WiFi marketing: A web of customer data

Miniature supercomputers in your pocket are more popular now than ever before. According to Zippia, 85% of Americans own smartphones and use them every day. That’s around 294.15 million mobile device users who are generating 47% of the country’s web access on the go.

Offering WiFi service to your customers while they walk around your venue could be the golden ticket you’ve been looking for to connect the dots between capturing, nurturing and marketing your products or services.

Dive into what WiFi marketing is all about, and how you can turn a web of information into actionable insights.

Customers are seeking free WiFi opportunities

WiFi marketing is a simple exchange of information between a customer and a business. A customer offers a business simple information and in exchange, they get to browse the internet via a free WiFi network without using cellphone data.

When a customer signs into a free WiFi service, they will provide superficial information about themselves like their name and email, and accept the terms and conditions. This information allows the business to then send the customer targeted ads on social media, email or SMS messages — which the customer can opt-in or out of at any time.

After a customer taps into your WiFi access, you have full control over what comes next.

You can redirect them to your online website, present the latest promotion or show the newest features of your products. The goal is to create excitement around your products and services to a captivated audience.

The motivating factor for offering WiFi services is twofold: Customer data is more readily available, and you can create greater customer loyalty. Let’s explore how to utilize a WiFi marketing platform to get these results.

WiFi marketing does the work for you

Your customers are already online, scrolling, and generally using their phones while they shop. Offering free WiFi as a convenient way to access the internet without using their cellular  data is a huge bonus. As they scroll through the internet, your network collects  valuable customer data that can benefit your business’ marketing efforts.

Here are a few ways customer data collection through WiFi marketing can change your next retail marketing campaign for the better:

Detailed customer WiFi analytics

WiFi marketing is the perfect solution for brick-and-mortar  businesses to step into the digital realm. Every business knows that to succeed in today’s digital revolution, you need to know who your customers are. Understanding your customers can help you target them in a way that makes sense for their established needs and expectations.  Where older methods of understanding shopper opinions like focus groups and written surveys are still great ways to gain insight, online customer analytics collection is the faster, more accurate way to achieve substantial results.

Trust with your customers

Similarly, WiFi is a purely consented way of safely collecting information that doesn’t violate customers’ right to privacy or overstep customer expectations. Your next potential customer is expecting the personal data you collect to be safe and therefore your WiFi marketing software should be secured as well.

As your customers build their trust in your business and network, they’ll be more likely to share positive feedback online and to their network of people. Word of mouth and referrals   are cost-effective, helpful ways to gain customer loyalty. Customers are 71% more likely to buy from a business if they see positive online reviews and hear good feedback from peers, according to HubSpot. 

Developing an excellent customer experience is vital to succeeding.

Optimizing your retail space

Outside of developing a stellar online experience, you can also track trends to provide an incredible retail space. WiFi networking can not only collect data from online activity, but can  track foot traffic and hotspots around the store as well.

A 2019 Growing Science study on customer satisfaction found that the environment and general service were crucial  to customer satisfaction. As you gain more insight into your customers,  look at the common types of questions they may ask while shopping, what types of merchandise they may pair together, what might match their style or how they are most likely to navigate the store. From there, you can turn these insights into actions that will delight your customers.

Marketing automation

WiFi marketing insights include:

• Demographics
• Name
• Email addresses
• Phone numbers
• Zip codes
• Behavior

By leveraging these insights, you can develop marketing automation strategies that directly target your customer’s needs exactly as they’ve laid out for you. The automation can help you win customers back, find new customers, increase visit frequency, online ratings and more. Automation can offer your customers personalized experiences in and out of the store.

The key to attaining these benefits is understanding what data points to pay attention to, how to organize them and what to do next.

Understanding the analytics

All of the data in the world will not be able to support your business if you don’t know how to collect information, where to store it, how to organize it and what to do with it. With the right strategy, you can create incredible value for your customers through WiFi marketing.  Here are three things to keep in mind as you deploy your network:

1. Collect data from multiple sources

WiFi marketing makes collecting data easy because your customers walk right into your store, connect to your WiFi network and allow you to track their information. Along with collecting data from in-store customers, notice what types of social media your customers are using and where else they spend their time to get the most insights. Email marketing and SMS messaging can help you speak directly to your customers and even gain feedback through surveys.

2. Prioritize data

There is a wealth of information you can gain through customer data collection. Every customer engagement point is another data set added to a customer profile. However, every metric shouldn’t be at the top of your priority list.

The information you’re focused on should depend on your goals for the business. If you’re in the beginning stages, for example, you may just want to gather information about who your customers are such as demographics, purchasing habits, and social media preferences. As your business grows, you should focus on more behavioral trends, such as  which items are more popular at what time of year , how they prefer to communicate with your business, and  how long it takes to make a purchase.

3. Actionable insights

With  these data points prioritized and organized, you can glean what your next steps should be. You can make data-driven decisions for your marketing and operations teams with a clean data set and proficient analytics team. From foot traffic to social media retargeting ads, you can meet your customers exactly where they are with messaging they’ll resonate with when you choose a WiFi marketing campaign as part of your marketing strategy.

What creating value means with WiFi marketing

The power of customer profiles shines through with solutions like WiFi Engagement & Analytics from Telesystem. Each time visitors log into your WiFi, your network will begin to collect information and build a personal profile over our cloud-based customer data platform that you can use to make informed business decisions.

You can increase your marketing effectiveness, efficiency and customer experiences with WiFi Engagement & Analytics. Reach the customers you want, with the bandwidth, performance and insights you need. To get started, request a quote today.