Digital customers demand a seamless retail experience, regardless of whether they shop online or in-person. Retailers have made great strides supporting these omnichannel shoppers but often lag in extending their brand’s digital experience to customers shopping in their stores.
Retailers can find it difficult to deliver the information and engagement in-store customers demand. Brands often lack data necessary to understand shoppers’ in-store behavior and have trouble forging a connection between the in-store and online experience.
In-store WiFi makes the connection
While many retailers offer in-store WiFi to their customers, few are leveraging it as part of an omnichannel strategy. In-store WiFi, combined with the right platforms and tools, provides retailers with a unique opportunity to offer a seamless retail experience to customers easily and quickly.
Utilizing a cloud platform and matching web applications, retailers can provide an enriched in-store WiFi experience, to engage with customers in real time and increase their loyalty and retention. Leveraging powerful analytics, retailers can design a fully customizable user journey to push marketing and advertising messages.
How it works, the benefits to retailers
WiFi access point can gather information about all WiFi users in range, whether or not they are connected or logged in. This is possible because every WiFi device has a unique digital identity, which it frequently transmits. Access points gather this data and transmit it to the cloud WiFi engagement platform.
Through this cloud platform retailers may configure user experience from any web browser. They may create the pages displayed to shoppers, choosing features to populate those pages, gathering behavioral data and doing real-time analytics. Stored data is available for detailed analysis using a variety of tools.
What in-store WiFi tells retailers
The information gathered from the in-store WiFi network tells retailers how often a customer visits a location, when they visit and how long they stay. Over time, this provides an accurate picture of the customer’s shopping habits, potentially including where the customer roams within the store.
Customers who provide personal information can be tracked in greater detail, with the WiFi presence data becoming part of a total customer awareness profile. Correlating behavioral data to specific purchases can drive a variety of decisions.
Whether anonymous or tied to particular customers, the data can inform decisions about store layout, hours, promotion schedules, merchandise mix, display strategy, and other question. In-store WiFi can even determine how long customers linger while looking into display windows from outside the store.
Increase customer engagement
Besides collecting customer data, in-store WiFi can also deliver customized, location-based content to specific customers. Customers see personalized content, which may include targeted promotions based on customer profile information.
Key engagement features include:
- Delivering marketing and advertising messages in a non-invasive way.
- Providing specials and coupons to customers based upon their known behavior and interests.
- Increasing customer loyalty through email and proximity marketing campaigns.
- Linking social media for creating brand awareness.
- Performing surveys, allowing retailers to learn more about customers’ likes and wants.
Customers can choose the level of engagement desired. They may decide to log into a store application, access Guest Wi-Fi or just roam the store. Each offers retailers the chance to deliver content and messages to the customer.
For example, upon arrival customers with known identities might receive an email or text message offering a customized promotion or sale price. After leaving, customers might receive survey questions concerning their shopping experience.
In-store WiFi unleashes retailers’ creativity
The opportunities in-store WiFi provides for customer engagement are limited more by retailers’ creativity than technology. Brands seeking to maximize their omnichannel reach should consider in-store WiFi’s unique ability to create an in-store digital experience that drives engagement and gathers actionable customer behavior data.
