Smart marketers know that offline marketing techniques like in-store promotions, events, and free samples are powerful techniques for delighting customers and driving sales. The challenge? There’s limited data to prove it.

Meanwhile, the Internet has spoiled us. Thanks to tools like Google Analytics and KISSMetrics, we have more data than we can handle – we can track everything from lifetime value to user acquisition costs, and acquisition models.

We laugh at brick-and-mortar and call it “old school,” making absurd claims that online mega-conglomerates are making our favorite stores obsolete. The days of the shopping mall are dead, right?

Not so much. Brick and mortar isn’t going anywhere. Consumers will always be window shopping on their lunch breaks, grocery shopping after work, and trying on clothes at the mall.

The fact is that online and offline marketing aren’t separate channels. They’re interconnected parts of the same customer acquisition engine. Our Web browsing habits follow us to the store, and when we’re at the store, those preferences follow us home.

As research firm Millward Brown predicts, “the notion of marketing activity being online or offline or mobile will cease to be a meaningful debate in 2014.” Thanks to smartphones and tablets, there is absolutely zero reason for brick-and-mortar marketers to throw darts in the dark.

Mobile gives offline marketers the ability to quantify anything. Here are three ways that mobile can bridge data blind spots for brick and mortar storefronts.

1. What’s in your customers’ heads

Customers are a small business owner’s lifeblood. That’s why Oren Dobronsky, owner at Oren’s Hummus Shop in Palo Alto, would always ask his patrons for feedback.

He would rarely hear anything beyond the usual ‘awesome’ or ‘good’ – that is, until he checked his Yelp reviews and Facebook account, when a negative post would surface out of nowhere. That’s when Dobronsky teamed up with Adi Bittan to build OwnerListens, a messaging platform that helps business and consumers communicate in real time.

“The problem with current feedback methods is that they are slow, slunky, and ineffective,” explains Bittan. “No one wants to sit on a phone call or end up on an e-mail spam list.”

When it comes to customer satisfaction and retention, however, a split second can make all the difference. Business owners need to connect with their patrons at exactly the right time.

On the Internet, we rely on algorithms to make these moments possible. As Bittan explains, offline should not be any different.

“Customers are used to getting what they need at the touch of a button,” explains Bittan. “They leave a message on a friend’s page and get a comment in five minutes.”

Consumers can use the OwnerListens app to send a message to any business without having to deal with the time sink of looking for an email address or phone number. Businesses who sign up for OwnerListens will also receive a dedicated ‘smart’ SMS number that customers can easily text message.

2. Cross-platform connections

Real-time feedback, however, is only the first step. Storefronts that use OwnerListens will develop a log of all customer communication. The next step? Analyze the information you’ve collected, and incorporate your findings into your future business strategy.

“Over time, customer feedback data will help us better understand consumer patterns and expectations at the individual and geographic level,” says Bittan. “These insights about the quality of customer service can help us predict future business success.”

Just as online marketers optimize natural touch points through landing pages, social media, and 1:1 email exchanges, businesses need to make sure that they’re prioritizing the metrics that influence the business. This information can help connect customer behavior across online and offline marketing channels.

“The easiest example to think of is Facebook,” says Bittan. “If users have to login through Facebook to use your app and later go home and use Facebook, there is now a connection between their offline and online behavior.”

Business owners who aren’t collecting data are facing a major opportunity cost. Even when the data is readily available, businesses seldom think to capture it. This process requires upfront planning. Once the right systems are in place, however, business owners can focus on collecting the exact information that they need.

“As more consumers walk around with cell phones and especially smartphones, collecting data will continue to become cheaper and easier,” says Bittan. “A good way to think about it is that the mobile phone is to the physical world as is the browser cookie to the virtual world.”

3. On-the-fly profit maximization

Jason Richelson, founder and CEO at ShopKeep POS, is a small business owner turned tech entrepreneur who realized that data was the solution to better serving his customers.

“I built my wine business on emailing customers when we had new wine in stock that I thought they might like based on what they brought previously,” says Richelson.

The idea of 1) reaching the right customers, 2) with the right message, 3) at the right time is foundational to marketing online. Thanks to cloud-based technologies, marketing automation, and sophisticated real-time bidding (RTB) algorithms, marketers can send personalized messages to consumers at just the right moment.

Why should brick and mortar be any different?

“ShopKeep’s customers collect all their store data via their iPad register, which automatically populates in a BackOffice in the cloud,” says Richelson. “The POS is the data collection hub for a retail business, tracking everything from sales and products to customers and staff.”

