Wi-Fi may be used for connecting to the internet, but it can be a great way of marketing your shopping center too. In fact, it has been shown that consumers stay longer at a business when provided with wi-fi.
As Wi-Fi is usually available at most public locations, it’s become easy for people to remain online through their smartphones. While you may see it as just a cost of doing business, it’s much more than that. It’s an effective marketing tool that can help you increase your sales and foot traffic. Here are some ways through which you can achieve this.
1. Grow New Customer Acquisition
By offering free guest Wi-Fi to your shoppers, you can build your SMS list. Each time they want to access the internet, they’ll connect to your network allowing you to market to them. However, you’ll need to first put up a landing page through which you can capture their mobile number. This makes it a win-win situation where the customer gets their internet access, and you get their mobile number.
By collecting numbers of your shoppers, you can build your SMS list. You can then broadcast messages to these shoppers whenever there’s any promotion or event in your shopping center. This can help you increase average ticket size.
To send out these SMS messages, you can use a proximity marketing solution that can make the entire process easy and simple. In addition to the mobile number, you may ask for more additional details. This can help you gather basic demographic data. However, keep your forms short as long forms may decrease your conversion rate.
2. Increases Shopping Duration
Your guest Wi-Fi can help in increasing the shopping duration of your shoppers too. According to a study, nearly 60% of businesses claimed that people spent more time in their stores when they were offered free Wi-Fi. Additionally, 50% of store owners also said that the customers spent more due to the same reason as well.
The reason for this is simple. When customers stay in your retail shopping center for longer, they’ll likely look for things that they want. This may be over and above the things that they actually came looking for in the first place. For instance, they may end up going to a restaurant to eat or may purchase a some new shoes they’ve been meaning to buy.
3. Increase Customer Visit Frequency
Many people may come to your shopping center solely because it provides free Wi-Fi. They may not be looking to shop, but when they’re present in the shopping center, they may end up buying something. By providing free Wi-Fi, you can attract customers, and they may keep coming over and over again just for this.
However, you need to ensure that you publicize this feature so that people become aware of it. Try placing banners throughout your shopping center. When people know that you provide free Wi-Fi, they may start accessing it.
4. Make Sense of Data
Free guest Wi-Fi can help you make smart business decisions by analyzing the data you collect from your shoppers. Whenever anyone walks into your shopping center and connects to your Wi-Fi, you can use this to market to them and collect additional data allowing you to build richer, more robust profiles about who enters your shopping center.
This will allow you to:
Easily measure the ROI of your property marketing teams
Leverage actionable insights that can drive leasing and operational decisions for better results
Easily manage activity and results of each property in your portfolio
5. Enhance Customer Engagement
When you give your shopping center visitors free Wi-Fi, you’ll be able to make your engagements with them more relevant especially if you’re collecting demographic information. For example, you may know one of your restaurant tenants is providing free appetizers with the purchase of an entree to college students. If you have collected information about your shopping center visitors that shows they attend a local college or university, you can use this to trigger a text message to them next time they visit your shopping center. This creates a positive customer engagement experience causing them to want to come back more frequently for these type of offers.
Wrapping It Up
Offering free Wi-Fi requires some work in creating the right messages and database segmentation, but it can help in generating loads of shoppers to your shopping center. You can increase the size of your SMS list and use it to send out marketing messages to your shoppers. Additionally, people may spend more time in your shopping center, and this can help in driving sales.
They may also keep returning to you solely due to this added facility offered to them. You can also take advantage of proximity marketing and use it to drive sales and revenue. Lastly, it can empower your shoppers by giving them access to online and peer reviews. This can aid in the shopping process.
What are the other ways through which guest Wi-Fi can help in driving your shopping center marketing? Let me know in the comments.
