Author: Allen Graves

Personalization of restaurant email marketing messages is crucial to winning over today’s savvy consumers. Personalization refers to using customer data to create much more effective email content because it can be tailored for each individual or each customer persona.

Using personalized messaging has been proven to improve open rates and generate more revenue because it allows restaurant marketing professionals to create more relevant content that will more effectively pique the interest of the consumer.

By collecting guest data through your WiFi access points, and grouping those customers into separate lists, marketers can avoid sending out a single mass message in hopes that it resonates well with at least some of the audience.

Instead, they can focus on sending highly targeted messages to each customer segment, increasing open rates and encouraging more engagement.

How to Collect Individual Customer Data

To execute an effective personalized restaurant email marketing campaign, you’ll need to have comprehensive data about your individual customers. There are various ways in which to collect customer data, but most are either expensive or take a great deal of time and energy.

The only way to gather enough data to effectively create a personalized campaign is to use a quality WiFi Analytics platform. Using WiFi technology, you’ll be able to capture data directly from your customers when they log into your WiFi access point. This will allow you to passively gather the necessary individual customer information required for proper personalization.

Using progressive profiling, data such as name, email address, phone number, age, gender, birthday, and other information is entered by the customer each time they log back into your WiFi.

In addition to all of this demographic information, the WiFi analytics platform also tracks the physical behavior of your customers, logging things such as dwell times, repeat visits, coupon redemption, days of the week, and hours of the day they have visited.

With this kind of thorough and reliable data, marketers can begin using it to build powerful, data-driven targeted restaurant email marketing campaigns.

Using Data to Build Personalized Marketing Messages

According to research from Salesforce, the world’s #1 customer relationship management platform, data targeting and segmenting were used 51% more by overperforming businesses than those who were underperforming. This makes perfect sense when thinking about today’s consumers. They expect personalized messaging and they know when they’re receiving a simple generic mass-marketing message.

The simplest way to start creating personalized campaigns is to make your customer profile data filterable. This will allow you to start building segments of specific customers based on their demographics and behavior data.

Email Segmentation for Marketing

It is important to be able to save these segmented lists. Then, you won’t have to build them each time you want to send out a message.

Some examples of segmented lists might include:

• Women over 30 who visited on Mother’s Day of last year
• Any customer who has visited more than x times
• Customers whose average dwell time is under 20 minutes
• Men below 45 years old who have only visited your establishment once
• Women/Men who only visit at lunchtime

As you can imagine, these specific audiences would likely respond best to entirely different marketing messages. Being able to segment your customer list allows this to happen.

While building these lists, you’ll need to be brainstorming about how to effectively engage these groups. As you go through this process, ask yourself and your team members these questions:

• What kind of action do I want this customer to take?
• What is the best way to reach this customer?
• Which kind of deals or promotions would interest this customer?
• What kind of deals and promotions would NOT interest this customer?
• What new products or services might engage this customer?
• Why do they need what I offer? What are this customer’s pain points?
• How can I attract and engage more customers like this?
• What type of imagery would engage this customer?

Always Be Testing

Now that you have your customer segments properly defined, and you have an idea of the marketing messages and promotions you want to send to them, it’s time to get started. When you send your marketing message to each list, monitor the ROI of each campaign.

As initial results come in, analyze the results and keep them documented in your platform. The next time you send a message to each group, you’ll want to make a small change to the message. You should only make a single change to the message while testing. Send the message and compare its results to the original message. If the results are not as good as the original, go back to your original message and test a different aspect of the message. If results are better, keep the change and continue testing and optimizing over time.

Also, don’t forget that you’re not just targeting current customers. You should also be seeking out new lookalike prospects online and targeting them in an effective manner using the data you’ve collected. These prospects should have a higher probability of becoming new customers. They can provide a more cost-effective means of acquiring new customers.

Final Thoughts On Email Personalization

Personalizing your restaurant email marketing messages with reliable customer data has been proven as an effective way to deliver relevant and engaging marketing content to your customers. This adds value to their experience and can quickly improve your open rates and subsequent revenue.

Using a WiFi marketing and analytics platform to collect a large volume of the right data, personalizing your marketing campaigns has never been easier. You’ll feel confident as you make solid data-driven decisions. You’ll drive company growth and build a much larger base of loyal customers.

