Category: WiFi Marketing

5 Coffee Shop Marketing Ideas For Better Marketing ROI

Posted on August 16, 2021 by - Restaurant Marketing, WiFi Marketing

How to Market a Coffee Shop

Are you developing your coffee shop marketing plan for 2023? Now is the time to evaluate the digital marketing strategy for your coffee shop or cafe.

As we begin a new year, remaining keen on what is working in digital marketing is key to staying current in your strategy. Since most – if not all – of your customers are using the internet to shop, socialize, and connect to local businesses, it is essential to be there when they’re looking to engage with your coffee shop and baristas.

So, we’ve put together some top ideas you need to implement in 2023 in your coffee shop marketing strategy to build customer loyalty and increase foot traffic.

#1. Live Video is a Must

Live video plays a massive role in building awareness and relationships on social media. For instance, tools such as Facebook Live and Instagram Stories capture attention and encourage followers to connect more with cafe brands. Likewise, it helps build customer loyalty.

In fact, according to  Forrester, people watch live videos 10 to 20 times longer than on-demand content, making live streaming a compelling way to deliver interactive content to consumers. Incorporating live video into your coffee shop marketing strategy is a must if you want to engage your followers more and increase brand awareness.

The good news is, there are several ways coffee shop owners can use live video in social media marketing. Here are a few ideas:

marketing guide for coffee shop marketing plan

  • Take your social media followers behind the scenes to show what it’s like preparing a cup of coffee and other foods in your shop.
  • Highlight your coffee shop team on live video so that customers can get to know them. Implement an employee of the month contest and feature your winners.
  • You can promote your new flavors and share the reasons why people will love them. You can also communicate why you decided to add them to your coffee menu.

Coffee Shop Content Marketing

#2. Hone Your Email List

Growing your email subscribers is the lifeblood of your business and is essential for your marketing efforts. The more potential customers that you have coming into your funnel, the more opportunities you create to build relationships and share promotions.

Your email strategy keeps your coffee shop at the forefront of your customers’ minds, fosters relationships with new and loyal customers, and keeps your brand top of mind in your local community.

Therefore, focus on honing your email marketing in 2023. You can achieve an excellent strategy for gaining new subscribers by providing free WiFi for your customers. Send users to a captive portal or landing page before they go online to collect their email addresses. You’ll quickly gather valuable information that can fuel your entire digital strategy.

marketing strategy for coffee shop

Rather than just sending sales and promotional content, nurture your leads by offering value your audience can use. Think about your target market and the common problems they experience, whether it relates to your industry or not. Share resources or give tips on how they can overcome them. Answer their questions.

They will see your coffee shop in a whole new light!

Customer Segmentation for Better Coffee Shop Marketing

#3. Ramp up Your Instagram Strategy

Instagram remains one of the fastest-growing social networks, currently boasting over one billion users.

It’s an ideal platform for attracting new followers and customers to your coffee brand while showcasing your creative side. It’s essential to stay up-to-date on the best social media marketing campaigns for your coffee shop.

Therefore, you can use these tips to amplify your Instagram strategy in your coffee shop social media marketing:

  • Hashtags are king on Instagram! If you’re not already using them, be sure to include popular and industry-related hashtags in your content. You can use tools like Hashtagify.me to find relevant ones and drive new followers to your page.
  • Be responsive. Remember, this is a social media platform. Replying to comments and online reviews and reposting others’ content is a sure way to maintain engagement on Instagram. It also humanizes your brand, making you more relatable and personable.
  • Share useful content. How-to videos and motivational posts are a hit on social media. Leverage them to your advantage while offering value to your audience.
  • Make sure your visuals are high-quality as they perform better on Instagram. Here are some Tips to Take.
  • coffee shop marketingUse Awesome Food Pictures.
  • Be consistent. If you can only post twice a day, maintain that cadence for improved engagement.

#4. Leverage Digital Marketing & Interactive Content in your Coffee Shop Marketing

In 2023, remember that consumers do not interact the same way with content as they had in the past. Techniques like blogging and social posts still work, yet followers are seeking more engaging experiences.

Additionally, offering multiple ways for people to consume your content allows you to reach a bigger audience.

