Social WiFi Marketing Delivers Growth

What Is Social WiFi?

Social WiFi refers to physical locations using a guest WiFi landing page to allow customers to login to their guest WiFi with social media credentials. Customer data is then collected such as names, emails, and demographics. This data is then aggregated into customer profiles to be used for re-marketing.

This is also known as WiFi marketing.

Not only does using a social login such as Facebook connect or LinkedIn make it easy for customers to access the internet, it generates a wealth of customer data for the business.

If their social media account setting allows it, you can gather specific customer information to add to their customer profile, such as their birthday, gender, or email address.

Once a customer opts in, you can start re-marketing to them with coupons, offers, and incentives that ultimately drive customer loyalty, and maximize your revenue per customer.

Studies show that businesses that provide social WiFi marketing tend to see increases in foot traffic, the length of customer visits and the amount of money they spend.

Captive Portal Social Benefits

When a customer tries to log into your social WiFi platform, they are taken to a WiFi landing page, also known as a captive portal.

This page contains the social logins for logging in, or the form fields for a name and email address, and other desired data points such as gender or birthdate.

Outside of using your guest WiFi landing page for your customer to opt in, you can promote any menu items, events, or even activate your customers to buy a gift card, download a mobile app or to follow your company’s social media.

This is a great way to let your customers know about your social media accounts, and to ask them to follow, like, and share.

There are many other features you can add to your WiFi landing page.

When they successfully log into WiFi, they can be then pointed at your Facebook fan page where you can ask them to like you or follow your page.

Using Social WiFi for Retargeting

Retaining current customers is much less expensive than finding new ones.

With the help of a social WiFi platform like Bloom Intelligence, it becomes entirely possible to remarket to your customers.

Bloom gives you the ability to embed a Facebook pixel into your WiFi landing page.

When a customer logs in, the pixel is triggered, and the action is recorded. This gives you the option to target those customers with Facebook and/or Instagram ads.

If a customer decides to log in with their email address, it too can be used for Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns by uploading your customer database list to these platforms to retarget your customers online.

You can even set up look-alike campaigns on social media or online publishers to target people that are similar to your customers. Thus bringing in new customers to your restaurant locations.

Social WiFi Marketing

Social Wifi Marketing refers to physical locations that use branded Wifi landing pages to capture their customers’ digital profiles in exchange for access to a location’s internet.

Registration methods on the WiFi landing page include “single sign on” applications such as Facebook Connect.

If a customer clicks on Facebook Connect to log in, they are giving that application permission to access approved customer data such as names, emails, genders, and birthdays.

This customer data is then stored in a customer profile database to be used for customer insight and marketing purposes.

As mentioned above, studies show that businesses that provide social Wifi marketing tend to see increases in foot traffic, the length of customer visits and the amount of money they spend.

In addition, Accenture reports that 64% of consumers make a restaurant decision based on WiFi availability.

Social Wifi marketing provides an opportunity for restaurants and retailers to passively build customer profiles.

As a result, you’ll have a much more accurate understanding of customer behavior.

Using Bloom’s growth tools you can automate personalized marketing campaigns based upon your customers’ behavior.

This will help reduce churn, and build strong customer loyalty, for example.

Vendor Selection

One of the most important considerations you face in offering social WiFi powered by WiFi marketing & analytics is selecting the correct partner.

You want to make sure they provide commercial-grade equipment, which is typically more secure and able to handle multiple concurrent users.

You also want to ensure your vendor is PCI compliant. PCI compliance involves following a set of requirements created by the credit card industry that mandates the security of cardholder data.

It includes guidance for networks that process payment cards as well as those that may do so unintentionally.

Bloom Intelligence offers these features and will even send a technician to survey your location.

They will find the best location for your access and install everything for you.

Bloom will also provide tech support after the initial installation for both you and your customers.

Promoting and Encouraging Sign-Ins

Having social WiFi will do no good if your patrons don’t know it is available.

Many businesses will display signage in prominent places stating they offer free WiFi.

And if your network name isn’t obvious, you can have it printed on your signage as well. It is a good idea to have your staff mention the WiFi availability when they see customers using a mobile device.

Even if they know of your free guest WiFi, many customers are unwilling to spend the time creating a login or typing their contact information.

There are two primary ways of avoiding this.

For example, offer the ability to log in using a social media account, such as Facebook.

Or, you can provide an incentive for users to log in, such as a free drink or dessert. And with Bloom, you’ll be able to try all of these ideas, and more.

Data Analysis and Customer Segmentation

Even with a quality POS and accounting system, you simply won’t have the type of information you need to effectively analyze your brick-and-mortar business.

Bloom’s social WiFi platform can do this for you.

You don’t even need to require users to log in to enjoy the benefits of data-driven marketing and operations.

Bloom has the ability to identify the smartphones and mobile devices your customers carry. They don’t even need to log in.

You’ll see things like first-time visitors, repeat visitors, dwell times, visit times and much more.

And if the customer does log in, Bloom will build a detailed customer profile around that customer.

Then you can use these profiles for more targeted, triggered marketing. Additionally, Bloom will even track ROI on each campaign.

A special promotion or a change in store layout can actually impact your sales. Bloom can help you see whether these changes made a positive or negative impact.

You can use the data to make more informed decisions in staffing and purchasing, saving you money and resources.

Improve Marketing ROI

Ultimately, the data you receive from offering social WiFi at your business can be used to improve your marketing and grow your business.

It has been proven that segmenting and targeting specific groups with different marketing messages aimed at appealing to each group can improve customer engagement.

A recent study by Constant Contact showed that more personalized emails deliver 6x more transaction rates.

With the ability to create customer profiles using Bloom you can create these types of targeted email campaigns.

Therefore, you’ll save on marketing costs and be able to track ROI down to the individual email level.

This allows you to test frequently and improve each campaign.

Other Benefits of Providing Social WiFi

• Increased customer dwell time. Free WiFi for your customers means higher dwell times. In turn, customers may spend more money. IGR reports that businesses that have free guest WiFi see a 72% success rate in increased sales.
• Remain competitive. By collecting customer profiles and segmenting, you’ll have a competitive advantage over your competition. Also, you will save on costs and improve operations.
• Increase customer base. Customers will feel more appreciated when they have access to the internet through your free guest WiFi. More importantly, using the customer data you collect, you can personalize your customers experience. Offering free social Wi-Fi creates a value-add for your customers, increasing loyalty and repeat traffic.

If you’re thinking about adding social WiFi at your place of business, you’ll want to take all the things mentioned above into consideration.

Bloom Intelligence can bring your business the power of social Wi-Fi and help you grow your business.

Bloom can automatically save your at-risk customers and also build your online ratings profiles and much more.

Even better, we keep the set up and management of the platform as simple as possible for you.

You’ll have your own dedicated customer success manager – letting you concentrate on what you do best, running your business.

If you’d like to learn why thousands of restaurants partner with Bloom, call us today at 727-877-8181 or schedule your demo here.