Franchise organizations come in all sizes. You may be the owner of a five-location business or a major investor who oversees a bloc of 30 national chain stores. Regardless of the number of locations you’re in charge of, there’s a rule of thumb in the franchise game: consistency across locations is imperative. That rule applies to the product, the overall customer experience, and all marketing initiatives.

Establishing operations guidelines and coordinating the marketing efforts of your franchisees is a crucial and ongoing requirement, but there’s one relatively simple thing you can do that will have an immediate unifying impact—install managed guest WiFi service in all your locations.

Providing free guest WiFi at all locations opens up a world of marketing opportunities that can lead to an across-the-board boost in business. Data collected via guest WiFi will populate customer profiles and analytics will reveal key details about customer behavior. That marketing intel can be used to refine outreach, optimize and automate loyalty programs, and precisely target promotions and digital ads.

When the process gets rolling, you’ll see underperforming locations begin to exceed revenue goals and top earners take off. 

In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of providing guest WiFi services to all your franchise locations. We’ll examine the impact it can have on customer satisfaction, look at the business benefits of a wide-scale guest WiFi rollout, and wrap up with an overview of the numerous engagement opportunities that WiFi marketing enables.

Read on to learn how guest WiFi and WiFi marketing can help your whole franchise organization.

Customer Satisfaction Soars with the Addition of the Free Guest WiFi

Most of the benefits of guest WiFi service belong to the franchisee and the franchisor, but it’s important to understand the value it has for customers too. They love free internet access!

Without access to guest WiFi, a limited mobile data plan or weak coverage can leave visitors disconnected from the outside world. In today’s phone-addicted society, not having internet access, even for a little while, can drastically limit the time a person will spend in an establishment and it can reduce the chance they’ll return.

With managed guest WiFi service, customers get a safe internet connection. The login process will create a user account, so patrons won’t have to ask employees for access, and customers can reconnect automatically in any location.

As we’ll cover in detail later, providing guest WiFi also means that customers will be treated to a more personalized experience. Between onsite engagement opportunities and the refinement of marketing outreach that’s made possible by data you collect via the WiFi network, you can present promotions and foster loyalty in a way that resonates with your customer base.

Exponential Growth through All-Location WiFi Marketing

As the owner or representative of a parent company with franchise locations, you should take advantage of every opportunity to help franchise operators increase revenue. It’s in the interest of the franchisees, your business, and the brand.

By offering guest WiFi, you can collect customer data and visitor metrics that will help automate loyalty programs, present targeted digital ads, and optimize all forms of marketing communications. WiFi analytics will help you analyze customer traffic, with data about first-time visits, return visits, visit duration, etc. Having that information about a single location is helpful but being able to take a franchise-wide view of metrics like that can have a monumental impact on your business.

If one of your locations offered free guest WiFi service, you and the location owner could use it to collect customer data and gain significant insights and marketing opportunities. If you were to add WiFi to a second location, even if the two networks were managed separately, both locations would reap marketing benefits. Such an approach would lead to growth, but on a linear and severely limited trajectory.

On the other hand, if all your locations had guest WiFi service that was managed as a single, unified system, the resulting comprehensive view of your customer base would create an opportunity for exponential growth.

A franchise-wide guest WiFi implementation allows franchisors to attract more business to all locations, create a more cohesive customer experience, and strengthen their brand.

Franchise WiFi Marketing in Action

When you’re melding franchise marketing and WiFi marketing, you need a guest WiFi platform that’s deployed across all locations. In the sections below, we’ll look at the onsite and offsite customer engagement opportunities that come from a full-blown implementation of WiFi marketing.

On-site Customer Engagement 

Since collecting customer information is central to WiFi marketing, an important form of on-site engagement is prompting customers to log on to the WiFi network, (unless they’re existing users who are automatically logged on).

The login process is your first opportunity to collect customer contact info. Visitors can be presented with a branded splash screen that prompts them to log in using their email address, phone number, or social media. This splash screen is hi-vis marketing real estate, perfect for presenting discount offers and promoting your loyalty program.

Using WiFi analytics, marketing outreach can be timed precisely for maximum effect. When a customer disconnects from the WiFi network, for example, that can trigger an automatic thank you message that prompts for a review or social media like.

Having a cohesive WiFi platform installed at all locations adds value. When a customer walks into a location that’s across town and gets the same experience as in the location near their house, that strengthens your brand. The availability of free guest WiFi can be a primary factor in creating a consistent customer experience across locations.

Off-Site Customer Engagement

The data collected via guest WiFi can be used to create customer profiles, which allow more personalized and targeted outreach. You can send promotional offers, coupons, contests, etc., all precisely targeted based on WiFi analytics and collected profile data.

WiFi marketing presents many opportunities to collect multiple forms of contact info, so you can use the customer’s most-viewed communication channel, leveraging the power of email, text, or social media selectively, based on your marketing goals.

Customer data and visitor metrics can be used to optimize and automate loyalty programs and present targeted digital ads more effectively. Email outreach can be used to prompt for reviews, solicit customer feedback, and win back absent customers.

WiFi marketing data can feed into your marketing processes so that existing workflows or a CRM platform can facilitate automated campaigns. Systems can be configured to automatically send emails or text messages, and you can define rules that initiate actions by an email autoresponder or a 3rd-party app.

Use WiFi Marketing to Drive Franchise Growth and Build Your Brand

Franchisors benefit greatly when all franchisees are doing well but achieving revenue parity across locations requires a cohesive brand image and highly focused marketing efforts.

By implementing guest WiFi across all locations you can establish consistency in the customer experience and centralize marketing initiatives. You’ll get a location-specific perspective on customer behavior and be able to rollup WiFi analytics from all locations to take a wider view of your customer base. 

We hope this look at franchise WiFi marketing has provided a new perspective on the potential impact of offering free guest WiFi at all your locations. You can increase customer satisfaction and unlock powerful marketing intel that will help you grow your business.