You may be asking, “Why is guest WiFi a marketing channel now?”
So here are the 3 reasons why guest WiFi can be a WiFi marketing channel:
- Increased exposure: More people than ever before are looking for in-store guest WiFi today and they are likely to spend more time in such venues. For example, 38% of the hotel guests say having no Wi-Fi is a deal-breaker and they will book elsewhere (courtesy: Hotel Chatter).
- Higher engagement: The internet is becoming the most intimate channel to interact with your customers through your captive portal.
- Doesn’t Trigger Sales Resistance: Most physical promotions at venue-based businesses trigger a customer’s resistance to sales attempts. However, since you are giving away internet-over-WiFi as a service, your customers will not exhibit this instinctive sales resistance to guest WiFi promotions.
So here are 5 specific campaigns that can be executed:
Reminder Campaign: Access to WiFi is one of the top services that consumers want at their store venue (courtesy: Accenture). Whether you are a restaurant, hotel, stadium or a theme park, you know how frustrating it is for your customers to keep waiting in line to place their order. These customers are unaware that they can also purchase online while at the venue. In-store Guest WiFi does this precisely well. It helps you communicate with customers who are yet to order. A reminder campaign sends a subtle communication reminding customers about their first order. These campaigns have clear metrics to measure such as the time taken to place their first order. This helps customers place orders online, using the guest WiFi rather than waiting in line.
Upsell/Cross-sell Campaign: Upselling and cross-selling can be a game changer for any business. Upselling at the point of sales counter could trigger reflexive resistance in the customer. To avoid this resistance, the upsell and cross-sell campaigns can be executed over the guest WiFi network. Every customer who just left the POS and is connected to guest WiFi can be notified of an offer price that is only available for on-premise customers. The metric for measuring the performance of this campaign is in terms of how much additional revenue is generated per dollar of the initial order.
Suggestion Campaign: Many a time the customer experience is dependent on the suggestions to be given to the customers at various points in their journey. These could be suggestions about where customers should be at a certain time, how to go to a specific place, whom to talk to etc. All of these suggestions can be pushed in a non-intrusive manner to the customers over the guest WiFi channel. The metric for measuring the performance of these campaigns is the customer experience index captured as part of the feedback.
Referral Campaign: As a marketer, you would know that when customers are enjoying your service, you are likely to get references for more business. Knowing when to ask for references and asking for those in the right way are two critical factors that determine the rate of success of referral campaigns. At times you might offer some goodies in return for referrals. Guest WiFi becomes the instrumental channel to push campaigns requesting referrals, specifically through social channels. These campaigns could be auto-triggered or manually triggered by the manager based on their assessment of customers’ happiness index at any point. The metric for the success of this campaign is to look for the average number of referrals received per customer or per day.
Feedback Campaign: Feedback is the most critical aspect of any venue-driven service-based business. Feedback form needs to cover just enough details so that the customer doesn’t find it tiring to fill-up and at the same time, you have captured the key parameters. Feedback forms are seldom filled up with due consciousness by the customers unless they are unhappy. To address the lack of customer response over feedback forms, the guest WiFi-based feedback campaign becomes very important for the business. With customers connected over the guest WiFi, they can be presented intermittent feedback questions, with perhaps just one quick question, so that customers find it easy and quick to give feedback. The key metric of performance for the feedback campaign is the number of qualified feedbacks obtained per customer.
Is it difficult for marketing teams to run campaigns over guest WiFi?
This is possibly the most practical question of all, isn’t it? It has to be easy enough so that marketers can use guest WiFi to configure and run campaigns centrally. You should be assured that the technology will be easy to use and that is only possible if it’s designed and developed by the people with the marketer’s perspective. So-called superior technologies may be counterproductive because you might need a special skillset to use it. The only question that should matter to you when it comes to marketing over guest WiFi or any other channel is, “What is the performance of the campaigns?” Did you get the answers to your questions on marketing over guest WiFi? If you have specific questions that are not covered here please write to us today.