With the amount of competition out there, email marketing can give you a strong competitive advantage and ensure lasting success.

Click for a free demo of the Bloom Intelligence platform, or call to schedule today at 727-877-8181.

A restaurant mission statement is a declaration of your company’s purpose, and it should be clear, concise, and inspiring. It should guide all your business decisions, and it should be something that you can always refer back to when making critical business decisions.

Here are three simple steps to create a mission statement for your restaurant, along with more tips below.

Define your restaurant’s purpose.

What is your company’s mission? What are you trying to accomplish? Define your goals and objectives, and make sure that they are realistic and achievable.

Write it down.

Mission statements should be written down and shared with all members of your team. Consequently, this will help to ensure that everyone is on the same page and knows what they need to do to help achieve the company’s goals.

Keep it updated.

Your mission statement should be a living document that you revisit and update as needed. As your business changes and grows, your mission statement should evolve to reflect your new goals and objectives.

Why You Should Have a Mission Statement for Your Restaurant

Your mission statement is a declaration of what your company stands for, what it’s trying to achieve, and who it’s trying to serve.

It’s important because it provides clarity and focus for everyone involved in the company, from the employees to the customers. Without a mission statement, it can be tough to make decisions and stay on track.

Creating a mission statement can be a daunting task, but it’s worth taking the time to get it right. Here are a few tips:

• Keep it simple. Your mission statement should be easy to remember and understand.
• Make it relevant. The mission statement should reflect the unique characteristics of your business.
• Make it inspiring. A good mission statement should inspire employees and customers alike.
• Be realistic. Don’t set your company up for failure by promising things you can’t deliver.
• Get input from everyone involved. Finally, the mission statement should be a collaborative effort, created by everyone who’s invested in the company.

Once you’ve created your mission statement, make sure to communicate it to everyone involved in the business. Post it on the wall, include it in employee manuals, and print it on marketing materials.

By making your restaurant’s mission statement visible and accessible, you’ll ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal.

Having a mission statement is essential for any business, but it’s especially important for restaurants. A clear mission statement can help you stay focused.

Likewise, it will keep you motivated while providing customers with a sense of what your restaurant is all about.

How to Use Your Restaurant Mission Statement

There are a lot of different things that your mission statement can accomplish for your business.

It can help you set restaurant marketing and operations goals and priorities, make decisions about what products/services to offer, and determine company values. It can also help you stay focused on what’s important and avoid getting sidetracked by less important issues.

Once your mission statement is created, shared with employees, and embedded into your company culture, you can begin sharing its message with your guests.

A great example of this comes from Maple Street Biscuit Company (MSBC), a southern comfort restaurant chain on a mission to create extraordinarily warm and welcoming dining experiences for its guests.

MSBC used Bloom Intelligence to help get this message in front of their guests. The goal was to amplify this mission, tell the brand story, and increase guest loyalty.

Zoey Rall, The Voice of Maple Street told us, “The mission behind my role is to tell the Maple Street story and show people how we are living our mission, and it matches up with Bloom’s capabilities really well.”

During her onboarding, she realized that the company was only using a very limited set of features and tools of the Bloom Intelligence restaurant marketing platform. “We were only collecting names and emails from WiFi. As far as email marketing went, it was very need-driven rather than based on a plan. We were using like 10% of what Bloom could do for us.”

Restaurant Mission Statement: An Example

So Zoey got to work. She began by working on new email journeys that run automatically anytime a guest gives Maple Street their email for the first time. Her first goal was to create a series of emails for stores that launch in new locations where customers do not already have brand affinity.

“We’re creating a four-email journey that says who we are, what we’re about – how we’re not just another restaurant – and thank them in a meaningful way for welcoming us into their local community. People in these new markets will come in knowing nothing about us, but the automated follow-up emails will help to build that awareness and transition into affinity.”

When Maple Street hosted their annual holiday brunch deal, Zoey created a final-call campaign infused with the brand’s warm and fuzzy personality aimed at capturing additional sales – and it worked.

“We realized there was time left to promote the special, so we sent out a last-minute reminder email and saw great bounceback. We even got email responses thanking us for the reminder,” said Rall.

Discover Bloom Intelligence

If you are ready to get your mission statement – or any messaging – in front of your guests, you need to give Bloom Intelligence a look.

