As a restaurant or café owner, you have definitely seen many of your customers taking pictures of themselves and their delicious meals; many of which potentially will land on social media platforms like Instagram, giving you an opportunity for free advertising. Using your store’s guest Wifi for free, your customers might become more interested into doing so, and in this way, your customers will do some of your marketing for you.

So, you shouldn’t think of your free Wifi infrastructure as an unnecessary expense that is only beneficial for your customers. But think of it as a service that can actually improve your customer satisfaction and therefore, your sales and profit.

If your customers log into your Wifi as they are in your store, your device will collect information that can be so valuable, if analyzed and used strategically. So let’s discuss the points where offering free Wifi can be beneficial to your business.

Customer Contact List

Let’s assume you have free Wifi at your restaurant. Instead of signing into your Wifi device with a single username and password, your customers can sign in with their phone number, email address, or even Facebook or Instagram profile, giving you their contact information that can be put on your customers’ database.

Putting a step further, by providing online ordering and payment service on your Wifi portal, you can also collect data on each of your customers’ behaviors such as which food they have ordered and amount of time and money they have spent on each visit.

Based on such detailed data and information, you can build various customer segments and personas, for whom you can design highly focused marketing and promotion campaigns in future.

Analytics & Marketing

The data you are gathering from your free Wifi service can generate useful information about your customer base, such as:

• First-time customers;
• Repeating customers;
• Customer repeat rates;
• Average table turnover rate;
• Customers’ age and gender distribution;
• Peak hours and days.

Analyzing the data and having the option to get in touch with your customers on their device, you can plan and perform more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns. You may want to send a thank you message to your customers after their visit, together with a link to your social media accounts or review websites where they can leave a comment or write a review. Or, you may decide to send special coupons or promotions for the customers who haven’t returned in a month. You can also inform a specific segment of your customers, based on their age and gender, of a special discount during a football match and letting them know they can watch the whole game at your café or restaurant with their friends.

This kind of marketing has a valuable feature that is worth mentioning here. By checking the information on customers who have visited during a specific campaign (for example, coupons sent out to a group of customers during a holiday), you can easily monitor the outcome and effectiveness of your campaigns and optimize your future plans accordingly.

Your Online Presence

As your customers get into your Wifi landing page, you can notify them to follow your social media accounts for future promotions and coupons or even redirect them to your page on restaurant review websites and ask them to rate their experience or leave a comment. Implementing such ways, you can grow your online presence and eventually attract new customers to your store through digital marketing.

Foot Traffic & Staffing

Attracting your customers to use your free Wifi while they are in your restaurant can also be a means for you to extract detailed data on the number of customers you have and average time they spend in your store, along with their turnover rate. Monitoring and analyzing this data, you, as the business owners, can understand the peak hours of your business and consequently optimize your staffing schedule.

On the one hand, you can create a better and more satisfying experience for your customers during peak hours. They won’t have to wait in long lines or try hard to get the attention of your overwhelmed staff. On the other hand, you can save money hiring less employees during low traffic hours.

Various decisions you can make or the marketing ideas you can perform as a result of offering free Wifi service to your customers can go on and on. However, in order to do this efficiently, you first need to prepare a robust infrastructure that can extract the valuable data and perform intelligent analysis on it.

So, if you think having a free Wifi service in your store can help you with your business, please contact us. We, at Hotwifi, are ready to provide you with the best solution that matches the specific requirements of your business and helps you in the way towards having a prosperous business.