Guest WiFi alone won’t give you a competitive edge, but advanced WiFi will. Here’s why…

Advanced WiFi gives retail stores a competitive advantage
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It’s no secret that one of the hottest questions in the boardroom of each business is “what will give us the competitive edge?”

But in a hyper-competitive world, where technology is evolving at a faster rate than many businesses can keep up with, and customers are continually demanding more… How is this achieved?

Unfortunately, the answer isn’t as simple as ‘provide guest WiFi’. This just isn’t enough anymore. What was once a pleasant surprise is now the expected.

Collect data from the offline world

Retail is a prime example of the increasing divide between online and offline worlds. Sadly, we are often faced with dramatic headlines like “the death of the high street”, where physical shops are struggling to keep up with their online counterparts.

It is true that websites have a number of key advantages over the high street, such as being able to track visitor trends, dwell time, return rate, demographic data, and much more. This information is then used by marketing teams to build customer personas, re-target and personalize the user experience; all increasing conversion to sales.

But why should this level of analysis be confined to the online world? Surely if, in this example, retail units were able to harness the data provided by a digital environment and apply this to their physical spaces, this would give them the competitive advantage?

Here’s how advanced WiFi can help

With Purple, it’s not just a guest WiFi experience. It’s also an opportunity to build a valuable GDPR-compliant database of users that are engaged with your business, who provide their details upon logging into your guest WiFi. This authentication process appears on a fully branded splash page, which is an advertisement opportunity in itself. You can show different messages on different days of the week, or even time of the day, all through time-saving automation.

Whilst this may be enough to provide a competitive edge, we can go one step further. Websites are often ahead of the crowd because the insights they offer allow brands to deliver a more personalized customer experience. With advanced WiFi, you can replicate this in your physical space by triggering a message when someone enters your venue at a certain time, or day of the week. Or even a customized message to frequent visitors or certain demographic groups. Contact customers in the moments that matter; when they are at your venue.

Finally, location analytics helps you understand how users interact within your venue, by mapping where they move through the space and identifying busy areas with heatmaps. By understanding crucial offline information about your customers – information that has enabled websites to dominate in recent years – physical spaces can take back some of that power.

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