The Potential for Omnichannel Analytics is Real

• Full-featured website analytics: These tools are considered to be a best practice among e-commerce professionals. It's likely that any serious omnichannel retailer has met this requirement.
• Comprehensive in-store analytics: Systems like RetailNext can measure and communicate in-store customer behavior at the same level of detail provided by their counterpart e-commerce systems.
• A robust, location-based mobile app: By giving shoppers motivation to download and opt in to your location-based mobile app, you can begin gathering insights into when they come to your stores, which stores they go to and what they do when there. Compelling location-based functionality includes providing directions to your stores (where's the nearest location?), directions inside the stores (where's the product I want?) and real-time offers (what products in this aisle are on sale right now?).
• Real-time in-store messaging systems: This component is necessary to turn your store into an intelligence-driven, optimized selling environment. It enables your store associates to take actions based on real-time intelligence, helping them become more effective sellers.
• Good reason to attach accounts: Offer your customers motivation to connect their mobile app usage to their online accounts and attach those in turn to their in-store loyalty cards. Then, give them a good reason to link their Facebook and other social accounts. This gives you the ability to correlate behavior across these channels and build a full picture of their effect on the market.

Once you have these pieces in place, you can become empowered to offer the best shopping experience across channels in a way that never was possible before. There are some useful insights you can uncover and actions you can take when you see all the data for a customer, which wouldn't have been possible without complete omnichannel usage data and these systems in place. Consider the following examples: