Understanding the consumer mindset is the holy grail of advertisers and business owners alike. What motivates and excites people? What influences a buyer’s purchasing decision? Does filling your store with additional staff to attend to customers influence their buying decision enough to provide a positive ROI? Does the presence of additional staff make a customer feel more comfortable or believe that the store is more popular than it leads on? Beyond understanding your customer profile, there is a competitive advantage in knowing the number of visitors your store has and how many of those visits are converting to tangible sales.
 Assume for a moment that for every ten visitors that walk into your store you make out with one sale. And for every five individuals that leave without making a purchase, two are on the borderline but for one reason or another don't pull the trigger. Now assume from just two of those visits, one would have led to a sale had a more qualified associate been present to suggest a suitable alternative at the time, or had the authority to extend a one-time discount to meet that customer’s budget - bringing us to the question - can tracking store visitors help you gauge an employee’s performance? If you’re currently analyzing performance by total sales generated, that won’t show you the entire picture. For example, if one of your employees made a hundred dollars in sales in his shift but only five people walked into the store, is he really bad at his job? Similarly, if another employee raked in a thousand dollars during a period when a hundred people came into the store, is
he
 a rock star? The most accurate way to gauge one’s performance is by knowing the number of visitors they had during their shift. Sure, you can determine peak times in your store by generating a sales by hour report
in Erply, but foot traffic can vary every week and particularly the case during holiday weekends and seasons. So the only true way to bridge the gap between employee performance and promotion effectiveness is by equipping your store or stores with a visitor tracker. Enter Erply.
   To provide retailers with the best possible tools to increase their top and bottom line growth, our visitor tracker with the compatible application has the capacity to track your business’ visits, transactions, number of items sold, time of visit, average sale, and total revenue generated over the course of a month. View conversion rate charts of sales by visits, sales by hour, sales by time block, and sales by the employee so you can grasp how effective your staff is relative to the number of visitors your store attracts and adjust accordingly. Mix up your team line by experimenting if your top salesperson can boost numbers in a low traffic period and whether other associates need to pick up their game. Determine if your advertising and promotional initiatives created with Erply’s CRM
module are driving higher traffic to your business, and if so, what the difference in sales figures are to your average period; our traffic aggregators may show you an uptick in visits during a store sale, but if visitors are not converting to buyers then you know you’ll need to tweak your strategy. Analyze product trends such as top-selling merchandise during heavy vs low traffic periods. Place our visitor trackers in different sections of your store for a clearer picture of demographics - perhaps you should devote more staff to the women’s department if many people are passing through but not buying anything, or reallocate existing staff and improve the quality of your offerings. Erply trackers can also show you heat maps of where your most popular sections are so that you can improve your store’s layout and get customers to all areas of your shop.
   The possibilities are limitless. Businesses should equip themselves with the best possible tools to not only understand their customers but the dynamics of store-flow and how visitors respond to certain layouts and may be dissuaded by others. It is too cost ineffective to merely look at store sales
, make a generalized assumption and respond accordingly without knowing the volume of potential customers that accounted for those numbers. Technology has afforded us the opportunity to make more informed decisions with new information at hand so that we can operate at our highest capacity. Why not take advantage?