Not only will you be able to automate your restaurant email marketing, but you can also use Bloom to unlock valuable guest insights, improve your ratings and reviews, identify and bring back lost guests, and so much more.

You’ll feel confident as you make solid data-driven decisions, drive company growth and build a much larger base of loyal customers.

With the amount of competition out there, Bloom can give you a strong competitive advantage and ensure lasting success.

So, click for a free demo of the Bloom Intelligence platform, or call to schedule today at 727-877-8181.

The war in Ukraine has generated worldwide concern and compassion for citizens of Ukraine.

We at Bloom Intelligence acknowledge our colleagues and friends in Ukraine, and express our solidarity and support for you all in this difficult time.

We see the deep pain and immensity of suffering that you and your countrymen are having to endure. We unequivocally stand next to the voices of those calling for the immediate end of this war, and we hope and pray that peace will return to you and your homes, families, loved ones, and country soon.

Even through this tragedy, you somehow continue to find time and show concern for your work when you are able. We have tremendous respect for your commitment, resilient spirit, and indomitable will.

All of us here at Bloom want you to know that you are on our minds and in our prayers, and we promise to support you to the best of our ability.

Customer segmentation and personalization of your marketing messages is crucial for your restaurant marketing plan to be successful.

Segmentation refers to using customer data to create much more effective email content. You can tailor messaging for each individual or each customer persona.

Using personalized messaging has been proven to improve open rates and generate more revenue because it allows restaurant marketing professionals to create more relevant content that will more effectively pique the interest of the consumer.

By collecting guest data through your WiFi access points, and grouping those customers into separate lists, marketers can avoid sending out a single mass-message in hopes that it resonates well with at least some of the audience.

Instead, they can focus on sending highly targeted messages to each customer segment, increasing open rates and encouraging more engagement.

How to Collect Individual Customer Data

To execute an effective personalized email marketing campaign, you’ll need to have comprehensive data about your individual customers.

There are various ways in which to collect customer data, but most are either expensive or take a great deal of time and energy.

The only efficient way to gather enough comprehensive, verified data to effectively create a personalized campaign is to use a quality WiFi Analytics platform.

You’ll be able to capture data directly from your customers when they log into your WiFi access point.

This will allow you to passively gather the necessary individual customer information required for proper personalization.

Using progressive profiling, data such as name, email address, phone number, age, gender, birthday and other information is entered by the customer each time they log back into your WiFi.

In addition to all of this demographic information, the WiFi analytics platform also tracks the physical behavior of your customers, logging things such as dwell times, repeat visits, coupon redemption, days of the week and hours of the day they have visited.

With this kind of thorough and reliable data, marketers can begin using it to build powerful, data-driven targeted restaurant and retail marketing campaigns.

Using Data to Build Personalized Marketing Messages

According to research from Salesforce, the world’s #1 customer relationship management platform, data targeting and segmenting was used 51% more by overperforming businesses than those who were underperforming.

This makes perfect sense when thinking about today’s consumers. They expect personalized messaging and they quickly sniff out when they’re receiving a simple generic mass-marketing message.

The simplest way to start creating these campaigns is to make your customer profile data filterable.

This will allow you to start building segments of specific customers based on their demographics and behavior data.

Email Customer Segmentation for Marketing

It is important to be able to save these segmented lists. Then, you don’t have to build them each time you want to send out a message.

Some examples of segmented lists might include:

• Women over 30 who visited on Mother’s Day of last year.
• Any customer who has visited more than x times.
• Customers whose average dwell time is under 20 minutes.
• Men below 45 years old who have only visited your establishment once.
• Women/Men who only visit at lunchtime.

As you can imagine, these specific audiences would likely respond best to entirely different marketing messages.

Being able to segment your customer list allows this to happen.

While building these lists, you’ll need to be brainstorming about how to effectively engage these groups.

As you go through this process, ask yourself and your team members these questions:

• What kind of action do I want this customer to take?
• How to best reach this customer?
• What kind of deals or promotions would interest this customer?
• What kind of deals and promotions would this customer NOT have interest in?
• Are there new products or services might engage this customer?
• What are this customer’s pain points? Why do they need what I offer?
• How can I attract and engage more customers like this?
• What type of imagery would engage this customer?

