WiFi analytics, the data that drives WiFi marketing, allows agencies to create a tailored customer experience by delivering personalized content and precisely timed offers based on customer demographics and behavior.

This article will provide a brief overview of WiFi analytics and describe three of its many practical uses.

The Power of WiFi Analytics

For brick-and-mortar businesses, insights into their target audience translate to improvements in how they engage with customers and prospects. WiFi analytics can provide those insights and improve the performance of the targeted loyalty campaigns that follow.

The power of WiFi analytics comes from two sources—anonymous WiFi data, which provides a high-level understanding of customers’ actions as a group, and collected customer profile data, which includes details that enable personalized outreach and better targeting of your client’s campaigns.

Anonymous WiFi data, based on a unique identifier that a device sends out when searching for a WiFi network to connect to, is the key to presence analytics. Is this guest a first-time visitor? What’s their “dwell time”—how long do they stay within the range of the router? These are the kinds of questions that presence analytics can answer.

The other type of WiFi intel—profile data collected from logged-in users—may start with just a single piece of contact information, like the customer’s email address, for example. Employed with other user-supplied profile data, like name, gender, and date of birth, this contact information is crucial in personalizing loyalty campaigns.

WiFi Analytics in Action—Three Practical Uses

The key strength of WiFi marketing is how it enables the collection of customer data and visitor metrics, making that information available as a tool for automating loyalty programs and optimizing customer communications.

Beginning with a client’s marketing goal, agencies can pinpoint the relevant WiFi metrics, apply creative statistical analysis, and ultimately identify a key audience segment. At that point, all that’s left to do is use collected profile data to personalize the outreach so it will better resonate with the target segment.

Customer profile information and real-time data about visitor behavior, when used in combination, can provide countless insights. Footfall stats overlaid with demographic data, for example, can tell business owners not only when people visit the business but who those people are.

This section will present three practical uses for WiFi analytics, a small sample size to say the least. Nevertheless, examining even this tiny sliver of what WiFi analytics can be used for will reveal the power of this cutting-edge marketing approach.

Engage Active and Inactive Customers

Using WiFi analytics, you can help your clients reach out to old and new or active and inactive customers as distinct groups, using tailored messages that align with the customer’s current relationship with the business.

For example, you could segment your client’s customer contact list into two groups, customers who haven’t visited in over a month, and those who were just there. Those groups can be targeted with different messages. In many cases, the distinction will come down to sending a “thank you” message or a “please come back” message, but the value of that basic outreach optimization should not be underestimated. 

The analysis in this example and, by extension, the resulting campaign optimization, is made possible by a single WiFi analytics metric: “Date of Last Visit.” It’s one of the simpler WiFi metrics, yet, it’s instrumental in this sort of audience segmentation.

Predict Customer Behavior to Improve Operations & Outreach

WiFi analytics provides a real-time view of foot traffic—valuable presence analytics can be used to track in-store (or near-store) customer behavior. Data about visitation can be used as an indication of when customers and prospects are in the vicinity, how long they stay, etc.

A marketer can analyze this data to help clients improve daily operations, adjusting staffing to respond to formerly unrecognized patterns in visitor behavior, for example.

WiFi analytics can also be used to adjust the timing of loyalty offers. A discount that’s only available during the business’ second busiest time, for example, is a quick path to increased revenue. All it takes to pull off that marketing move is to examine the top two data points of a single WiFi metric: “Visit Time.”

Establish or Refine Your Client’s “Ideal Customer” Profile

WiFi analytics, involving both customer-provided profile data and collected presence data, can help your client figure out who their best customers are and then market to them more effectively. By analyzing customer profile data, like age and gender, in combination with presence data, like “dwell time,” a marketer can compile a more accurate profile of their client’s most receptive customers.

Let’s look at an example.

Thanks to their guest WiFi, a coffee shop owner could discover an otherwise unnoticed spike in business every weekday at 4:10 PM and learn that, at that time of day, the average guest is a college-age female that stays for 30 minutes. In a light-bulb moment, the proprietor’s marketing agency links the daily spike in traffic to the class schedule of a nearby community college, and an important piece of the customer profile puzzle falls into place.

Anonymous WiFi data combined with customer profile data can be an unbelievably powerful engine behind customer loyalty programs and every other type of customer engagement, partly due to the detailed insights about customer demographics and behavior that can be gleaned.

Supercharge Your Client’s Business with WiFi Analytics

When considering WiFi analytics, the breadth of possible applications is staggering. Our sample of 3 practical uses could have easily been 30!

With so many metrics and such a valuable array of customer profile data to work with, no client marketing goal is out of reach. In every imaginable scenario, a savvy marketer can identify the pertinent WiFi analytics metrics, overlay detailed customer profile data, and end up with an effective strategy to achieve the client’s marketing goal.

We hope you enjoyed this brief look at WiFi analytics. It’s the power behind WiFi marketing, giving that cutting-edge practice its limitless range of applications in helping brick-and-mortar businesses optimize customer engagement and boost revenue.