If you’re a coffeeshop, cafe, restaurant or hotel business owner, here is a great way of getting your customers’ online profile effortlessly and without being nosy and intrusive. All it takes is something that you are most probably already offering to your customers: free Wi-fi.
Savvy business owners, no matter which industry, know that growing a mailing list for email marketing is important for digital marketing activities, and yet most businesses were not able to build one because asking for a customer’s email address is intrusive, time-consuming (imagine encoding hundreds of entries in your excel sheet) and frustrating (one client of ours reported that more than 80% of the email addresses in their sign up sheet are either invalid or written ineligibly). We have previously discussed how Wi-fi is able to tackle these challenges. Here we will see how one small, startup business is able to expand fast effortlessly through digital marketing.
Meet ATIK: Aral Tambay Internet Kain
ATIK is a small, upstart student lounge established 5 months ago (end of August 2015), as of this writing. They don’t have much marketing capitalization, nor resources to get to know their customers, but they have offer free Wi-fi for students who would like to study, do research, or just be online.
Instead of having their customers ask for their Wi-fi password (familiar?), they are presented a splash screen (technical term is Captive Portal) in which they can choose which Social Media account to use to login. Instead of just offering Wi-fi as a service, ask them to exchange their profile (by logging in) for Wi-fi access. After all, in business, there is no such thing as free lunch.
Using a social media account as login has the following benefits:
- You receive your customer profile instead of just a nameless email address. You’ll be able to know their names, email address, birthdate, age, location and gender – all of their details that are public in their social media account
- Email addresses used in their social media accounts are valid, and most likely used as their personal email account.
- No more encoding! Just export it as Excel sheet and import it to your favorite email marketing platform.
ATIK does not have a website, and most if its marketing is done through Facebook, so it is important to get their Page Likes up. For ATIK, after their customers have logged in, they were asked to Like their Facebook Page:
While Facebook has made it clear that you cannot force someone to Like your page to “gate” them from your service, about 20% of ATIK’s customers have “Liked” their page when asked, and this is just on the captive portal. Without using Facebook ads, they have managed to increase their Facebook Page Likes to 2,453 in 5 months: about 500 per month. Remember that these are ACTUAL CUSTOMER likes – likes that came from ATIK, who knows where ATIK is, what they offer and what their business is all about. Paid Facebook likes are almost superficial for niche market business and brings almost no value nor engagement to your business.
So, with 1,600++ email addresses and 2,400++ page likes of highly targeted contacts (university students, aged 19-24), ATIK is able to expand immediately, getting promos and introducing new products to their place. Knowing their customers is the key. If you know that majority of your customers are female, would you be able to focus your offerings to the female gender, or do more to attract the male groups? With these type of information you are now able to make better decisions for your business, and not just second-guessing.
What else? Knowing where their customers came from (or at least where their social media account “home” is located) might not be applicable for ATIK, but for hotels, this information can be used to cater for a certain nationality or culture (for example: offering Korean food since a great percentage of your guests are Korean).
All of these information and more, just by providing free Wi-fi in your place of business.
Information is the key to success. Coffeeshop, restaurant, cafe and hotel owners, you now have the means of collecting information about your customers effortlessly.
This is the wonder of technology – automating repetitive, menial yet important task, such as building an email list, automatically. Of course, this service is not for free, and you can’t buy just any router out there and achieve the same result. AC Web Consultancy provides this Wi-fi service and other technologies to get you started with your Digital Marketing. Talk to us to know how you can avail similar service and more for your business.
