Airship's combined CRM and WiFi strategy assisted Walkabout with their busiest Christmas to date

How Airship increased loyalty and footfall in venues for Walkabout Bars

Increasing customer loyalty in the UK hospitality industry

Intertain are a multi-brand operator in the UK leisure and hospitality industry; their Walkabout brand is well known for showing live sports and entertainment 7 days a week.In November 2015 we took over the CRM strategy for Walkabout venues across the UK. The strategy encompassed 24 venues and a customer database of 360,000. The goal was to drive footfall and overall customer loyalty in Walkabout venues. The key challenge was to link Walkabout’s CRM output to their Sky “The Cloud” WiFi data. Successfully connecting the CRM with their Sky “The Cloud” WiFi data partly led to Walkabout’s most successful Christmas period to date.

How did Airship increase footfall in Walkabout venues?

To achieve great results for Walkabout we first examined their existing customer database of 360,000 and “cleaned” the data to ensure the quality of the contacts. This involved removing duplicates, standardising the entries and completing missing data.We then integrated with Walkabout’s website and party/table booking platform. We advised Walkabout’s web agency on how to provide clear contact forms on the website to ensure that all data flowed transactionally straight into their CRM.The next step was to integrate with Sky to collect data on a daily basis from customers using the WiFi connection for the first time and customers re-connecting to the WiFi. Airship began to automatically segment the data; separating it by session of the day and the day of the week - this helped us to build a better picture of each customer. After segmenting the WiFi data by time and day we added more functionality to allow segmentation into categories - such as the event the customer was attending at the time of connection.

Customer loyalty can be driven using events

Walkabout informed Airship that their customers were event-driven - meaning that they needed to know when customers were in-venue and why they were there. They knew that if they could map what event was happening when customers were connecting to WiFi that they’d be able to understand the behaviour of their most loyal customer segments.By integrating with Sky, Airship were able to make use of Knowledge Repeat, which records every customer WiFi session as it happens in each venue. At the forefront of WiFi technology, it reconnects the customer automatically on their next visit; removing the time consuming step for the customer of having to sign up again or remember log in details.Airship reaches into the Sky Cloud database on a daily basis and extracts the last 24 hours of customer interactions via an excel or CSV file. The WiFi connection data is then automatically uploaded to the Walkabout database and assigned to individual locations by:

• Time/Day
• Age
• Sex
• In-venue activity

The interaction information is stored transactionally per customer, which allows Walkabout to trigger broadcasts based on the customer's most recent interaction. For example, if the customer’s visit fell on a day and time that coincided with rugby union being on the big screen then Walkabout could automatically notify the customer via email of upcoming rugby union coverage. Walkabout is also able to understand the frequency of customer visits and reward the customer’s loyalty with special offers.

"Knowledge Repeat gives The Cloud’s commercial customers a far greater and deeper understanding of the frequency of visits of their own customers, enabling them to see who visiting and returning to venue. When working with Airship’s analytics and segmentation platform, brands can compare WiFi analytics across multiple venues, as well as proactively market to WiFi users to drive more revenue or extend loyalty and customer feedback initiatives. Together, The Cloud and Airship are at the forefront of delivering the understanding businesses need into how WiFi data can deliver incremental revenue."

John Bettinson - Market & Customer Insight Manager, Sky

Using data bridges to deliver a CRM programme specific for multi-venue operators

Airship have worked with Walkabout to deliver a new and improved CRM strategy. This includes new welcome and birthday emails, rewarding customer loyalty and the invitation for customer feedback to improve their customer service. By building a data-driven customer insight, Airship have been able to tailor broadcasts to build trust and engagement with Walkabout’s email content. This has led to an uplift across all success metrics, including delivery, read and click-through rates.Airship have managed to deliver this ambitious project by building a powerful data bridge; pulling together a number of important pieces of data. Firstly it connected the Walkabout website to an event table which was stored in their CRM. We built a platform that could import the WiFi data and map the data to the event information for each venue. The event information could span trading hours from 10am to 3am and show up to 20 different events at a time. This provided a mechanism to attribute a customer visit to the sports or entertainment activity taking place at the time. Finally being able to record this information allowed Walkabout to segment customers into groups for retargeting.Examples of Walkabout events include:

• All sports coverage
• Student Nights
• DJ led events
• Karaoke
• Late night weekend visits
• Daytime visits for food or WiFi use

Increasing the quantity and quality of Walkabout’s customer database

Cleaning the data gave Walkabout a large database of high quality contacts ready to be targeted. The segmentation of the data was key to feeding into an effective CRM strategy that would allow Walkabout to reward customer loyalty and improve customer experience. By combining these two areas of marketing Airship were able to give Walkabout the following results:

• Revenue for pre-booked Christmas parties increased by 203%
• Open rates of emails increased by 2%
• The number of triggered emails for birthdays increased by 9%
• The number of triggered emails for welcomes increased by 17%
• Walkabout now has on average 30,000 WiFi sessions per week with 13,000 unique users
• An increase in traffic from email to the website by 9100%
• Broadcasts triggered from WiFi interaction encouraging the customer to give feedback has doubled the amount submitted.