With restaurants failing at astronomically high rates and competition at all-time highs, restaurant owners and operators need to use every weapon in their arsenals to boost sales and protect profits.
Many store owners, marketers and managers are waking up to the possibilities of WiFi marketing. Sometimes referred to as social WiFi, this technology turns the free WiFi connection you’re already offering your customers into a tool that helps you build a huge list of customer profiles and contact information, such as email addresses and phone numbers.
Traditional marketing alone won’t transform your revenue and profits. You need to combine new marketing capabilities with advanced analytics for your brick-and-mortar locations to thrive in the digital age.
The Basics of WiFi Marketing
With WiFi marketing, you give your customers free WiFi access in your locations. When they log into your connection, they’re taken to a landing page where they’re encouraged to:
- Share their email address with you
- Follow one of your social media profiles
- Provide their rating of your establishment
You can also advertise an upcoming event, or special. Requiring contact information prior to accessing the internet gives you a way to stay connected with these customers. You can also use this basic contact information to send coupons and automate marketing campaigns.
These basic WiFi marketing tactics add a handful of digital marketing capabilities on top of the traditional tactics you’ve used to motivate customer loyalty and drive foot traffic into your locations.
Power Profits by Combining WiFi Marketing with Powerful Analytics
However, if all you’re doing with your newfound WiFi marketing capabilities is automating loyalty campaigns and growing email lists and social followers, you’re leaving a lot of uncaptured value on the table. To realize powerful gains for your locations, you need to amplify your marketing with WiFi analytics.
With WiFi analytics, you can capture information about your store performance and customer behavior – even if customers never log into your WiFi connection. By capturing key data such as hourly foot traffic and average customer dwell times, you will gain a high-level view of the performance of your locations.
You can then combine these and other data to determine things like average customer lifetime value and the lifetime value of individual customers.
The data you collect on both the customers who log into your connection and those who simply enter your location with a WiFi-enabled device gives you tremendous visibility into the health of your locations and the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. You can also divide your customers into various targets and segments.
With this information, you can make strategic decisions about:
- How much to invest in future marketing campaigns
- Which marketing campaigns are yielding the highest ROI
- Staffing/purchasing plans by hour, day, week and even time of year
This helps you cut the waste out of your operations and keeps your focus on attracting and retaining the kinds of customers who keep your P&L statements in the black.
Your Profits Start with Comprehensive WiFi Analytics
While some WiFi analytics solutions can capture data on customers who don’t log into your connection, not all do, or at least they don’t make it easy for you to access this data.
For you to really turn your stores into analytics-driven locations, you need to make it simple to access and learn from your data. You’ll want your WiFi solution to connect to a robust platform with an intuitive dashboard that puts your key data front and center.
You’ll also want to make sure your Wi-Fi solution captures and calculates performance data on a wide range of customer behaviors including:
- Customer churn rates
- Lifetime customer value
- Hourly, daily, weekly and monthly footfall
- Customer dwell times and dwell times by hour
There are even ways to connect POS data to traffic data. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to truly automate personalized marketing campaigns for every segment of your customer base.
Restaurants all over the world are beginning to fight back against their competitors. With a potent WiFi marketing and analytics platform like Bloom Intelligence as your foundation, you will gain a competitive edge that turns your locations into profit-making machines.
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