The Bloom Intelligence Restaurant Marketing & Customer Intelligence Blog

Your Source for Restaurant Marketing Best Practices

Good business intelligence is a hot subject in every market sector of business, but it's really only as good as the data you have and understanding what it means. If you have any experience with big data, you already know there's such a thing as both good and bad data.  It's also important to understand what data is actionable and how to use it.

intelligent wifiIn the case of having "bad information", you may have considerable data available, but just don't have a good way to make sense of it.  So, it's not really "bad" per se, it's just that it doesn't make sense the way it's received.  Some of it might become quickly outdated if not gathered in real-time.  Also, just having a lot of information does little to improve your business, unless it's actionable and be interpreted to predict trends.

This is where having a great dashboard in addition to Wi-Fi technology can play a big part in improving visibility into raw data, including real-time location analytics. You can capture information in real-time basis, compare to history, project toward the future and discover some surprising customer insights. Not all wifi solutions are created with a powerful dashboard to sort, and analyze customer churn rates or identify at-risk customers.

Here's more about managed Wi-Fi and automated marketing tools to analyze your business.

Using a Captive Portal System

Wi-Fi technology has become far more intelligent and now provides data and location analytics that is detailed for immediate use. Perhaps you've collected basic data on customers from your POS systems. This generally skims the surface to provide a customer's name, what they bought, and if they returned anything.

You can't learn much from this other than maybe a few buying habits. With a captive portal system, you capture a lot more about a customer, including how often they visit, times of the day, times of the week that are favored, how often they stay, whether they stopped coming. When they log in to your Wi-Fi on their smartphone or other connected device, you can correlate their email to their activity and track what they do when in your store.

Now you can see where customers go throughout your store, what they buy, and what they don't buy. 

Much of this consumer behavior and location analytic information is impossible to determine from any other source.

Connecting the Wi-Fi Data With a Loyalty Program

If you already have a loyalty program going in your business, do you really have enough data to make this work well for your most loyal customers? How do you really know what your loyal customers want?

Just taking second-guesses leaves open a data gap that could become an extreme risk. It's possible to miss something only your customers see, hence leading them to move on to a competitor.

Taking data from a captive portal and integrating it with your loyalty program is one of the best business practices you can make. Adding information from consumer log in to your Wi-Fi to your loyalty program is an incredible way to target your real customers.   Once you have more thorough data in your loyalty program, you'll know exactly how to go about creating targeted offers your customers will open and appreciate.

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Giving Access to Customers to Write Online Reviews

To extend your loyalty program, you can provide the things they want in exchange for them writing online reviews about your business. When you give them access to your mobile loyalty program, they can click on links taking them to online review sites.

They can do this on any mobile device at any time, giving them convenience to write a review without having to do it at home. Plus, you can give them links to specific social media sites where they can promote your business to gain rewards points.

Using the Data for Automated Marketing

Once you have access to customer mobile devices, you can continue to mine for data and use it to send automated marketing content.

What's important is to make your marketing content look personal, despite being automated. Through automation, you'll be able to choose whether you want to send scheduled or triggered offers to your customers. Pre-configured marketing content like this saves your management team and your marketing directors considerable time having to send messages manually.

Reading analytics you receive from your Wi-Fi data, you'll know a lot more details about your customers, like when the best time is to send content. Automation lets you set the perfect time to send content or offers. In some cases, this can mean triggered offers based on what customers do when they visit you in person.

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