 

Customer Churn Success Report

 

Content for your coffee shop is crucial. That’s where interactive content and digital marketing for your coffee shop comes to play. Formats such as quizzes, assessments, surveys, and polls are excellent ways to entertain and engage your followers. Even as a coffee shop, you can think of creative ideas to leverage interactive content in your digital marketing strategy.

best coffee shop social media marketing

For example, create a quiz using interactive content tools like Apester, where users discover their “Coffee Personality Type.” Or, build a poll asking social media followers about their favorite coffee or specialty tea. Finally, you could develop a survey to discover more about your consumers and what they want to improve your customer initiatives.

The options are endless with interactive content.

#5. User-Generated Content Sells!

User-generated content is one of the most effective forms of content in marketing. Your customers’ comments, selfies with your products, testimonials, and videos provide you with valuable content to implement in your coffee shop marketing. Social proof and reviews sell.

The Nielsen Consumer Trust Index shares that  92% of consumers trust organic, user-generated content more than they believe in traditional advertising. This trust plays a massive role in generating buzz on social media and getting more people into your coffee shop!

With that prefaced, encourage your customers to leave positive reviews on your Facebook Page, Yelp, and Google. Make it easy by sending a direct link where they can click and write. Consider hosting a contest where each participant shares a social media post about their experience with your brand.

woman taking a picture of her coffee cupThe key is to collect as much user-generated content as possible to amplify your overall digital marketing strategy. And it can help build your word-of-mouth marketing as well.

#6. Create a Coffee Subscription Service

COVID-19 has transformed the way that cafes and local coffee shops operate. Customers are more comfortable staying at home, and coffee shops struggle to attract their business. That’s why many coffee shops are turning to subscription-based coffee services for their customers.

One type of cafe subscription service involves providing an unlimited amount of coffee for a set monthly cost. The other coffee shop subscription service entails providing customers with packaged coffee beans delivered to their homes.

More than half of online shoppers  (54%) say they subscribe to a subscription box service. The subscription box industry appeals to consumers’ desire for convenient, novel experiences.

Key Coffee Shop Statistics to Keep in Mind

Implementing smart digital marketing tactics in your coffee shop marketing plan will position you well in 2022 as a business owner. It’s essential to continuously test your efforts to keep what’s working and modify what isn’t. With consistency, you’ll create a winning strategy that keeps people connected to your brand online and drives new customers through your doors.

Drive More Revenue Into Your Restaurant Business With Customer Data

Posted on June 4, 2021 by - Restaurant Marketing, WiFi Marketing

Until now, restaurant marketing professionals have had a tough time authenticating the ROI of their online and offline marketing campaigns.

However, as customer behaviors blur the lines between screen time and storefront visits, WiFi analytics and marketing platforms have changed the game, allowing physical locations to collect real-time tangible campaign data from actual customers—whether they’re scanning menus at corner cafes or checking odds through integrated betting sites at neighborhood pubs. More importantly, when used properly, this data can provide a significant return on investment, revealing patterns that refine everything from peak-hour staffing to cross-channel incentives that keep foot traffic steady year-round.

In the past, retail and restaurant managers had to pay companies large sums of money to obtain accurate and detailed customer profile data.

While this information provides a good look into customer demographics and psychographics, there are two main issues:

  • The data collected is only a snapshot in time. If you’re looking for consistent data, you’re going to have to continue purchasing it.
  • The data collected is typically from a small sample size of customers.

Fortunately, a WiFi analytics and marketing platform can eliminate the issues. You’ll consistently receive real-time data, build accurate and detailed customer profiles, and you will see it from a very large sample size of your actual customers.

And you can do this at a fraction of the cost of purchasing data from traditional companies.

Customer profiles can allow you to make much smarter marketing decisions and engage with your customers on a more personal level, driving higher customer spend and loyalty, saving on costs, improving restaurant reputation, and boosting ROI.

Now that you know you can quickly and easily collect all the valuable data you want, let’s take a look at the actual value customer profiles can add to your bottom line.

Turning Customer Profiles into Increased Revenue

Knowing who your customers are can make all the difference in the world when it comes to your marketing strategy and results.

By collecting detailed customer profile data, you can create marketing campaigns that will speak much more clearly to each of your audience segments.

This allows you to not only define and differentiate your most valuable customers but to speak to them in an effective way that they will understand and engage with, persuading them to keep coming back.

As you’ll see below, this can make a tremendous difference in your profitability.

You’ll be able to:

  • Identify your ideal customers in terms of value, and market to them effectively
  • Classify other audience groups you may or may not have previously identified
  • Measure ROI and optimize messaging for each audience segment
  • Develop new products, services, menu items, deals and promotions

As you begin using your customer profile data to segment and effectively message your customers, you’ll see much more success increasing your per-person averages and customer lifetime values, filling your locations with buying customers, and increasing your bottom line.