Test and Optimize

Now that you have your customer segments properly defined, and you have an idea of the marketing messages and promotions you want to send to them, it’s time to get started.

When you create and send your marketing message to each list, it’s vital to monitor the ROI of each campaign.

As initial results come in, analyze the results and keep them documented in your platform.

The next time you send a message to each group, you’ll want to make a small change to the message.

You should only make a single change to the message while testing. Send the message and compare its results to the original message.

If results are not as good as the original, go back to your original message and test a different aspect of the message.

If results are better, keep the change and continue testing and optimizing over time. This is known as A/B testing.

Also, don’t forget that you’re not just targeting current customers.

You should also be seeking out new lookalike prospects online and targeting them in an effective manner using the data you’ve collected.

These prospects should have a higher probability of becoming a new customer, providing a more cost-effective means of acquiring new customers.

Final Thoughts Customer Segmentation and Your Marketing Plan

Segmenting and personalizing your email marketing messages with reliable customer data has been proven as an effective way to deliver relevant and engaging marketing content to your customers.

This adds value to their experience and can quickly improve your open rates and subsequent revenue.

Using a WiFi marketing and analytics platform to collect a large volume of the right data, personalizing your marketing campaigns has never been easier.

You’ll feel confident as you make solid data-driven decisions, drive company growth and build a much larger base of loyal customers.

Restaurant marketing is truly complex. It is driven by seemingly countless digital marketing channels and even more tactics and strategies. There’s certainly a lot going on, and restaurant marketing professionals are constantly under the gun to keep their advertising costs at a minimum.

In the midst of all this, there’s one often-overlooked channel that can provide a huge return on investment, and restaurateurs may not be using to its full advantage – customer ratings and reviews.

Customer ratings and reviews can literally make or break your restaurant business. If you’re not paying attention to your online ratings and reviews, or you’re not working to improve them, you’re missing out on a serious competitive advantage. 

Why Are Ratings and Reviews Important

More and more, consumers are turning to the internet to help them make their dining decisions.

Ratings websites like Google and Facebook receive millions upon millions of visitors every single day, and these sites can be one of your restaurant’s most powerful and relatively inexpensive marketing commodities.

Obviously, positive reviews are a great thing, while negative customer reviews are somewhat of a bad thing. The more positive ratings you receive, the more consumers will trust that they will have a pleasurable experience at your establishment.

But the truth comes in the research that has been done around these ratings sites and the potential effects that restaurant ratings have on your overall bottom line.

Positive Customer Ratings Improve Foot Traffic

A study performed by Michael Anderson and Jeremy Magruder, professors at the University of California, Berkeley, concluded that positive reviews have a direct correlation to increases in foot traffic during peak times.

They found that a ½-star rating increase resulted in a 30-40 percent increase in the number of 7 pm bookings.

Based on this study, although online rating websites may not generate attributable financial returns, they can certainly play a role in your restaurant’s success, driving more foot traffic and overall revenue.

At your next lunch or dinner peak time, think about what a 30-40 percent increase in bookings would look like at your restaurant.

Positive Customer Ratings Increase Revenue

Another study conducted by Professor Michael Luca at the Harvard Business School sought a correlation between online ratings and actual revenue.

The study found that a rating improvement of one star led to an increase in revenue of between 5 and 9 percent.

Interestingly, Luca also found that the star rating of restaurants played a much higher role in consumer decision-making, finding that website visitors were often overwhelmed by the number of written reviews.

Luca concluded, “Online consumer review websites improve the information available about product quality. The impact of this information is larger for products of relatively unknown quality…On the consumer side, simplifying heuristics and signals of reviewer quality seem to increase the impact of quality information.”

More Reasons Why Customer Ratings and Reviews Matter

There are many more studies about the effects of positive customer ratings and reviews.

In 2017, websitebuilder.org collected data and statistics about the effects of good and bad user reviews.

As you read through these statistics, think about current foot traffic and revenue at your establishment and you’ll further realize how important and valuable positive user ratings can be.

Among the data, here are some interesting facts they found:

• 72% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.
• 61% of consumers have read online restaurant reviews, more than any other type of business.
• 53% of 18-to-34-year-olds report that online reviews factor into their dining decisions, as do 47% of frequent full-service customers.
• 34% of diners choose a restaurant based on information provided on a peer review website.
• Consumers are likely to spend 31% more on a business with excellent reviews.

