How Can WiFi Drive Revenue in Your Business?

Guest WiF iIs your business taking full marketing advantage of offering a great WiFi service? With the advent of smartphones, the appetite of customers for connectivity is insatiable and as content providers such as Sky, Spotify, iTunes, Netflix and BT ensure that their subscription services are available on all devices, WiFi experience has to keep up.

‍It's not always about the data. We believe typical consumers don’t make specific choices to where they visit based on WiFi availability, it will certainly enhance their experience if the WiFi provision in your business is seamless in its connection and that the browsing speed is good. If your business invites corporate customers then choices will definitely be made based on the ability for people attending meetings to get online

.It’s all about the data. On the initial connection you have the opportunity to collect customer information and entice the customer to opt-in to your mailing list. Keep it simple and short - we recommend First Name, Surname, Email, Mobile (non mandatory), gender and DOB (so you can send them something nice for their special day...) with a pre-ticked box for EMAIL and SMS. You’ll want to ensure that the page clearly shows the benefits of leaving the boxes ticked.To push up the amount of good email addresses you might want to indicate that you you will verify a user's email address for WiFi access.In addition to the above, you can also offer customers the ability to register using their social networks, this can prove valuable as you can collect social user data but it may also add a necessary step for the customer. You are also at the whim of these networks when they update their API’s (the code used to connect applications) - which could result in the authentication process stalling or failing, leading to a poor customer experience.Looking at a client who utilise Purple WiFi, we saw in December 2015 that 41% of customers opted to use social to sign-up against the 59% who used the registration form. Of the social sign-ups just .05% were from Twitter the rest were Facebook.The other key piece of information that you collect on registration is the user's MAC (Media Access Control) address, this is the unique device ID which every device has, and which is used to verify that a customer is registered to access your WiFi on subsequent visits.Once a customer has registered with you it opens up a wide variety of data opportunities; the date and time of visit, the length of time online and device type. From this you can deduce the day of week, the session, the total visits over time and visit frequency, all of which give your CRM a wealth of useable marketing and customer insight when added to your mix.In simple a terms WiFi interaction is a sign-of-life in your business from your customer allowing you to create links back to your marketing efforts.To put this into context, we tracked one client with over 20 locations around the UK for the month of December, there were over 100k sessions during the month by 48k individuals. We were able to segment those individuals by key dates, time of visits and booking data allowing us to target those customers with specific broadcast messages. This also allowed us to track the customer journey leading to the visit.

‍Key actions to take:

User Experience: Make sure that you have a good user experience and that the sign-up process is clear and inviting.

‍Data: Store the data transactionally by individual, in addition to storing the connection date & time and disconnection date & time.

‍Customer Journeys: There are several customer journeys that are can be activated from WiFi data:- Customer feedback - based on connection date. We recommend that if you have this in place that you suppress the broadcast if the customer has already given feedback within a period.- Welcome - Where a customer is new to your database ensure that they get a welcome email 24 hours following the visit, this can include an offer to drive a return to your business.- Gift Card - Prompt customers to purchase a gift card there and then in the venue with an immediate email or SMS.- Reward loyalty by triggering a broadcast based on a number of connections to WiFi over time.

‍Segmentation: Ensure that you segment the customer by day, time, session and also by key date e.g. Valentine's Day, NYE, Bank Holidays and sports events.Need more information or help? Get in touch with us today.