Richelson elaborates that the cloud has infinite power in bridging data gaps for brick and mortar.

“The cloud eliminates data storage issues and makes analysis as easy as clicking a button,” he says. “That data is then available from anywhere using mobile devices.”

Brick and mortar storefront owners have access to their customers’ data in one central place.

“ShopKeep customers use that live data to make changes to staffing levels or sales strategies in real time,” says Richelson. “For example, store owners might notice a particular product selling well, and decide to run a promotion or position that product prominently in the store. Or they may notice Wednesday afternoons becoming increasingly, busy and decide to add more staff.”

Work backwards from your goals

If business owners aren’t careful, they’ll find themselves buried in a big data dump. The key to getting started with predictive analytics, real time feedback, and on-the-fly profit maximization is structure.

What matters most to your business and bottom line? What customer engagement metrics are most relevant to your business’s sales and revenue objectives?

Start with your goals, and reverse engineer the process. It doesn’t matter whether you’re marketing online and offline – you still need to wield your left and right-brained skillets. With the proper outlook and strategy, the technology and solutions will fall into place.

Wine may improve with age, but point of sale technology does not.

Years ago, when ShopKeep POS founder Jason Richelson operated the Green Grape wine store in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, he struggled so often with archaic point of sale systems that it motivated him to develop his own alternative.

Richelson had several problems with the store’s point of sale system. Because information was stored on the server, he had to be in the store to check reports. He also couldn’t get much support from the terminal manufacturers if problems arose.

“The final nail in the coffin was when I was on vacation and the server crashed in the store…because there were viruses on the Windows machine,” Richelson says.

So in 2008, while still working at the wine shop with his partner, Richelson launched ShopKeep as a cloud-based system. When Apple unveiled its iPad in 2010, the tablet became “a catalyst for making innovative point of sale systems much more affordable for merchants…especially small merchants,” Richelson says.

Before tablet-based systems, point of sale equipment was usually a Windows PC touch-screen which costs about $3,000, he says. IPads cost around $500, so ShopKeep quickly adopted the tablet as the basis for its own point of sale system.

The company of about 100 people started in co-working spaces in downtown Manhattan, and has since moved to its own office in Soho. ShopKeep recently opened an office in Belfast, Ireland and plans to target European merchants soon, Richelson says.

ShopKeep’s founder already had some experience in payments from co-founding Internet Cash in 1999. The company developed a system for consumers to buy online anonymously. Consumers would use a prepaid card with an Internet Cash-hosted payment page, rather than using their own credit cards.

ShopKeep charges merchants $50 a month per register. Merchants pay transaction fees directly to their processor. ShopKeep works with processors such as First Data, Heartland Payment Systems and Mercury Payment Systems. It also works with SCVNGR’s LevelUp, a mobile payment and loyalty system; and PayPal, which can process both PayPal and credit card payments.

PayPal has been a strong promoter of ShopKeep, mentioning the point of sale provider in much of its marketing and promotional material. ShopKeep also helped test PayPal’s mobile wallet in 2012 at a film festival in New York.

“PayPal is one of the partners that has helped us grow the business,” says Richelson. “It’s an innovative service and lots of our customers use it.”

Since its launch, ShopKeep has amassed more than 10,000 small independent retailer and quick-service restaurant customers. The company had seen a lot of adoption in Brooklyn, its home town. It has steadily updated its technology with features such as a customizable interface and QuickBooks integration.

All of ShopKeep’s customers come inbound, meaning they call the company looking for point of sale systems. The company also offers its Surround 360 software through independent sales organizations, though it is phasing this offering out to introduce a new program in the second quarter.

ShopKeep has seen steady growth, tripling its number of storefronts every year for the past three years, Richelson says.

“I truly believe in five years you’re not going to see any more PCs behind the counter…instead you’ll see tablets in a lot of retail stores, mostly iPads,” says Richelson. This will be influenced also by Microsoft ending support for Windows XP in April, forcing merchants to seek a replacement to stay secure, he says.

Richelson’s prediction is confirmed by research from Mobey Forum, which states that mobile point of sale terminals will reach 46% market penetration by 2017.

The Green Grape still operates in Brooklyn, but Richelson sold his half to his partner two years ago to focus on ShopKeep. The store’s profits helped fund Richelson’s work for the first few years before ShopKeep got venture capitalist investment, he says. Green Grape still uses ShopKeep’s technology today.

“I have big aspirations to be the first software as a service company that comes out of New York with a billion dollar valuation,” says Richelson.

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