In the highly competitive and fast changing food service industry, customer lifetime value (CLV) is of immense importance to the bottom line. Obviously, losing high CLV customers and maintaining low CLV customers at their current level of spending would be bad for business. Understanding this makes it possible for you to adjust your approach to both groups by finding new ways to hold on to more profitable customers, while maybe also turning those low CLV customers into big spenders.

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.

Consumers visiting your Master planned community may or may not visit your Welcome Center,   When they go directly to the models, you may not know, unless their unique signature or MAC address of their cell phone gives them away.  Monitoring these visits, through your captive Wi-Fi portal can give some tremendous insight into consumer behavior. But just having that data may not be enough.  One of the biggest challenges you may encounter when gathering customer data is attempting to make sense of it all. If you're still using other methods through a POS to capture basic customer data, much of the information isn't very thorough, or it's difficult to interpret.

If you operate an entertainment center (perhaps a bowling alley), you likely provide free Wi-Fi services to all your customers to stay competitive and offer convenience. However, did you know you can use the Wi-Fi you're offering as a tool to gather data on your customers?

Whether you're the restaurant owner or a professional marketer coming up with new ways to bring new customers and repeat customers into your restaurant chain represents an ongoing challenge. It's easy to run out of new marketing ideas, and it's not always easy to filter through new technology to find the tools that can help make your marketing campaigns more efficient. There are he only so many times you can push the same five or six promotion types before the novelty wears off for your customers, and sending out offers that are not personalized or timely may lead to reduced open rates.  The most dangerous thing for a marketer is relying on old ways of doing things and stagnating. 

Operating a retail business can sometimes feel like leading an army during wartime. You pass long periods of relatively little activity and your troops face intense boredom. Suddenly, a peak holiday weekend hits and the line is out the door and around the block. Madness ensues, and the boredom is broken in the worst way.

How you tried to find a metrics platform predicting what your foot traffic is in your brick-and-mortar store?  Chances are, you haven't found a good one, or at least one predicting foot traffic days ahead.

If your location based marketing campaign doesn't incorporate location analytics through wi-fi access points, you are missing a huge opportunity to improve the return on investment of your marketing dollars.  As any brick and mortar establishment marketer knows, it's all about the traffic.  So what brings your customers in, what drives them to stay, and how you can get them to come back are powerful marketing nuggets that a savvy marketer wants to mine from their wifi location analytics. 

Have you purchased an email or other marketing distribution list that did not produce new customers? Have you paid someone to design, print and distribute a mailer that didn't increase sales? If so, you know just how precious marketing dollars are.  And, you don't want to make the same mistake again.

Knowing how and where to spend a marketing budget to maximize results is the key to any marketer's success. The same is true for managers who need to assess how to allocate their "resources" - i.e., their employees.  And when combined, knowing how to best coordinate your operations to take advantage of your marketing efforts, and vice-versa, is an art many businesses are still trying to perfect.