How Wi-Fi Marketing Increases Loyalty, Sales and Insights in Customer Behaviour
Innovation. As marketers, it’s our playground to change the way we think and do business. It’s everywhere you look and never before have we experienced such phenomenal speed and scale of innovation. So what are the next big things, what are the next game changers entering the playground?
In our series “Breaking Through”, we take a closer look at innovations on the verge of transforming customer experience.
In our last blog we looked at the potential of Augmented Reality to transform digital marketing. This month we’ll turn the spotlight on Wi-Fi marketing and specifically on a Toronto start-up that has been a ground breaker in this space.
Turnstyle is pioneering the way that brands and marketers can connect with their customers in-store, leveraging powerful real-time proximity marketing to mobile devices. Their Wi-Fi marketing platform provides a new way to speak to consumers in a mobile-first world that increases loyalty, sales, and insights into customer behaviour.
In the 3 years since their founding, their platform has grown to over 25,000 venues in over 40 countries. They’re a founding member of the Future of Privacy Forum’s Mobile Location Analytics and an active member of the Location Based Marketing Association.
Turnstyle helps any brick-and-mortar business increase customer visit frequency and loyalty. The platform turns traditional Wi-Fi into ‘Way Better Wi-Fi’ by enhancing it with 3 main functionalities/features: Audience Analytics, Social WiFi, and Campaigns.
- Audience Analytics. You can detect the Wi-Fi enabled smartphones of anyone who walks by or enters the business in order to provide interesting analytical insights. Information such as the number of visitors, visit frequency and visit duration are provided to individual venues (departments/sections) to give a better understanding of customer behaviour.
- Social Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi sign-in process is used to opt people into proximity marketing and to enrich the behavioural analytics, in a fully brandable digital landing page. By enabling customers to sign in with a social profile, the business can also establish the critical connection between a customer’s digital profiles and physical behaviours, at the individual level.
- Campaigns. Turnstyle-powered venues are able to use the platform to trigger automated email and SMS communications to any customers opted-in to the network based on their demographics and their physical behaviour patterns. Best of all, this can be based on their real-time interaction with a store (i.e. - the 3rd time they enter in a 30-day period).
Each one of these functions work together to provide marketers with the ability to recognize and reward loyal customers for their patronage while preventing at-risk customers from churning.
Transforming the Customer Experience
Consumers not only expect stores to provide free Wi-Fi, but they desire a personalized experience. People are more mobile-centric than ever, and brick-and-mortar retailers need to leverage that channel for active in-store engagement. Wi-Fi happens to provide a scalable, cost effective way to do that without creating a burdensome onboarding process, like downloading a mobile app.
Requiring nothing more than a one-time Wi-Fi sign in, businesses can opt consumers into a marketing and loyalty program based not only on demographics, but on a real-time understanding of where they go and how they act.
Proximity triggered campaigns enable businesses to reach customers at the most critical time in their purchase journey - when they are in-store. The timing of a personalized message and offer may be the difference between a customer completing their purchase and shopping around for a competitor’s product.
The best part is that if a retailer already has the Wi-Fi infrastructure in place, no additional hardware installation is required as Turnstyle’s platform integrates with most existing networks.
And that’s just where they’re at today. Thinking forward to the future is incredibly exciting. Turnstyle can use this technology to recommend products to customers based on their past shopping behaviour in a brick-and-mortar location or retarget them with online offers if they’ve abandoned their cart in the physical store. Very soon they’ll be able to offer all the same advantages to offline retailers that online retailers have been benefiting from for over a decade.
The Future
Using Turnstyle’s platform, marketers can get their messages into the palms of customers’ hands at the most influential time in the sales process - when the customer is in-store. Their platform is the only way to personalize the brick-and-mortar experience in a mobile-first and scalable way.
Mobile has already established itself as the most important marketing channel for retail, and for brands, mastering it in a scalable way will be critical. Scalability in this regard goes well beyond cost, and needs to consider the ability to automate the necessary personalization to be relevant to consumers in a mobile world. It also requires a solution that is not cumbersome to consumers and does not require significant investments from them, not least of which includes sacrificing their precious mobile real estate.
As the clash between online and offline storefronts continues to wage, Wi-Fi marketing platforms may be the best way for businesses to defend themselves against increasing e-commerce cannibalization. Turnstyle’s Wi-Fi marketing platform is an innovative and practical way for businesses to learn more about their customers and engage them in a contextual way, without the headaches of costly app development or new technology implementation.
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