Offering Free WiFi to Customers

Offering free WiFi to your customers is not only a great benefit for them, it can be used to create massive increases in revenue and marketing & operations for your business.

However, to take full advantage, you need to plan and execute correctly.

From choosing an internet service provider, all the way to launching a fully-customizable WiFi marketing and customer intelligence platform, certain steps should be taken to create the most powerful system for your business.

So, here are the steps to offering free WiFi to your customers that will help your business grow.

1. Choosing an Internet Service Provider

It is important to choose the right internet service provider for the size of your business.

First and foremost, you want to choose a service provider that is reliable and affordable at the same time.

If you have multiple options in your area, make sure to gather information on all of them. Then, choose the highest speed and largest bandwidth that is reasonable for your budget.

In addition, make sure to research customer ratings and reviews.

You do not want to get stuck with a service provider who will offer poor customer service, or with poor internet connection or speed, for instance.

2. Setting Up Your Equipment and Network

Your equipment is just as important as a reliable internet service provider. You can have the best internet connection, but with poor equipment, your guest WiFi network will suffer.

This is an important business investment, so choose the highest-grade equipment you can afford.

Cisco Meraki WiFi access points are a good choice. They are commercial units and provide stellar WiFi access for your patrons.

Place your access point in a central, elevated location maintaining as much of an unobstructed view of a majority of WiFi-utilized space as possible.

Many owners and operators will install the access point in a back room or office. This is not recommended because the more obstructions between the access point and the receiving Wi-Fi enabled device there are, the decreased strength of the overall signal.

Then, have your technician set up a secure, public guest WiFi network so that it will appear on WiFi-enabled devices. Or, follow instructions from your internet service provider.

3. Create Your Captive Portal

A captive portal is a web page that users automatically see when they try to access your public WiFi.

It forces the user to log in with (typically) their name and email address. Once logged in, they can then visit other internet websites as usual.

In many cases, certain websites can be blocked from being viewed through your public network. Likewise, this can help prevent “bandwidth hogging” and other malicious activity.

The captive portal is not just a login screen.

You can use this valuable virtual real estate to:

• showcase specials and events
• build social media followers
• offer surveys
• showcase your mobile app or loyalty program
• ask for customer ratings, and more.

Before your customers even get to the internet, you can market to them on your business-branded captive portal page.

4. Choose a WiFi Marketing and Customer Intelligence Hub

Now that your network is set up and you are ready to launch your guest WiFi, it is time to begin reaping the benefits.

Don’t let the name of this tool intimidate you.

A WiFi marketing and customer intelligence hub is an easy-to-use, relatively low-cost tool for building your customer database, customer loyalty, improving your brand reputation, and increasing your marketing effectiveness.

Here are the various benefits you can take advantage of with a platform like Bloom Intelligence.

5. Collect Customer Profiles

When a customer logs into the internet through your captive portal, their name and email address are stored in a database.

Then, a customer profile is created for the customer and all of their past and future behavior data is stored in their customer profile.

Things like their average dwell time, visit days and times, visit duration’s, and locations visited are recorded.

Then, through progressive profiling, other demographic information can be added to the customer profile over time such as birthday, age, gender, postal code, and phone number.

This can all be done passively by the platform. You can build a customer list of thousands upon thousands of customer profiles without lifting a finger.

6. Segment Your Database for Better Marketing Results

Once you start building your customer database, you can then begin creating customer segments, or groups of customers with similar behavior and demographic data.

For example you can create a segment of men, over 30 who have an average dwell time over 30 minutes, but haven’t visited in more than 30 days.

In this example, you could create a marketing message that would appeal to this particular segment and send it only to those in your database who match the criteria.

Studies have shown that 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 customer 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.

Offering free WiFi to customers allows you to begin executing detailed, segmented marketing campaigns and watch your marketing ROI grow.

Even better, once configured, the campaigns can be completely automated. All you have to do is watch the results come in and optimize your messaging over time.

7. Improve Online Ratings

You can also improve your online ratings and reviews by offering free WiFi to customers.

By creating an automated ratings feedback loop, you can catch bad ratings before they are posted online. Likewise, you can push good ratings to your pages on the online ratings sites.

Here’s how it works.

When a patron leaves your establishment, the system will automatically send a message asking for a rating of their recent visit.

If the customer leaves a good rating, then you can follow up with a thank you and links to your pages on the online ratings sites.

Or, if the customer leaves a poor rating, you can automatically follow up with an apology message and an incentive to get them to come back and give you a second chance.

Over time, your online ratings should begin to increase as you mitigate many unhappy customers from leaving a poor online review.

With the power of online ratings sites, this is a very valuable campaign. In addition, it is all automated for you.

8. Save Customers At-Risk of Churning

Customer attrition will happen in every business. That is the nature of the business.

However, what if you had a way to identify those customers who are at risk of churning, or have fully churned?

With Bloom, you can. Using unique machine learning algorithms, the system will automatically detect customers who are at risk of churning.

Then, it will send an automated message to that customer with an incentive to return. The goal is for them to re-establish their habit of visiting your location.

Completely automated, businesses are seeing up to 38+% of their churning customer return.

Imagine not only being able to identify churning customers, but get 38% of them to return!

This will give a huge boost to your bottom line and is a very powerful marketing campaign.

Discover Bloom Intelligence

Bloom Intelligence can do everything above for you. And that is just a short look into the power of WiFi marketing and customer analytics.

If you would like to see all of the benefits of offering free WiFi to customers, and the powerful tools that Bloom can give you to grow your business, give us a call at 727-877-8181, or click to schedule a free demo online.

In today’s competitive industry, this can be the tool to give you the valuable competitive advantage to keep your business top of mind.

Increase customer spend and loyalty, improve ratings, bring back churning customers, improve your restaurant reputation, and so much more.

That’s not just smart, that’s Bloom Intelligence.