Captive Wifi Portal: Say you run a restaurant, coffee shop, QSR, small brewery, or hospitality business. Great question; more smart business owners like you use guest WiFi to acquire, engage, and grow customer loyalty.
What Is A Wifi Captive Portal?
Signing up for a free WiFi network automatically takes you to a captive WiFi portal. Consumers will see them when they log onto WiFi at a coffee shop or wait for a flight at the airport. WiFi providers usually require an email address or zip code to connect.
Why Your Company Needs A Wifi Captive Portal
It would help if you protected users from security breaches and hacking with any WiFi. Hackers are creating fake WiFi networks in public places to steal data from users as they become more sophisticated. Captive portals ensure that customers use your WiFi and do not accidentally connect to another network. Additionally, a WiFi captive portal protects your business from unauthorized network use.
Locate And Secure Your Business
You should monitor how your guests use WiFi to ensure they follow the rules. A captive WiFi portal makes detecting and tracking internet misuse at your location more accessible.
Manage Wifi Bandwidth
WiFi will be used by most of your customers for work, video calls, and social media. You’ll gladly let them as a business owner or operator. But your WiFi is designed for something other than heavy streaming, gaming, or downloads. You should limit customer bandwidth to maintain WiFi speed. Captive portals enable usage monitoring and control.
Promote Your Business
Your captive portal lets you market different business aspects to customers. Customers are attentive and receptive when browsing the internet, so they’ll look at what you share rather than scrolling. Consider advertising an event or a new menu item. Your captive portal can promote your loyalty program, and the possibilities are endless.
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Monetization Scope
Some businesses want WiFi revenue. There’s nothing wrong with exploring this option for your business. However, it would help if you considered its logic. Your audience, type of business, how long customers spend in the store, what they spend, competition, and other factors will influence your decision. Some companies profit from WiFi monetization. Not for others.
We recommend collecting active contact information or first-party data from customers who use your free WiFi. If customers need a lot of bandwidth or want to use WiFi for a long time, consider offering packages. Sell ad space to selected partners. You can do this and more with your captive portal.
Wifi-captive Portal Benefits
Restaurants can set WiFi rules with a guest WiFi captive portal that requires a buy before joining. Your front-of-house team won’t have to keep asking customers to buy more cookies or refill their favorite drinks to boost sales. Before the pandemic, we all went to our favorite coffee shop or restaurant for lunch and found every table filled with remote workers and students with laptops, not purchasing anything.
A guest WiFi captive portal that demands a purchase before using your fast, free, secure Internet changes guest behavior. It also lets your front-of-house team focus on excellent service and products. Purchase-related guest WiFi captive portals are easy to set up! Our product has been refined and improved since 2016.
Ask For Information
Requesting a guest’s email address, Zip Code or SMS opt-in for guest WiFi is nothing new. This technology dates back to the 1990s when captive portals were less brand-focused. Most WiFi captive portals today are brand-focused. Your brand can promote new products, events, and eCommerce channels with the right captive portal solution. It’s a casual way to introduce other business and brand aspects. GoGoGuest captive portals simplify guest opt-in and opt-out.
Automate Welcome Messages
Friendly greetings are encouraged. When a customer permits you, you can email or text them. This is the charm of a guest WiFi captive portal with marketing automation. Your marketing team can create a welcome series introducing your brand and business to customers. A welcome series can cover:
- How to brand-connect across channels
- What your brand represents
- Various product, event, and subscription engagement channels
Content and timing insights from the welcome series will help your marketing and customer teams personalize campaigns. Personalization increases engagement by 74%. Engaged customers are 6x more likely to buy from your brand!
Use Segmentation Tools To Your Advantage
GoGoGuest learns more from your customers’ personal profile identifiers as their active consumer profiles or subscribers engage with your brand more. These are examples.
- Location
- Favorite email client;
- Device
- Timezone
- Frequency visits
GoGoGuest can query most products bought, average order per visit, lifetime purchase value, and more if integrated with your POS system. GoGoGuest helps your marketing and customer teams organize your extensive customer list by preference. Segmentation lets you tailor content to customer preferences. A customer preference center is another great benefit.
A Customer Preference Center?
Preference centers help you understand customer needs. As you learn more and store data in a customer’s profile, a preference center lets them change and update their information. John Doe may have preferred medium roast whole ground beans in the past but now prefers dark roasts. As John’s purchases change, GoGoGuest can update the information.
Learn Useful Things
Each automated email or SMS campaign reveals much about your audience and customer groups. See patterns in when to send campaigns and which customers aren’t motivated by some topics but are energized by others. These insights should inform your content and messaging to increase engagement, conversions, and interest.
Top 5 Ways To Improve Results
Know Your Repeaters
Frequent buyers are your best customers. With tools and data, it’s easier to identify these valuable customers. Captive portals simplify repeat customer identification. This information can be used to offer these customers special services or promotions to make them feel valued and happy to keep buying from you.
Traffic Measurement
Restaurants and hospitality brands have sales, revenue, and inventory data, but traffic volume is only sometimes known. Track and monitor traffic with captive portals. You can use these insights to make strategic business decisions.
Visit Loyal Customers
Loyal customers sometimes disappear. They may be trying out your competitors or taking a break from eating or drinking. Business is like that. Sometimes, a friendly reminder or hello is enough to get a loyal customer back to buy.
Captive portal data helps you identify customers who used to visit often but have yet to. Send them a re-engagement email sequence, promotion, special offer, or SMS to get them to buy again.
Display A Customized Welcome
Personalizing welcome messages is an excellent method to attach with customers and leave a lasting impression. Every little bit helps show customers you value their business. Your captive portal can easily display a personalized welcome message to delight customers.
Inform Customers Of Data Use
Customers today need to learn how brands use their data. Clients are going to know how you will use and protect their data. Give clear instructions on handling customers’ data and saving it. You can use your captive portal.
Conclusion
Implementing a WiFi captive portal for your business offers multifaceted benefits, from enhancing security and bandwidth management to creative marketing opportunities. Companies can personalize engagement, automate welcome messages, and optimize marketing strategies by leveraging customer data collected through the portal.
The portal’s segmentation tools and preference center facilitate a deeper understanding of client behavior, enabling businesses to tailor their offerings and promotions. A well-utilized captive portal can significantly improve customer loyalty and drive business success in a digital age.
