Retailers can make more money by measuring their marketing effectively, collecting data about their shoppers and sending them personalised promotions.

That was the advice from David Morgan, chief operating officer of Velocity Worldwide, who told Retail Express how retailers can start to gather more data about their shoppers to encourage them to spend more.

Velocity Worldwide uses technology called Darius, which can collect information about a store’s shoppers using incentivised surveys and purchasing data.

Velocity manages the service and looks at realistic increases in footfall and basket spend that it could achieve. The cost for the service is tailored to the retailer.

Mo Razzaq, owner of Family Shopper Blantyre in South Lanarkshire, began working with Velocity in January and has gathered data from 10% of his customer base by giving shoppers a Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day deal in exchange for their answers to questions.

Once Darius has collected data about what demographic a shopper fits into and what they have bought previously, it can then send relevant offers to shoppers in ways such as email, social media and text, as well as ensure that in-store posters are more relevant to shoppers.

Darius also allows you to track how effective each of these methods are, allowing tweaks to be made to the campaign as it progresses.

It can also connect with media screens and change them automatically to offers that are relevant to the shoppers you have in store at that time and notify staff to change displays at key times.

“The idea is that Darius always makes retailers money by bringing in more shoppers, spending more, more often. We don’t take six months to build a database, we get going fast and manage the service as we go,” said Morgan.