How to Connect With Customers Using Guest WiFi

Posted at 11 Sep 2023 - 6 min read

Guest WiFi is becoming essential for businesses to connect with their customers. Understanding consumers is becoming more and more visible when enabling easy, secure, and fast WiFi for your customers. Small, medium, and large business owners can take advantage of Guest WiFi to launch digital strategies and connected experiences for customers.

Information about consumers is no longer available only to large retailers and larger companies. It costs zero marketing budget to know about your customers and their actions in your venue, including occupancy monitoring. Moreover, using an effective guest engagement platform, you can connect and engage with them using context-aware location-based marketing and WiFi location analytics and engagement tools.

More and more small businesses are incorporating Guest WiFi into their business strategy to gain customer data and connect with the consumer using WiFi & Location Analytics.

IPERA Starling Guest Experience platform provides splash portals customized to your brand. It goes beyond connectivity and provides insights as well as customer engagement tools for analytics for physical spaces. This platform is a cloud-based software integrated with your existing WiFi hardware.

Guest WiFi & Customer Engagement platform offers 3 key benefits to business owners.

1. Enhanced Venue Experience:

The customer needs a secure, fast, and easy login to the splash portal. Your splash portal must be sleek in design and reflect your brand image. Customers will have multiple login options to use WiFi, including social network login, email, mobile number, and more. As they connect to your WiFi, you build your customer list to use for your engagement strategies, including WiFi & Location Analytics. Moreover, using the Guest Engagement platform, you have the opportunity to promote your services on the splash portal.

2. Customer Data, Insights and Analytics:

The Guest Engagement platform enables retailers and businesses to deploy Presence Analytics and Social Analytics to track historical and real-time visitor presence, occupancy monitoring, dwell time, as well as sentiment from Twitter feeds. Leveraging this data, retailers can strategically design their store layout and offerings and respond rapidly to what customers enjoy about their shopping experience using WiFi location analytics.

3. Customer Engagement:

You know who your customers are, when, and how often they visit your venue. You may use the data within your CRM; alternatively, there are unlimited opportunities to use it to engage with them through built-in engagement tools, including proximity marketing based on WiFi & Location Analytics – delivering targeted messages based on your customer’s behavior in the venue. You have targeted offers based on demographics, frequency of visits, and preferences.

Proximity marketing – delivering targeted messages based on your customer’s behavior in the venue. You have targeted offers based on demographics, frequency of visits, and preferences.
Campaigns – Engaging with your customers who have not visited through SMS, e-mail, or even mobile app push notifications.
Social Marketing – by enabling social login options on your splash portal, your guests can post a message on their social network profile, which helps to increase social visibility for your brand. In addition, you reach out to their friends on the social networks.

Who needs it?

Any venue that needs to engage with its customers benefits from WiFi marketing tools, including shopping malls, hotels, restaurants & cafes, retail stores, airports, and smart cities.

IPERA Starling Guest Experience platform is a cloud-based software. It takes 15 minutes to set up and start seeing benefits.

All You Need to Know About Wi-Fi Marketing

Posted at 19 Sep 2019 - 3 min read

Finding new customers for your business may be a challenge. A powerful Wi-Fi Marketing tool can help to engage better with your existing customers, which benefits your business without spending large sum of marketing budget. Guest Wi-Fi plays a great role for service industries to deliver context-aware and location based messages

WiFi marketing is a term used for delivering your marketing messages to customers that connected to Free Guest Wi-Fi in a business venue or smart city concept.

It is an innovative concept that is being adapted for businesses that needs to provide free and good quality guest wi-fi service

How it works?

While your customers login using Free Guest Wi-Fi, in return you build a customer database with their demographics, social likes and other preferences.

You deliver your context-aware marketing messages in simple ways;

Proximity marketing – delivering targeted messages based on your customers behavior, demographics, frequency of visit and preferences.

Social Marketing – by enabling social login options on your splash portal, your guests are given an option to post a message on their social network profile which helps to increase social visibility for your brand.

Campaigns – Engaging with your customers that have not visited

Who needs it?

Any venue that needs to engage with their customers get benefits from IPERA Starling Wi-Fi Marketing tools including shopping malls, hotels, restaurants & cafes, retail stores, airports and smart cities

Finding ROI Through WiFi Investment

Posted at 19 Sep 2018 - 5 min read

A practical Enterprise Guest WiFi Analytics and Marketing tool empowers marketers to communicate with their customers through the analysis of their visiting patterns, behaviors, demographics, and social preferences.

At IPERA, we receive frequent inquiries about calculating the return on investment (ROI). Our answer typically varies as it depends on the industry in which a business operates. Every business has a unique perspective on the value of a customer. For example, a hotel operator prioritizes building a direct relationship and engagement with guests to increase loyalty, while a health clinic focuses on communicating vital information to visitors, enhancing the clinic experience, and collecting feedback through integrated survey tools.

