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Free Wi-Fi: So Much More Than A Customer Service
Free Wi-Fi: So Much More Than A Customer Service
When it comes right down to it, there are only three ways to increase same-store revenues: get more customers, get existing customers to return more often, or get them to spend more on each visit either by selling them more product or by charging more for what they are already buying. Anything else is just a variation on one of those basic themes.
Sales promotion has long been used to drive these sorts of customer behaviors. Until recently, however, a challenge has been that it is often hard to target promotions to specific customers in order to maximize response and minimize waste. Promoting blindly can be costly. A coupon in the newspaper or dropped to a mail route may reach new prospects, but also risks discounting existing customers who would have been happy to pay full fare. These aren’t the results that stores want or need.
But what if you had the ability to identify and segment customers based on traits such as how often they visit your location, how long they stay, or how much they spend while they’re there? And what if you could target specific customers and trigger promotions automatically based on such behaviors? Three recent advances have made this easy for single- and multi-location stores alike, and explain the current surge in location-based customer analytics and marketing.
First, it has become much easier to connect with customers and capture identifying information that can be used for such targeting. Where they previously may
have been hesitant to share much about themselves, customers are increasingly willing to provide basic personal information such as their name and e-mail address in exchange for something they value. For many customers, free WiFi access does just the trick.
Not that they need much of an incentive. A recent report from Deloitte shows that nearly two-thirds of all US consumers prefer WiFi to cellular access. Among them, Millennials – those currently between 19 and 35 years of age – are the most likely to participate. Their high mobile device usage and need to keep data costs as low as possible combine to provide a powerful motivation to seek out WiFi access. Millennials make decisions daily based on WiFi. They expect it to be available, they expect it to fast, and they expect it to be free.
Providing free WiFi to customers is not exactly a new tactic. International coffee giant Starbucks has offered free unlimited WiFi to customers since 2010. McDonald’s also offers free WiFi across its US store network. Research has shown that 77% of consumers spend more time in Wi-Fi-equipped establishments. More to the point, 63% spend more money in those locations. With results like this, it’s no wonder that industry leaders have caught on.
Sophisticated WiFi technology is now available at a price point that makes it accessible to even the smallest location.
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This makes it quick and easy to connect with customers and capture visit and dwell time data automatically, without adding new responsibilities for already-burdened front-line staff. It is also much easier than ever before to get meaningful and actionable information out of customer data. Single-location businesses now have access to big data analytics that were previously available only to large multi-location chains. By integrating customer point-of-sales data with data collected from in-store WiFi networks, they are able to segment customers and understand their behavior in ways that simply were not possible only a few years ago.
Having so much useful data is revolutionary for most small operators. But data on its own is useless. The real payoff comes through using those data to drive more profitable customer behavior. That’s where the third and final technical advance comes into play. Modern marketing automation allows owners and managers to put their marketing on autopilot, letting them reach into deep stores of automatically-collected customer data and develop meaningful customer promotions that trigger desired behaviors and increase profitability. This makes it possible to do some pretty remarkable customer-focused marketing. Restaurants can increase revenue per available seat hour by identifying and triggering action from the customers most likely to be responsive to an offer to visit during slow times. They can also easily identify their best customers. According to Inc. Magazine, 100 fiercely loyal buyers can
drive more word of mouth traffic than a $25,000 advertising campaign.
SUBWAY knows firsthand the power of using WiFi to capture customer data, analyze it, and develop effective sales promotion. Their recent four-month, 54-store test had several objectives: Increase customer retention, particularly amongst millennials; increase their real-time customer knowledge; better customize the in-store mobile experience; and create a more consistent public WiFi experience across their store network.
The results were conclusive. They received 16,000 unique opt-ins and found that, on average, these opt-in customers returned nearly twice as often as other customers. Coupon redemption topped a whopping 17%, comparing most favorably against the 1-3% industry average for traditional direct mail. Finally, 6% of SUBWAY’s at-risk customers redeemed their offer within 12 hours of receiving it. This showed that data-driven promotion was not only invaluable for reengaging customers whose purchase behavior was waning, but it could be used as an effective way to stimulate immediate store traffic.
In delivering results such as these, the marriage between WiFi, big data analytics, and marketing automation is a match made in heaven. Now that such capabilities are within the reach of the average location, savvy marketers are taking them to the street, and to the bank.
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