Restaurant marketing is more important than ever. After COVID-19 restrictions are lifted, customers will be dining out again – and you want your business to be at the top of their minds.
For offline businesses like restaurants, WiFi marketing is quite possibly the most powerful way to build a strong customer base, increase customer spending, improve loyalty, and decrease costs.
Here are some of the latest trends and advancements in WiFi marketing in 2024.
In today’s competitive marketplace, it is vital to keep your customers coming back. Using Bloom’s WiFi marketing platform, it becomes possible to actually identify customers who are at risk of churning.
Bloom uses machine learning and advanced algorithms to identify when individual customers may not be coming back.
When these customers are identified, an automated message can be sent to them with an incentive to get the to come back and become a loyal customer again.
Bloom users are seeing up to 38% of their at-risk customers come back through their doors. This is making an enormous difference in their bottom lines.
For details and an impressive case study, click the banner below.
Improve Online Ratings and Reviews
With an advanced WiFi customer experience platform, it becomes possible to begin improving your online customer ratings immediately.
Here’s how it works.
When a customer visits your place of business and logs into your WiFi, they are added to your customer database. They only need to log in once – ever – and the system will track their device indefinitely.
When the customer leaves after visiting your location, the system will wait a preconfigured amount of time and then send the customer a message asking them to give you a rating from one-half to five stars.
If the rating is bad, it will follow up with an apology message and an incentive to get them to return and give you another chance. This may also keep the customer from leaving a scathing review online.
If the rating is good, then you can follow up with a thank you message which includes links to your online ratings pages on Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc.
Over time this can make a huge impact on your overall ratings on the powerful online ratings websites.
Click the banner below for more information on improving your online ratings and reviews.
Improve Online Advertising
Google is one of the most widely used advertising platforms. Until now, advertisers could use cookies to serve their ads to the most targeted audience.
However, Google is retiring this way of advertising in 2023.
The only way to target customers after 2023 is to have your own first-party data. Cookie-based targeting will no longer be available.
From now on, in order to serve your ads to a targeted audience, you will need to have your own first-party data.
WiFi marketing allows you to passively collect huge amounts of first-party data about your actual customers. Using this data, you can create highly targeted, profitable advertising campaigns on the world’s largest search engine.
For all the details, visit our academy course about attracting more customers here.
Customer Segmentation and Personalization
As you passively collect more and more customer profile data, you can begin studying the data and creating specific segments, or groups, of your best types of customers.
The reason this is so powerful is because you can send much more targeted messages to your customers, resulting in highly improved marketing ROI.
For instance, you could create a marketing campaign targeted to women over 30 who visit during lunchtime hours, and send messages specifically tailored to that demographic.
Or, you could create a different campaign for men and women under 30 who visit on Sundays during football season.
Instead of creating one message for your entire customer database, you target segments of customers with messaging that better appeals to them.
You can also use these customer segments to create customer acquisition campaigns in other channels by matching your current customer persona to the targeting criteria in your other marketing channels.
These new potential consumers will have a higher likelihood of becoming a new customer, providing a much more cost-effective way of acquiring new customers.
To learn more about customer segmentation, click the banner below for our free informative white paper.
WiFi Marketing Automation
Another powerful trend still emerging in WiFi marketing is the ability to create various automated marketing campaigns.
With a WiFi marketing platform, it becomes easy to send out marketing via email or SMS to customers based upon their behavior or demographic data points.
However, what is becoming more powerful is the variation in the types of automated messaging and who you can send the messaging to. There are very good reasons to automate messaging based on customer behavior.
But what does automated messaging do, exactly?
Automated messaging enables businesses to send messages to customer phone numbers and email addresses on autopilot.
These messages can include custom promotions, messages, and coupon codes designed to make the customer experience even more rewarding.
Your automated messages can help share customer appreciation and increase customer loyalty.
How would you like to reach out to customers who might not visit as often as they used to?
As we discussed in the previous lesson, if a customer hasn’t been back in a while, automated messaging allows you to send only those at-risk customers a special coupon or promotional deal to bring them back to your business.
You can also automate many other things such as a ratings and reviews campaign, asking customer to rate their recent experience to help boost your online ratings.
You can even track customer spending brackets. Below we will show you the various types of campaigns you can create using marketing automation.
In addition, segmented messaging can also help improve automated campaign conversions.
For example, if a customer never spends more than $10 or $15, you may want to send them different automated messages than other customers who consistently spend $50 or more.
Gaining access to customer spending habits and history will allow you to create more ROI-focused campaigns.
With a Marketing and customer experience platform like Bloom, you can trigger automated messaging based upon:
- Milestone – when customers reach predetermined milestones such as their 10th, 25th, or 100th visit
- Loyalty – every time a customer reaches a predetermined number of visits
- Rating – when a customer provides a rating at or below a level you specify
- Anniversary – when customers reach the anniversary of their first visit
- Birthday – a few days prior to a customer’s birthday
- Upon Exit – a predetermined number of days or hours after a person leaves a location
- Upon Registration – shortly after a guest first registers (logs in) on your WiFi
- At Risk of Churning – when a customer has been determined as unlikely to return by our statistical model
- At Risk (number of days) – when a customer has not returned after a set number of days
And the best part is that once configured, messages will be sent automatically when a customer meets the message criteria.
In a dynamic and competitive marketplace, it is more important than ever to get customers through your door – and keep them coming back.
WiFi marketing automation can do just that! Click the banner below for our detailed WiFi Marketing Guide!
Social Proof
Social proof is huge in today’s post-COVID marketplace. Consumers are now very used to visiting restaurant websites to make a dining decisions.
So, why not show them social proof right on your website?
WiFi marketing allows you to do this with great results.
Similar to the ratings campaigns we talked about above, you can also use Bloom Intelligence to rate their experience in Facebook or Google, as well.
The system will keep track of all your customers’ ratings. It will calculate an aggregate rating from all sources combined – even those from your physical location’s captive portal.
Then, you can download a small bit of code from the Bloom platform and insert it into your website code.
Every visitor will then see a small unobtrusive pop-up that shows them your aggregate rating!
Likewise, the code will inject schema into your website which will help Google show your star rating in the search engine results pages.
Marketing Attribution
A WiFi customer experience platform knows when a customer is at your physical location.
Even if customers do not log into your WiFi, the system will know that a unique device is in range of your WiFi access point. Likewise, it will know every time that same device returns, and how long it is there.
This will give you great baseline data of you overall customer behavior, such as:
- First time visitors
- First time visitor return rates
- Customer repeat rates
- Customer dwell time
- Customer dwell time by time of day
- and more.
You’ll be able to spot trends and identify opportunities for improvement.
When customers do log into your WiFi access point, they’re required to give contact information, such as their email address.
At that point you can begin marketing to them with automated (and manual) marketing and advertising campaigns.
The beauty of these campaigns is that the system knows what message was sent to what customer, whether or not they saw and/or opened the message, whether or not they returned to your location, and if they redeemed an offer or not.
This has never been been possible with traditional offline marketing.
You can now monitor and record marketing ROI in real time. This allows you to test your campaign messaging over time and optimize your campaigns to their fullest potential.
To learn more about Bloom Intelligence and how WiFi Marketing can take your business to the next later, click on the banner below to see it all in action!
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