Retail Wi-Fi provides customer insights. It enables targeted advertising, tailored to the shopper’s interests and location. As a result, retailers and shopping malls get more sales and more revenue from advertisers.
Retail Wi-Fi services lead to 61% more time on premise and 46% of customers spend more money after getting free Wi-Fi.
About 27% of US shoppers looks for deals and vouchers on their smartphones while shopping. Intent to visit store increases with 116% when the offer is location based.
About 30% of us are checking prices online while shopping. As a result, retail Wi-Fi drive in-store sales. Because, 50% of shoppers feel comfortable making large purchases, knowing the price is right.
Sources: Accenture, Thinknear, IPG Media Lab, Mediapost and IGR
Eleven of the most influential shopping mall specialists in the UK were interviewed by Retail Week for their May 2017 analysis ‘why shopping centres need Wi-Fi for profitability’. Among the respondents, 88% listed retail Wi-Fi as their top tech priority to better serve visitors. Personal communications and digital in-mall messaging were close behind.
All leading Wi-Fi vendors offer heat-maps and footfall analytics that shows general trends of movements in the shopping mall. The user do not even have to be active on the Wi-Fi network, it’s enough that the Wi-Fi is switched on.
Retail Wi-Fi powered by social media login through a captive portal or app, provides valuable insights that no other technology can. The Wi-Fi analytics include rich opt-in demographics such as e-mail address, mobile number, age, gender and interests. This information is not only interesting for the Wi-Fi service control and engagement system. But, also for other systems such as loyalty apps and digital advertisement signs.
The same user and location analytics are also useful when integrating with professional advertising networks such as Google Adwords and Axonix. And, of course with the shopping mall’s existing campaign system. It’s all about triggering the right ad for the right person at the right place.
Do you not have the ambition to use advertising networks or your own campaign system? Use the built-in Wi-Fi marketing functionality in Aptilo’s guest Wi-Fi solution. Engage users with your own messages through SMS and e-mail, and schedule portal updates with different banners at different times. Download the Wigo case study to learn more how they monetized their free retail Wi-Fi service.
To maximize the value of your Wi-Fi analytics, you need to integrate with other systems. Aptilo has long experience integrating with external systems through our service provider Wi-Fi offering. The Aptilo Service Management Platform™, with Aptilo SMP Venue Wi-Fi Manager™, is ideal for building a tailored retail Wi-Fi service with advanced integration. We also have a streamlined cloud-based offering with the most requested functions–the Aptilo Guest Wi-Fi Cloud™.
Yes, we think so. There are few business segments that can benefit more from a loyalty app than shopping malls. With so many different brands and the need for location-based services. As we could see from the example with David, the loyalty apps are useful and almost addictive to users ones they are installed. It’s only that. How do you get users to install your app? One good way is to push an incentive for downloading the app to users via SMS as in the case of David. Users that refuses to use your app, can still be engaged via captive portals, SMS and e-mail.