It’s plain to see that receiving more and better customer ratings is key to growing your customer base, increasing revenue, and driving down costs – and this is expected to continue for quite some time.

Therefore, you should be doing everything you can and being proactive in improving your ratings across all the major review sites.

This includes leveraging your customer WiFi access to ask for a rating after a customer visits your establishment. If the rating is good, you can send them a convenient link to the ratings website of your choice.

If the rating is bad, you can apologize, offer to resolve any issues, and give them an incentive to come back and re-rate your restaurant.

Click here to see how Bloom intelligence can automate that process for you. Look for the Ratings Feedback Loop section.

Bloom Intelligence Ratings+

You can also automatically send guests a ratings request straightaway. Using the Bloom platform, you can automate a message to guests after they leave your restaurant.

The message will contain direct links to your Facebook and Google ratings pages. When the guest leaves their rating and review, it is published on Facebook/Google and also recorded directly in the Bloom platform where you can monitor and manage them all in one easy place.

The message also contains a link for a guest to get in touch with you directly if they had a bad experience. This way, they may refrain from leaving a bad review online and will give you the chance to make things right with the guest (customer service recovery).

There will always be the occasional poor review, that’s just the nature of the internet. Remember that dealing with poor customer reviews the right way can actually have a positive impact on business.

At the end of the day, you should always be doing your best to provide quality service, excellent food and drink, and the best atmosphere possible.

If you do that, good ratings and reviews will naturally follow.

This will turn your restaurant’s pages on the ratings websites into a revenue generator, and may become one of the most powerful marketing tools in your arsenal.

Perhaps the most powerful way to boost revenue, improve online ratings, bring back lost customers, and improve customer lifetime values – all while saving time and money – is to invest in WiFi marketing and customer intelligence platform like Bloom Intelligence.

So, if you would like to see Bloom in action, and how easy it is to use, call us today to schedule a demo, or schedule a demo online here.

No matter what type of marketing strategy you are employing, or when, it is crucial to have detailed customer data collection and marketing attribution tools.

Using these tools, marketers will have the customer information necessary to create targeted and personalized marketing campaigns. This will give you the upper hand over your competition when rebuilding your revenue stream before, during, and after challenging times.

Likewise, you will be able to see the results of online and offline campaigns to measure ROI and optimize over time.

Collecting Customer Data

There are plenty of ways in which to collect customer data – official U.S. data sources, market research companies, WiFi data collection, or even DIY surveys and questionnaires.

However you collect your data, there are also tools available today to help you gather useful customer information and use it to effectively drive positive ROI.

Some of these tools will collect much more detailed data for you, in real-time, using WiFi technology – which further reduces your data collection costs and gives you a much larger sample size of your actual customers.

Knowing your customer segments and how each of these groups behaves can allow you to create much more creative and effective online campaigns for each of them on your website, your mobile app, and various online advertising channels, such as Google or Facebook.

It means knowing where they are online and offline, and appealing to their interests when and where it is most convenient for them, allowing you to focus on the most effective marketing channels.

Plus, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of what kind of information appeals to them and what questions and pain points they have.

This allows you to create high-quality, informational, and useful content for your website, social media channels, email campaigns, and offline marketing efforts.

It can also give you great insight as to how you might optimize your brand presence through testing. With customer behavior possibly changing after the pandemic, this can give you a very powerful advantage over your competition.

You can create more visually and intellectually appealing creative not only for your digital efforts but for your point of sale marketing as well.

For instance, you can provide more effective or engaging merchandise or signage to help you increase customer PPA at the POS itself, including suggestive selling by your employees.

Customer data can give you the ability to execute things you may not have even thought about, such as more effectively selecting the most profitable location for a new restaurant or store.

Likewise, it can help you better manage purchasing and staffing, and it can help you make much better decisions on special events and promotions.

WiFi Triggered Marketing

WiFi marketing and analytics platforms, Like Bloom Intelligence, are solutions that can passively collect customer data for you and create the detailed customer profiles necessary to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace.

But that’s just the beginning.

As you build these customer profiles, Bloom allows you to set up one-time, regularly-scheduled, and behavior-triggered marketing campaigns.

