Have you ever thought: “What if I could directly target specific groups of guests, in real time, when they are in my venue and send rewards and vouchers to loyal customers when they enter? Or send a discount on that next drink to the Wi-Fi ‘flies,’ sipping one cup of coffee for an hour and target known guests as they are walking by to entice them back in?”
If you have, then you know that guest engagement is all about encouraging your customers to interact and share in the experiences you create for them as a brand.
In today’s crowded hospitality sector, it is becoming increasingly hard to compete against rivals and the growth of home delivery. Attracting customers and getting them to return is made even more difficult by the noise generated by all of the other food and beverage businesses competing to win over the same customers.
Just getting people to opt-in to your marketing communications is becoming much more difficult. A strong customer engagement strategy that demonstrates clear benefits for your customers will certainly contribute towards sales and brand growth and loyalty. Happy customers can have a significant impact on your top and bottom lines. However, customers don’t engage themselves.
The importance of measuring customer engagement
Customer engagement is a necessary metric for your business. Many hospitality operators have invested heavily in their customer relationship management (CRM) technology stack in recent years to understand more about their guests. They have invested to provide them with rewards and loyalty incentives, and to also have the communication tools in place to reach customers in a more personalised, targeted, and timely way.
In isolation, these technologies can provide significant benefits to the operator, and in turn their guests, who feel more connected with the brand. However, these benefits can only be truly maximised when the technology providers work together on behalf of their clients and their guests.
That’s why digital performance marketing provider, Eagle Eye, and Wi-Fi marketing and guest analytics provider,
Wireless Social, have come together to develop a unique set of tools, designed to engage our hospitality clients’ guests in new ways. These tools can improve the guest experience by delighting them when they are in your venue and rewarding them for their loyalty. Better still, they offer the ability to track the success and return on investment (ROI) of your engagement strategy with a unique set of reports that clearly demonstrate the impact on repeat visits and visit frequency of your engaged customers.
How do the Eagle Eye and Wireless Social tools work?
Wi-Fi has become one of the best sources of guest data capture for hospitality operators, in many cases, exceeding that of table booking services. It’s not only the volume of data or the quality and number of additional data points collected that makes Wi-Fi a valuable commodity. With an average marketing communications opt-in of over 70% from its Wi-Fi users, Wireless Social offers a ready made audience of customers with whom you can build an ongoing engagement strategy.
The increased ability to segment based on demographic profile means that all future communications can be tailored to meet the specific needs of the target groups. Customer profiles can be built using elements including age, birthday, gender, location, and interests (all collected via the social media login process), in addition to visit frequency, recency, dwell time, and last visit. This sophisticated engagement also provides data on the direct impact of such targeted engagement on loyalty and visit frequency.
The Wireless Social and Eagle Eye solution enables you to do this. When a guest enters a venue and logs into the Wi-Fi, or a returning guest is detected by the Wi-Fi network, the data captured from each guest allows us to build a detailed guest profile. The operator can decide which attributes make up the customer profile they want to target and what offer or promotion they would like to engage them with.
Dynamic customer engagement delivery in real time
As soon as someone meeting the criteria is spotted, Eagle Eye generates a unique voucher code, which is sent via email directly to their device as they are in the venue. But you may be asking: “Why reward customers who are already in my venue?” In the past this may have seemed like a discounting tactic with a negative impact on your bottom line. However, the reporting capability on offer here allows you to see what the direct impact of such a campaign has on driving repeat custom.
Not only can you obtain reports on how many vouchers have been redeemed, you can now also see by who and, as a result, how much more often they visit compared to your other guests, who have not received any rewards. Presence analytics (tracking both known and unknown devices when they enter or are near your venue) offers the opportunity to see how the behaviour of your engaged guests compare to anonymous ones. By multiplying your uplift in visits by your average spend per visit, the ROI for such a campaign is clear.
Using a similar process, The New World Trading Company, a Wireless Social customer, and user of the presence analytics capability, saw a 54% increase in visit frequency from Wi-Fi users who received their automated email campaigns. It also saw a 100% increase from those responding to prompts to download their loyalty and discount app after they had signed into its guest Wi-Fi.
Working with Eagle Eye and Wireless Social
It's also very simple to put into action. The
Wireless Social software can be installed quickly and easily onto existing Wi-Fi hardware. Wireless Social integrates directly with your CRM, so that all of your data capture and communications are handled automatically via your existing systems. This ensures that it always remains compliant with data privacy regulations, including GDPR.
Eagle Eye’s cloud-based software platform manages the issuance of all offers and rewards. Its integration with all of the major food and beverage EPoS systems enables an easy and fraud-proof redemption process at checkout without any lengthy configuration. This provides both a seamless guest experience and detailed campaign reporting of results to accurately track attribution and ROI.
You can get in touch with the Eagle Eye team
here.