With restaurants failing at astronomically high rates and retail locations closing by the hundreds, store owners need to use every weapon in their arsenals to boost sales and protect profits.
Many store owners, marketers and managers are waking up to the possibilities of Wi-Fi marketing. 
Sometimes known as social Wi-Fi, this tactic turns the free Wi-Fi connection you’re already offering customers into a tool that helps you build social media followers and email list subscriptions.
But basic Wi-Fi marketing alone won’t transform your revenue and profits. You need to combine new marketing capabilities with advanced analytics for your brick and mortar locations to thrive in the digital age.
The Basics Of Wi-Fi Marketing (And How It Helps)
With basic Wi-Fi marketing, you give your customers free Wi-Fi access in your locations. When they log onto your connection, they’re taken to a landing page where they’re encouraged to:
- Follow one of your social media profiles
- Share their email address with you
- Discover a coupon they can use on a future visit
This gives you a way to stay connected with these customers. You can also use this basic contact information to send coupons and automate loyalty campaigns.
These basic Wi-Fi marketing tactics add a handful of digital marketing capabilities on top of the traditional tactics you’ve used to motivate customer loyalty and drive foot traffic into your locations. Considering that these capabilities are essentially included in the cost of your monthly Wi-Fi router cost, they add value without risk.
Power Profits By Combining Wi-Fi Marketing With Analytics
However, if all you’re doing with your newfound Wi-Fi marketing capabilities is automating loyalty 
campaigns and growing email lists and social followers, you’re leaving a lot of uncaptured value on the table. To realize powerful gains for your locations, you need to amplify your marketing with Wi-Fi analytics.
With Wi-Fi analytics, you can capture information about your store performance and customer behavior even if customers never log in to your Wi-Fi connection. By capturing key data such as hourly foot traffic and average customer dwell times, you gain a high-level view of the performance of your locations.
You can then combine these and other data to determine things like average customer lifetime value and the lifetime value of individual customers.
The data you collect on both the customers who log into your connection and those who simply enter your location with a Wi-Fi-enabled device gives you tremendous visibility into the health of your stores and the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. You can also divide your customers into various targets and segments.
With this information, you can make strategic decisions about:
- How much to invest in future marketing campaigns
- What marketing campaigns will yield the highest ROI
- Staffing plans by hour, day, week and even time of year
This helps you cut the waste out of your operations, and keeps your focus on attracting and retaining the kinds of customers who keep your P&L statements in the black.
Your Profits Start With Comprehensive Wi-Fi Analytics
While most Wi-Fi analytics solutions can capture data on customers who don’t log into your connection, not all do, or at least they don’t make it easy for you to access this data.
For you to really turn your stores into analytics-driven locations, you need to make it simple to access and learn from your data. You’ll want your Wi-Fi solution to connect to a robust platform with an intuitive dashboard that puts your key data front and center.
You’ll also want to make sure your Wi-Fi solution captures and calculates performance data on a wide-range of customer behaviors including:
- Customer churn rates
- Lifetime customer value
- Hourly, daily, weekly and monthly footfall
- Customer dwell times
Some solutions are even developing ways to connect POS data to traffic data. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to truly automate personalized marketing campaigns for every segment of your customer base.
Stores all over are beginning to fight back against their competitors. With a potent Wi-Fi marketing and analytics platform as your foundation, you can gain a competitive edge that turns your locations into profit-making machines.
Sometimes known as social Wi-Fi, this tactic turns the free Wi-Fi connection you’re already offering customers into a tool that helps you build social media followers and email list subscriptions. 
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