You instantly gain the ability to perform marketing in real-time, based on actual customer demographic and behavior data.

Here are examples of a few triggered campaigns you can implement immediately:

• Birthday – When you know a customer’s birthday, you can send an offer or promotion a few days prior. Of course, you should still consider all of the other data points in their profile, such as age, gender, and personal interests. The goal is to bring that person back to your physical location, redeem your offer, spend more money, and become more loyal.
• Come Back Soon – Another tactic is to send a marketing message to a first-time customer after they have left your place of business. When they leave your store, the tool waits a pre-configured time period (minutes, hours, days) and sends them a thank you message, and offers them an incentive to come back.
• Give us a Rating – Using the same trigger as the ‘Come Back Soon’ example, you could send a message to a customer who has recently visited your place of business and ask them to rate their experience. If you are aware of the customer demographic and purchase decisions, and their rating is better than average, you can offer a compelling offer to get them to write a review on Yelp, Google, or any other ratings website.

You can also send triggered messages based on things like milestones, loyalty, registration, at-risk potential, good or bad customer ratings, and more. You may also send one-off messages and regularly scheduled messages to any or all of your customer segments.

Again, you want to keep in mind all the data points in your customer profiles as you create these campaigns.

Would you send a 50-year-old woman the same message you would send a 21-year-old man? Probably not.

Testing and Measuring Results

Of course, none of this will be as effective if you have no way to accurately measure the results of your efforts.

You need to make sure that the solution you’re using provides detailed and comprehensive reporting features, and the ability to track testing campaigns.

It can be tempting to use your own intuition to predict what will make people come into your restaurant or visit your store, but it’s vital to understand that customer perceptions, experiences, and likes/dislikes are limitless.

Basing marketing decisions on one person’s “feelings” can be detrimental to your business. 

You also need to be able to attribute customer behavior to specific channels and campaigns.

For instance, you want to distinguish if a customer came into your location because of an advertisement they saw online, or through an email message, or from a radio commercial.

Additionally, you want to know which particular marketing message they responded to, and to which customer segment(s) they belong.

This will allow you to optimize your marketing messages based on accurate, tangible data, and strive for continuous improvement. If you’re not measuring your marketing campaigns and ROI at this level of detail, you will not know for sure if what you are doing is helping or hurting your business.

You want to continuously test your marketing messages. Without testing, you’re always leaving potential revenue on the table.

Just make sure that the tools you are using can give you the accurate reports and KPIs required to determine which messages are working better than others.

And always allow plenty of time to give yourself a large enough sample size to confidently determine your winners – the more, the better.

Why You Need To Get Started Now

Using a WiFi analytics and marketing platform to collect customer data can make a huge difference for your business when you use them effectively.

But it can also work for your competition!

Now is the time to move forward to leverage a jump-start on other savvy marketers.

The concept is easy to master and can yield huge returns. Successful business owners not only know their business, they understand the differences in their customers and they provide specific, engaging messaging that addresses those differences.

Increasing customer frequency and spend, building customer loyalty, improving ratings, staying ahead of the competition, and striving for continuous improvement – all are potent and effective ingredients for restaurant and retail business success.

With the amount of competition out there, customer profiling can be one of the easiest methods of gaining a strong competitive advantage and ensuring lasting success.

Click for a free demo of the Bloom Intelligence platform, or call to schedule today at 727-877-8181.

If you’d like to learn more, take a look at our free guide: The Value of Customer Profiles.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric used by businesses to measure the financial value of a customer over the entire period of their relationship with the company.

CLV considers not just how much a customer spends in a given period, but also how likely they are to return and spend more in the future. This information can be used to make decisions about how best to allocate resources, such as marketing dollars, in order to increase profits.

In today’s competitive restaurant space, it is more important than ever to create customer loyalty and keep them coming back.

Loyal customers boost your overall customer lifetime values and help lower marketing and customer acquisition costs. The more loyal guests you have, the less money and time you need to spend finding new customers.

There are several factors that go into calculating CLV, including the guest’s average purchase amount, the frequency of purchases, and the length of time they have visited your restaurant.

In order to optimize and increase CLV, businesses often employ retention marketing techniques such as loyalty programs and WiFi marketing, which incentivize guests to continue their relationship with your restaurant.