Multiply Results with Personalized Marketing Messages

With detailed customer profiles gathered through your WiFi marketing hub, personalized campaigns not only become entirely possible, but they’re also easy to set up, maintain and measure.

You can target your messaging by profile information like age, gender, geographic location, visit times, length of stay and several other demographic and behavior data points with messaging that speaks to that particular segment.

According to Mindfire, Inc., a marketing automation company, in a study of 650 multi-channel marketing campaigns, personalized campaigns consistently and overwhelmingly beat out static campaigns in generating a high response rate from recipients.

And according to The Direct Marketing Association, 77% of ROI comes from segmented, targeted and triggered campaigns.

In our free guide, The Value of a Customer Profile, we go into detail around the monetary value of customer profiles, showing how a chain of 5 restaurants could increase their customer visits by an additional 480 visits a month.

Then we factor in per-person averages and cost to acquire a customer and show how just one marketing message per month could bring in an additional $80,000 in annual revenue.

We further explain that increasing customer frequency – of just 10% of their customer profile base – could take that number and increase it dramatically, to an additional $417,600 in annual revenue.

Then we factor in personalized messaging and behavior-driven marketing, and that number increases even more.

You can download the guide here to see all the details. It’s truly an eye-opening read.

Save on Costs

Not only will customer profiles help you in terms of getting customers to come back more often and spend more, they can help save you money in costs as well.

We’ve already talked about the costs of collecting customer profiles using WiFi technology being a fraction of the cost of purchasing data from traditional companies.

You’ll also save money on advertising costs. In an Ayman Farahat and Michael Bailey study conducted on targeted advertising, they found, assuming the cost per 1000 ad impressions (CPM) is $1 USD, that:

  • The marginal cost of a brand-related search resulting from ads is $15.65 per search, but is only $1.69 per search from a targeted campaign.
  • The marginal cost of a click is 72 cents, but only 16 cents from a targeted campaign.

Targeted advertisements, no matter the channel, will typically yield higher results for lower costs, dramatically reducing your cost per customer acquisition.

{{cta(‘d916771f-4aa5-4869-85d2-2e938fa36500’)}}

By collecting customer profile data, and using WiFi analytics, you’ll be able to not only identify your high-traffic days and times, you’ll begin to be able to better predict them.

This will allow you to bring on the right amount of staff at the right times, avoiding overstaffing and loss of payroll dollars.

In addition, you’ll be able to make smarter purchasing decisions, keeping your items as fresh as possible and decreasing the likelihood of running out of a product – the dreaded ‘86’.

It’s Time To Get Started

The value of customer profiles can be seen from several different angles. With the emergence of WiFi technology, it has never been easier to passively collect this valuable data and act on it.

Customer profiles can be extremely valuable, giving you a greater understanding of who your best customers are, allowing you to speak to them when, where and how they want to be spoken to.

This drives engagement, familiarity and loyalty between you and your customers, driving solid increases in PPA and CLV and saving on costs.

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.

7 Powerful and Valuable WiFi Marketing Trends for 2025

Posted on May 6, 2021 by - WiFi Marketing

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 2025.

Save Your Churning Customers

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 2024.

The only way to target customers after 2024 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.

webinar-1In 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!

floating widget-1

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!

Engaging Restaurant Customers Who Are Churning

Posted on April 12, 2021 by - WiFi Marketing

It’s no secret that your loyal customers are the lifeblood of your business. So when a customer changes their habit of visiting your establishment, do you have a way of knowing?  More importantly, can you entice them to come back?

{{cta(‘38116713-035d-4937-a11f-61a76e24baf6’)}}

There is an enormous amount of competition in the restaurant industry, and it doesn’t take much to shift a customer’s routine.

That change in routine can result in a customer who is at-risk of churning shifting into a fully-churned customer.

When it comes down to it, if your customer isn’t dining at your establishment, they are dining somewhere else.

Fortunately, there are solutions to help restaurateurs know when a customer is at-risk of churning. With these solutions, you can reconnect with your customer before their loyalty shifts to your competition. Perhaps the best way to understand customer behavior is by utilizing a WiFi marketing customer experience platform.