The role of a marketer has evolved from traditional marketing to digital marketing, and they now need to justify investments with measurable returns when choosing a WiFi marketing platform. The platform helps them assess their investment’s actual value by measuring results such as increased footfall, enhanced customer loyalty, growth of the CRM database, and increased engagement with customers. The Guest WiFi marketing platform serves as an effective tool for marketers to achieve their goals.

Regardless of which business you operate, three key elements contribute to the value that can be generated from your existing Guest WiFi;

Enrolling to Customer Database when connecting to Venue Guest WiFi
Increasing Likes / Check-ins on Social Media
Online Reviews

1. Enrolling in Customer Database when connecting to Venue Guest WiFi

Any new record in your CRM database is a potential customer for the business. How do you value any new potential customer for your CRM?

2. Increasing Likes / Check-ins on Social Media

Social media has a significant impact on promoting businesses through word-of-mouth advertising. Each new like or follow on social media represents a potential new customer for the business. IPERA’s Starling Social WiFi App enhances a business’s visibility by automating check-ins, likes, or follows on social networks. This helps business owners expand their reach by connecting with their friends and their friends’ friends on social media.

3. Feedback & Online Reviews

A positive online review is a valuable form of word-of-mouth advertising that costs nothing. Online review channels can attract new customers to a variety of service industries, including retail, malls, hotels, theme parks, and even public services. Preventing negative reviews and resolving poor service while the customer is still at the venue not only improves the services provided but also avoids negative feedback.

The Starling Guest Experience and Analytics App assist business owners, such as restaurants, theme parks, malls, and hotels, in enhancing engagement, maximizing their investment, and increasing overall profits.

Guest WiFi ROI Value Calculator

A simple calculation is explained below based on customer feedback in retail, malls, restaurants, theme parks and hotel industries.

Monthly new footfall assumed for a medium size venue: 20,000 visitors

Conversion to WiFi Enrolled Customer: 20% of 20,000 visitors = 4,000 customers

Social Logins: 80% of WiFi Connected Customers = 3,200 Social Followers

Online Reviews: 5% of total visitors = 1,000

The estimated value for each parameter (CRM Record, Social Follower, Reviewer) is assumed at $5 at average.

Total estimated monthly revenue is: 4,000 * $5 + 3,200* $5 + 1,000 * $5 = $41,000

How to Generate Benefit From Your Existing Guest WiFi

Posted at 19 Sep 2018 - 7 min read

This article offers insights on how to effectively utilize free Guest WiFi to improve guest experience, communicate with them, and increase the number of repeat customers, all of which directly impact your business without any marketing costs. Have you ever considered that marketing doesn’t always require spending millions of dollars to reach your target audience? Whether you are a hotelier, restaurant owner, or hospital manager, customer satisfaction alone is not enough.

Free WiFi comes with an investment. Customers constantly demand easy, secure, and fast Guest WiFi without filling out complex login forms.

The majority of the service industries, including smart cities, shopping malls, hotels, airports, event venues, retail stores, restaurants & cafes, face the dilemma of providing free Guest WiFi for the sake of customer satisfaction only with no clear Return on Investment (ROI).

It is now possible to expect return on investment (ROI) from your existing Guest WiFi infrastructure using IPERA Starling Guest WiFi Engagement platform. You can provide a better customer venue experience and engage with them through social networks as well as other communication channels. While they enjoy free WiFi, you get to know more about your visitors, their behavior in your venue, their preferences, and the frequency of their visits.

This is provided through four simple steps within the Starling platform; Access > Analyze > Engage > Monetize

Guest WiFi Onboarding (Access)

Unlike traditional, complicated login pages, you can offer a beautifully designed and fully customized splash portal that provides a simple two-step login process using various login options such as social login, self-registration, click-through, and more. This enables you to build a customer database that includes demographic information, Facebook likes, Twitter followers, and other preferences, such as the device and browser they use.

Insights & Analytics (Analyze)

Through BlueSpace’s built-in dashboards, you get to know more about your customers and their action in the venue. You know where they spend their time most, what they like most on social networks, visit frequency, dwell time, new customers vs. repeat customers

Guest Engaging (Engage)

There are several Engaging Apps that you can use to engage with your customers in the venue. Simply generate splash ads and deliver them through the splash portal. You can also build marketing messages that are given based on guest demographics and interaction in your venue through a proximity marketing app.

In addition, you spread word of mouth through social networks. While your customers connect to the Guest WiFi, you encourage them to post their presence on social media, which gives you the opportunity to access their friends.

WiFi Marketing & Campaigns (Monetize)

By leveraging IPERA Starling WiFi Marketing, you gain access to tools for delivering personalized customer engagement strategies, allowing you to tailor your marketing messages to specific customers, such as top customers or those who haven’t visited your venue in a particular time frame. This results in an increase in customer visits, which has a direct impact on your revenue.

The Starling platform provides you with tools to engage with your clients and execute context-sensitive marketing campaigns without investing in large marketing budgets. Additionally, it is a cloud-based platform that does not require any IT investments and can be set up in just 15 minutes.