Captive Portals and WiFi Marketing

In a world that’s constantly connected, WiFi marketing is becoming an increasingly important way to reach restaurant guests.

By using a WiFi captive portal to collect customer data, restaurant owners and operators can learn more about their customers and target them with relevant ads and offers.

Also, by providing free WiFi access, businesses can attract customers and keep them engaged while they’re visiting.

Here is how your WiFi captive portal can help improve your restaurant’s CLV.

How Captive Portals Help Improve CLV

When a guest logs into your free WiFi, a captive portal page will appear. A captive portal is a page that asks the guest to enter information, such as their name and email address, in order to access the internet.

Once the user logs in, it will create a customer profile for that guest. The customer profile contains all previous and future behavior data, such as dwell times or popular visit days and times.

Over time, you can ask for other information each time the guest returns and logs back in. You can collect demographic data this way, such as birthdate, gender, postal code, and more.

As you passively build a large list of customer data, you can begin segmenting guests into smaller individual lists. This is customer segmentation.

Then, you can send out different messages to each list that they will be more likely to engage with.

Customer Segmentation to Improve Loyalty

Segmented, targeted marketing is much more effective in terms of engagement and ROI. Here are some examples:

• An article from CMO.com stated that targeted advertisements are, on average, almost twice as effective as non-targeted ads.
• eConsultancy.com reported that 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases guest engagement.
• In a study by The Direct Marketing Association, segmented and targeted emails generated 58% of all marketing revenue. And 77% of ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.

The major benefit of executing targeted personalized marketing campaigns is that you are sending your message to guests who are more likely to engage and respond.

With the ability to collect guest data like contact information,  demographics, physical behavior, guest ratings, purchasing habits, and other targeted information, you can deliver this type of highly effective advertising to help your business grow.

By implementing customer segmentation and executing well-thought-out targeted marketing campaigns, your guests will notice that you are communicating with them on a more personal level.

Today’s customers expect personalization when it comes to advertising, marketing, and personalized messaging. And when they see it, they engage, and you build stronger brand loyalty.

As they realize the personalization of your message and begin to engage with it, the chances of them coming back into your store increase dramatically.

The Value of Restaurant CLV

Retaining loyal customers is much less expensive than acquiring new ones. According to the Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer can be anywhere from 5-25 times more expensive than retaining a current one.

Add to that the time between losing one customer and gaining another, and you can quickly see that an out-of-control churn rate can be devastating for any business.

Worse, if you do not recognize it, it will only continue to climb. Unfortunately, many restaurateurs do not know what their churn rate is, or which way it is trending.

Using a WiFi customer intelligence platform like Bloom Intelligence can offer another very powerful way to improve your restaurant’s CLV.

Get Back Lost Guests

Bloom uses machine learning to identify guests who are at risk of churning.

When it identifies a potentially churning guest, the system will send a message to the guest. Some restaurateurs will also include an incentive to help restore loyalty.

Bloom users are seeing up to 35%+ of their churning guests come back through their doors. This, of course, can have a huge impact on maintaining and growing your CLV.

Using your captive portal and WiFi analytics to monitor and report on your customer churn rate, you’ll be saving money compared to hiring a third-party to do this for you.

Plus, with Bloom, it is entirely passive. You don’t have to lift a finger to see your customer churn rate, which receives real-time updates.

Plus, you’ll be collecting data from a considerable sample size of your customer base. This gives you the ability to spot trends quickly.

Focus on Customer Service

Another powerful way to improve customer lifetime values is to focus on providing excellent customer service.

Make sure that your team is well-trained in providing top-notch service. And be sure to respond to customer inquiries and complaints quickly and effectively.

You may also want to consider offering loyalty programs or other incentives to encourage customers to keep coming back.

By focusing on providing great customer service, you can improve customer lifetime values and boost your bottom line.

Using a WiFi marketing and analytics platform to collect a large volume of the right data, personalizing your marketing campaigns has never been easier.

You’ll feel confident as you make solid data-driven decisions. You’ll drive more company growth and build a much larger base of loyal customers.

To learn more about what you can do with data captured by your captive portal, and how to save time while increasing customer lifetime values, call us today for a free demo at 727-877-8181, or click here to schedule your free demo online.