Analytics and Automation to the Rescue

Automation is a tool that can make our marketing efforts efficient and more productive. It will send pre-written marketing messages to customers when they meet specific criteria set by the marketer.

Using triggers or scheduled automation, you can make marketing tasks easier.

Automation helps with tasks that may slip through if we had to rely on our memory, or when we simply do not have the time to do it manually.

When it comes to utilizing automated marketing to engage at-risk customers, Wi-Fi intelligence can provide powerful insight.

Imagine being able to identify a churning customer and send a message without having to lift a finger:

“We haven’t seen you in a while and we miss you. We hope everything is well with you and look forward to seeing you soon!  We’d like to offer you a free appetizer with your next meal.  Hope to see you soon!  Your friends at….”

More importantly than what your message says – and content does matter – is letting your customers know they are valued on a personal level.

It is also a great way to stay top-of-mind. There is absolute truth in the proverb that states, “out of sight, out of mind.”

When you realize this means you must keep tabs on all of your customers to the best of your ability, the need for automation begins to take on more clarity.

{{cta(‘d916771f-4aa5-4869-85d2-2e938fa36500’)}}

Customer Retention

When it comes to retaining customers, automation can help us with doing things better than we could without automation – at least realistically speaking.

With WiFi marketing systems, we have the ability to see whether our customer has been to our location recently, regardless of whether they log in or not.

So, when it comes to recognizing and retaining at-risk customers, those employing a WiFi marketing and analytics platform have a distinct advantage.

We only need to examine a real-case scenario to see how this applies.

Recognizing the At-Risk Customer

Even if you manage a single-location family owned diner, you may believe you are “small enough” and have the volume to recognize and manage your at-risk patrons.

But if you consider the lost revenue from one loyal customer, not recognizing all of them can be significant.

What is the lifetime value of a customer? How many meals will they purchase over the course of time and what does that mean to your establishment?

If you are the owner or marketing director of a multi-unit franchise, you have multiple locations and losing customers can result in substantial revenue loss.

You simply do not have the luxury of being unaware of customer behavior when your competition is becoming more aware and proactive at enticing your customers to be loyal to them.

{{cta(‘38116713-035d-4937-a11f-61a76e24baf6’)}}

Turn Your Guest Wi-Fi Into A Revenue-Driving Machine

Regardless of the customer metrics you choose to track, from spending to engagement activity, recognizing pattern changes and trends is the concept that demands attention. Therein lies the needle in the haystack.

If your store serves 1,000 weekly customers alone, that’s 4,000 customers a month for whom you must study behavior data, locate trends, omissions and other behavioral benchmarks.

Having a dashboard to view exactly what is happening within a specific time period is vital. You’ll be able to see frequency of visits, customer repeat rates, dwell times, individual potentially churning customers and overall churn rates.

And, most importantly, you’ll have the ability to shape customer behavior resulting in fewer churns and positive business trends.

Realistically there is no way to accurately and feasibly employ the manpower to manage such data quantities.

This is the beauty and the magic of WiFi marketing, analytics and automation.

Building an automated marketing campaign tailored to your customer behavior and your operational practices can be a huge safety net for your business.

There will always be some customers that just can’t be saved – that’s just the nature of the business. But consider the many who can be saved.

This safety net will help you retain those who can be saved and that is worth every penny.

  • Acquiring new customer can be as much as 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
  • A mere increase of 5% in customer retention equates to more than a 25% increase in profit.

The financial and business sense (and cents) of WiFi marketing, analytics and automation is evident.

Used effectively, you will foster relationships, promote trust and benefit both your restaurant and your customers.{{cta(‘ff109ec5-1b98-4869-82fd-89b671b4592d’)}}

How To Decrease Customer Churn With WiFi Analytics

Posted on May 19, 2020 by - Restaurant Marketing, WiFi Analytics, WiFi Marketing

Customer churn, also known as customer attrition, isn’t an isolated event. It’s a process that can start at any time, from when a potential customer first discovers your place of business, to when they finally become a repeat customer.

Your company’s strategy to combat customer churn must work similarly, providing an end-to-end solution — and it all starts with your data.

Growing Your Customer Database During The Coronavirus

Posted on April 8, 2020 by - Restaurant Marketing, WiFi Analytics, WiFi Marketing

As the world navigates the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants and retail businesses are doing everything they can to stay afloat until they can re-open their doors for on-premise dining again.  

During these uncertain times, it is extremely important to continue communicating with your loyal customers and growing your customer database as quickly as possible.