Back in the day, large businesses would spend millions of dollars to get vital information about their business. They would hire armies of analysts and bespoke software developers to either integrate or develop all the analytics they need.

Why did they do this? So that they can make informed and calculated business decisions that will contribute to the growth of their business. In addition to this, these analytics-based business decisions helped them capitalise on opportunities whenever they opened up. Lost opportunity leads to money loss.

Is the cost justified? Wasted inventory, storage space and missing out on potential opportunities can lead to thousands, if not millions of dollars lost for business operating at this scale.

The bigger your business gets, the more you will lose if your business process is not optimized. If you’ve ended up on our resources, we know that you don’t plan on staying small for long.

The good news is, nowadays, intuitive POS Systems providers such as IDZlink.com have integrated analytics that automatically collects and display your business data at a fraction of the cost. On top of this, all of this data is now available at your fingertips.

This article will show you a glimpse of where your business can be if you utilise business analytics properly. It will also help you understand what you’re missing out on

What is Business Analytics

Business Analytics is the collection of data about different aspects of your business, which is then displayed in an insightful manner through graphs, charts and tables, in order for you to make the right business decision for the development of your business.

It helps you see what currently works in your business, and also what hinders the growth of your business.

Your basic reporting and experience probably tell you which item sells out the fastest and who your regular customers are. However, Business Analytics gives you the specifics such as when exactly are your peak times on which days, and how much of your revenue comes from return customers vs new ones.

For example, say through your tool you find out that your busiest time during the week is at 10 am. You can use this information to set up stock, shuffle staff, create new promotions and more.

Nowadays, managing a business involves selling your product, marketing your product, managing your team, and optimising customer experience.

Each of these aspects have their own analytics, and as a proactive business owner, you will eventually have to use to maximise your growth in said aspects.

Here are the different types of Business Analytics you will need in your arsenal as a business owner in 2021.

Point of Sale Analytics:

Point of Sale Analytics is the data regarding sales, inventory and staff. This includes information best-selling times, best-selling products, best performing categories, best performing staff etc.

You can use this information to manage inventory, identify trends, stock up on new products that are trending and reward high performing employees.

Customer Analytics

Customer Analytics will help you see how your customer interacts with your business. You should know how your marketing activities are being received by your customers. Depending on this, you can plan loyalty offers and other promotional activities to ensure you generate more from loyal customers.

Customer Analytics will also help you identify customer buying habits, such as their average spend per month, how many times average customer returns and more.

Social Media Analytics

Social Media Platforms are one of the best ways of reaching your target audience. If your business is not on it, you’re missing out. Optimised posts through social media get your business targetted traffic. Social Media Analytics lets you know how well your content is performing, who it’s reaching and how well your ads are doing.

Your goal needs to be to create quality content your customers want and promote the high performing posts you identify through your analytics. This process will generate a lot of cheap, quality leads for your business. Hootsuite and Facebook My Business are examples of this.

Web Analytics

Web Analytics let you analyse the traffic your website gets. Where your audience comes from, how they find you, which words they searched to find you, when they find you and how long they stay on your website is just a few of the information you get from Web Analytics. Google Analytics and SEMrush are examples.

For the scope of this article, we will be focusing on POS and Customer Analytics.

Now that you know the basics of what Analytics can do for you,

Here’s 5 reasons you need analytics to run your business.

Understand your sales

With IDZlink.com Business Analytics, you can analyse real-time charts to find out what items fly off the shelf and when. This data can help you set up inventory in the most optimum way possible, giving you more money to reinvest for business development.

Understand your customer behaviour

Do you know if most of your sales come from return customers? Or are customers dropping in for the first time responsible for most of your revenue? Who are these customers and what do they buy?

This information can help you prioritise and plan your marketing tactics.

What does that look like in practice? If you think return customers are the bread and butter of your business you might decide to focus more on your e-mail marketing campaign and loyalty campaigns for your existing customer. Otherwise, you would create marketing campaigns targeted at new customers to ensure your customer list keeps growing.

Figure out your busiest hours

You might have a rough idea as to what time your business is busiest. However, many of our clients were quite surprised to find they were incorrect about their best hours. As a result, some clients even increased their trading hours because it was clear that they were losing a lot of sales by closing early.

With these analytics, you’ll have all the details regarding when your best hours are so you can stock up and staff up accordingly.

Get real-time insight to understand your business’ standing

IDZlink.com Business Analytics tracks your sales from the very first sale you ever made. Since it has a built-in Accounting Software Module as well, you can see how your cash-flows and your profit over the days. All of this collects automatically and in real-time.

What makes it even better is the fact that you can view your entire business’ financial standing at your fingertips, wherever you are. This was not possible a couple of years ago, and now it’s so easy so make sure you don’t miss out.

Identify best sales person

As you know now, the Business Analytics module of a good POS system will track everything. This includes your staff sales, counter-wise sales and more.

Reward your best performing employees, or roster them on days that are forecasted to be busy to make sure your business performs best when it needs to.

IDZlink.com’s Analytics comes free with any license you use currently. This probably won’t stay like this for long, but customers signing up now can get it free, forever. Furthermore, we have a one month free trial for all our modules on IDZlink.com, so try it now, and let’s take your business to the next level.

At FI-ES Systems, even our on-site ERP Magnolia has an analytics module that you can view on your phone because we understand how important it is to know where your business stands, wherever you are.