Restaurant Marketing & Customer Experience Blog

How Social Wi-Fi Can Accelerate E-Mail Marketing

Written by Robin Johnston | Sep 27, 2016 2:37:00 PM

One of the most effective digital marketing tools remains e-mail marketing. Unlike other methods, e-mail marketing allows companies to contact people who have an interest in their product or service directly, and in a place that they are actively engaged. Website ads and social media posts are often glossed over, whereas an e-mail grabs a user's attention. 

The key to a successful e-mail marketing campaign is collecting as many customer addresses as possible, along with as much information about them as you can get. The more addresses you have, the more customers you will bring back into your business. And if you have detailed information about who you are sending the e-mails out to, you can better tailor your messages to fit your audience. 

If your business has a physical location - such as a restaurant, coffee shop or gym - then a great way to gather both e-mail addresses and customer information is by providing them with Wi-Fi. By providing your customers with a free Wi-Fi hotspot you accomplish two things. 

  1. You give your customers another incentive to come into your location, and a reason to stay there. For example, by offering free Wi-Fi for your customers, they will be able to get more work done while in your coffee shop or watch a movie while at your gym, thereby making it more likely that they will choose to visit and spend time in your location.
  2. You control the landing page that pops up when they connect to your network, and can use this page to gather their e-mail addresses. 

Customers will typically be more than happy to exchange an e-mail address in return for a free Internet connection. Even if your customers don't actually connect to your Wi-Fi, you can capture plenty of useful information about their behavior - such as when they typically visit, and how long they stay.

If you want to start generating return customers, you need a way to reach them after they leave. By using a Wi-Fi connection to draw them in, you can get contact information from your customers, and use it to bring them back for different promotions. Click "Wi-Fi Analytics" under the "Wi-Fi Marketing" link at the top of the page to see some of the other customer questions you can answer using the Bloom Intelligence platform.