How Restaurants Can Succeed and Thrive After COVID

It is a new dawn for restaurant and retail owners and operators around the world.

In the United States, restaurants and retail locations that have been closed for months are finally able to open their doors again.

Obviously, as a business owner, your main concerns are keeping your employees employed, developing and maintaining a positive revenue stream, and getting your old customers back into your doors.

Moreover, you want those customers to become loyal again and keep coming back.

As we enter this uncertain time, those who have a customer database of loyal customers have a distinct advantage over those who don’t.

But do not fret.

You can quickly and passively build a large list of customer profiles in a very short amount of time using your location’s guest WiFi.

Using Guest WiFi To Rebuild Business After COVID-19

With your existing guest WiFi access points, you have the ability to collect anonymous, overall customer data.

Better yet, you can build individual customer profiles which include contact information with which you can use for targeted marketing campaigns.

Here is how it works.

Almost everyone today is carrying a WiFi-enabled smart device. This is usually a cell phone, but also includes laptops, tablets, and even smart watches.

These devices can be identified by your WiFi access points even if they do not log into your WiFi network.

With a quality WiFi marketing and analytics platform like Bloom Intelligence, you will be able to track all of this anonymous data.

In real time, you will begin collecting amazing baseline data to help you with your marketing and operations efforts.

You will see your daily traffic totals, how many repeat visitors are returning, how many first-time visitors return, dwell times, popular visit times, and more.

This data alone will show you how your business is recovering after the shutdowns.

And since the data is updated in real time, you will easily see trends in customer traffic and other behavior.

With this information, you can develop and execute online and offline data-driven, intelligent marketing campaigns to help drive customer spend and retention.

Staying top-of-mind during these trying times is of the utmost importance.

Building Your Customer Database to Improve Revenue

When customer come to your physical location, all of the above can be done.

However, if they log in, or you can entice them to login to your WiFi network, much more potential can be realized.

When the customer attempts to access the internet, they will be taken to a WiFi landing page, also known as a captive portal. This page will require the customer to enter their email address prior to gaining access to the internet.

As soon as they enter this information, a customer profile is created in your database for that customer. Any previous data associated with their device will be added to their customer profile.

Then, you will know who that customer is, how they behave at your physical location, and most importantly, you will have their contact information.

With their contact information, you can begin marketing to the customer with targeted, segmented marketing campaigns.

This means that you can now send that customer an email based upon their behavior at your location.

For instance, if the customer has stopped visiting your location on a regular basis, you can send them an email with an incentive to get them to come back and re-establish their visit pattern.

Or, if a customer only visits during lunchtime hours, you could send them an email with an incentive to begin visiting for dinner, as well.

Better yet, with Bloom, you can completely automate these messages. When the system notices a specific customer behavior that you configure, it will send the message to them automatically.

This is known as WiFi marketing automation.

Without lifting a finger, your marketing campaigns will be running behind the scenes. All you have to do is monitor the detailed campaign reports and optimize the campaigns over time.

What This Means After The COVID-19 Outbreak

With lost revenue over the last few months, and loans/federal assistance dwindling, restaurant and retail owners need to build revenue as quickly as possible.

They need to bring their business back into a profitable revenue stream.

Doing this comes down to one important thing – getting customers through your doors, and keeping them coming back.

With quality WiFi analytics, you will be able to see your customers’ behavior at your locations even if they do not login to your WiFi.

Plus, as you build your customer database, you will be able to launch intelligent, data-driven marketing campaigns.

You can target specific customer behavior, or segment your customers into various groups to send more targeted messaging to them.

Over the coming weeks, we will be posting details on how to market to customers after the COVID-19 pandemic. We will be focusing on the specific type of messaging that can bring your customers back and keep them coming back.

Subscribe to our mailing list (below) to receive email alerts of our new posts. 

Also, be on the lookout for our upcoming webinar in August that will go into more detail and show you how it all works.