WiFi Marketing: 3 Powerful Ways It Can Grow Your Business

Imagine you’ve recently opened a newly-minted restaurant that you’ve dubbed the Gingerman Eatery. Since it just launched, awareness among your desired customer base is nearly non-existent, yet, you’re confident you can deliver a uniquely-gratifying, share-worthy experience that customers will rave about to their network of personal connections. 

A group of friends have just walked into your establishment and like any smart restaurant owner, you’ve recently implemented a WiFi marketing solution in-store. After wrapping up the work week, this group is looking to unwind over dinner and drinks, like most young professionals. While waiting for their orders to arrive, they pull out their phones to nab some free internet.

Upon connecting to the guest WiFi network, they immediately encounter a branded landing page that prompts them to take two required actions to successfully complete the WiFi authentication process: one, they must choose whether to receive communications from you and two, they must login via Facebook. You now have five new customers added to your customer database who have provided their contact preferences for future communications from you. What’s more, by using social WiFi, each customer ‘checks-in’ at your venue, sharing their whereabouts to their respective Facebook communities. Now hundreds of like-minded followers are aware of your restaurant’s existence and the customers who have shared their location have provided an unspoken recommendation of your brand. 

The Gingerman Eatery 2, Restaurant sans WiFi Marketing 0.

Their experience with the branded landing page doesn’t end there. You leverage this prime real estate to communicate current promotions (e.g. happy hour cocktails, buck-a-chuck oysters, ½ off sangria pitchers, foods on special, etc..) which prove powerful; the limited-time nature of the promotions encourages customers to spend more time and money. Your WiFi efforts have increased average order amount per guest by nearly +30%, ultimately increasing sales.

The Gingerman Eatery 3, Restaurant sans WiFi Marketing 0.

The bills have been paid and your customers have left. But you haven’t seen (or heard) the last of them! Since the opt-in process, you’ve gained the necessary permissions to send automated SMS messages and emails to first-time customers in order to convert them into returning customers. “Hey! We’ve missed you since your last visit. Come by this week and we’ll give you 10% off your entire order”, the text reads. Incentivised by the compelling offer, your customers happily oblige, returning for a repeat experience. Congratulations – your automated messages have cultivated a relationship with your customers and planted the seeds of loyalty. 

The Gingerman Eatery 4, Restaurant sans WiFi Marketing 0.

Back at your office, you log into your analytics dashboard. Laid out before you is a treasure trove of data and actionable insights about your customers that feed into location based campaigns – automated, real-time, tailored engagement with consumers based on their behaviour. You decide to implement a proximity-triggered campaign for returning customers. After logging back into the WiFi, returning customers will be shown WiFi Stories (proprietary to the Stampede platform) – recent news, limited-time offers and upcoming events – that are delivered to the customer in an approach similar to Facebook or Instagram stories. Not only has maximum impressions been achieved, but sales have increased by the sense of urgency encapsulated in the WiFi Stories.  

The Gingerman Eatery 5, Restaurant sans WiFi Marketing 0.

This is WiFi marketing in action. 

How does WiFi Marketing help grow Retail & Hospitality businesses?

As we vividly illustrated in the example above, WiFi marketing is about bridging the physical and digital divide of your business, enabling a richer, data-driven in-store customer experience.   Whether it’s a coffee shop, bar, pub, fast food joint, retail store or even a recently debuted hotel, businesses can grow through a robust customer engagement platform synonymous with WiFi Marketing. 

Here are three powerful ways WiFi Marketing can help grow businesses, especially those in the retail and hospitality industries:

1. It gives you a clearer picture of how customers interact with your business – so you can communicate with them better. 

While your WiFi Marketing platform is churning out automated campaigns, it’s also working to passively gather customer data. This data is comprised of behavioural data and demographic data. Behavioural data tracks how customers behave in store and include metrics like dwell time (how long they stay in-store), identification of new versus returning visitors, return frequency and more. What’s more, business owners have the ability to marry that behavioural data together with demographic data that’s living and breathing on social media. By signing into social WiFi, business owners can identify the age, gender breakdown and interests of opted-in visitors. All of this data is converted into customer insights that help inform future automated campaigns and overall marketing strategy.  The analytics doesn’t stop there. With our Stampede platform, you can measure campaign effectiveness and redemption to determine post-campaign ROI.

2. It allows you to interact with your customers – even when they are miles away from your venue. 

As we’ve demonstrated, WiFi Marketing bridges the gap between your customers’ digital and physical profiles by asking they opt-in to receive direct communications from you. Through the vehicles of email marketing, SMS messaging and social media marketing, business owners have a lifetime opportunity to engage with their customers. There’s a litany of levers you can pull within the Stampede platform: set simple rules to automate the sending of email or SMS messages; drive push messages and coupons based on physical movement and/or demographics in real-time; message ‘at-risk’ customers based on days since visit; help create user-generated content by compelling customers to share stories about the venue on their social handles – all of these activities are part and parcel of an automated real-time, tailored engagement with your customers. 

3. Finally, it generates top-of-mind awareness, helping to raise the profile of your brand to ultimately build brand equity

Don’t forget that WiFi Marketing is not just an automated marketing tool – it’s also doubles as a brand experience tool as well. The texts, emails, and engagements on social media are all designed to mimic how people interact with their friends and family today. Businesses at the end of the day are brands – and brands must be choosy about how they communicate with their customers if they want to elevate the brand experience. WiFi Marketing provides brands a golden opportunity that other marketing tactics, both digital and traditional, simply fail to provide – the art of conversation. By creating a one-on-one dialogue with your customer (versus treating them as passive recipients of hard sell messages), you’ll forge a stronger connection with your customers and consequently, increase positive brand perception that will pay off in the years to come.