It’s common knowledge among business owners and marketers that keeping your current customers coming back through the door is much more efficient and less costly than acquiring new customers.
In today’s competitive environment, consumers have more options than they can choose from. This is why restaurateurs and retail store owners should be concerned with not only attracting new customers but keeping the ones that they already have. Customer attrition is a natural occurrence in any business.
No matter what you do, some customers will simply not return to your place of business. Whether this is a fault of your own or not, it is important to establish and execute an ongoing, measurable strategy to reduce customer attrition.
The Value of Saving At-Risk Customers
A company’s customer base is its most important asset. As customers continue to return to your establishment, they become more and more valuable. This is exactly why controlling customer attrition can pay huge dividends to a company’s bottom line, and why retaining customers is an absolute necessity for a business to be as successful as possible. For example, if you own a restaurant and have a party of five who visit your establishment once a week for dinner, with a per-person average of $25, you can estimate that this party is worth around $500 per month in revenue, or $6,000 per year.
If this party suddenly stops visiting, you will take that immediate hit to your revenue. But it doesn’t stop at the revenue hit. To offset the loss in revenue, you’ll need to acquire five more customers to replace them. As a result, customer acquisition costs will increase. And depending upon the reason for their churning, your reputation may take a hit as well, because word-of-mouth promotion from those five churned guests will likely be gone. Or worse, they may have had a bad experience and are spreading negative word-of-mouth, which can impact your customer acquisition and retention for years to come.
Identifying Customer Churn Using WiFi Analytics
Using a WiFi marketing and analytics platform, like Social Wi-Fi, when a customer logs into your WiFi just one time, the platform can track that customer’s behavior from then on whenever they are at your place of business. This includes the number of times they visit, their dwell times, and the frequency of their visits. Bloom’s intelligent algorithm sets are monitoring each customer’s frequency distribution, individually and as a whole, to understand your customer attrition rate. By analyzing customer frequency, the platform can accurately predict when a customer should be returning for another visit. If the customer does not return by that date, they are identified as a customer who is “at-risk” of churning and tagged as such in the database.
Using WiFi Marketing Automation to Rescue At-Risk Customers
Salesforce defines marketing automation as, “Technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically.”
In other words, you can set up marketing messages ahead of time and then have them execute automatically when a customer meets the specific criteria you have specified for that message.
Marketing automation is very simple to execute using a WiFi marketing and analytics platform because the data upon which your messages will be triggered is also collected automatically.
Once a campaign is configured, you can literally sit back and watch the results without lifting a finger.
Setting Up an At-Risk Campaign
is a Must
When it comes to saving customers who are at risk of churning, it is important to take the necessary steps to identify and mitigate churning on an ongoing basis. Fortunately, using a WiFi marketing and analytics platform makes this very quick and simple to execute.
The first step is to create the message you would like your at-risk customers to receive.
Most businesses using the Bloom platform create messages containing an incentive to get the customer to return, such as a free drink or appetizer.
The message itself will typically be upbeat and friendly, saying something like, “We haven’t seen you in a while. Hope you’re having a great summer! Come back soon and enjoy this free frozen drink with us.”
The next step is to configure the campaign that will trigger the message when a customer is tagged as being at risk of churning. The campaign is given a name, the at-risk trigger is chosen, and the message that was created in the previous step is connected to the campaign. It’s that easy.
With Social Wi-Fi, you can even execute customer segmentation on any campaign. This, for example, would allow you to send different messages to different age groups or genders who are at-risk of churning.
Once the campaign is launched, everything is done for you. All you need to do is watch your campaign reports to see how your campaign is performing. You’ll see who opened the message, who came back to one of your locations, and who redeemed the offer.
Social Wi-Fi users are experiencing immediate results using this type of campaign and seeing more than 30% of their at-risk customers return!
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