Every guest is a potential customer. By offering free guest WiFi, you have a surefire way of drawing these potential customers to your place of business. Everybody else is already doing this, so how do you make your guest WiFi the preferred choice? Souping up your WiFi network to increase its performance and deliver a much superior customer experience. Don’t just broadcast “Free WiFi.” Deliver a free guest WiFi experience that’s fully optimized to go above and beyond what your business and customers need.
4 Benefits of a Customizable and Free Guest WiFi Solution
A customizable, free guest WiFi solution opens up more opportunities to grow your business. A simple free guest WiFi network that’s password-protected doesn’t stand out among numerous other signals broadcasting within your location. It doesn’t offer anything “extra” to your business or your customers. But you can upgrade and customize your guest WiFi to leverage it as a marketing platform.
Here are the many ways a WiFi marketing platform can help your business grow.
You can use a guest WiFi sign-in template that requires guests to input their name, email address, or phone number before accessing the internet. You can use the information you collect for email/SMS marketing purposes, but remember that you have to give your guests the option to opt-in and out of any marketing subscription list.
A free guest WiFi that serves as a marketing platform allows you to customize your captive portal in various ways. A captive portal can be more than just a login page. You can use it to:
- Promote special offers, new products/services, and upcoming events
- Encourage guests to follow you and engage with you on social media
- Conduct surveys
- Build your loyalty program
- Prompt customers to leave a feedback
3. Control How Your Free Guest WiFi Is Used
Customize your WiFi system so you can control how your free guest WiFi is used. Limit how long a guest can stay connected to your network. Set bandwidth restrictions to manage uploads and downloads. Restrict access to specific websites.
4. Create Customer Profiles and Keep Track of Customer Behaviors
After logging in to your free guest WiFi, your customers’ information is stored in a database. A fully customizable guest WiFi platform can collect not only basic customer information such as email addresses and phone numbers. It can also keep track of average dwell times, number of visits, number of repeat visits, and movement inside your premises. You can create customer profiles and segments based on the information you collect to help you design a more effective targeted marketing plan.
Follow these steps to set up your gusset WiFi marketing platform.
1. Choose Your ISP Carefully
Select an internet service provider (ISP) that’s highly preferred in your area. More subscribers typically indicate better connection and customer service. Check out the different service plans the ISP offers. You want a plan that’s right for your budget and offers optimal speed and bandwidth. Ensure the wireless access point or router with the plan can be configured to set up a captive portal.
2. Set Up Your Free Guest WiFi Network
You can do this on your router’s configuration page, which allows basic customizations for guest access. The configuration typically involves the following:
- Providing a separate name for the free guest WiFi network;
- Assigning login credentials;
- Setting a password for the guest WiFi network;
- Turning off your business’ private SSID, so only the guest network is visible to visitors; and
- Enabling the guest portal to redirect guests to your customized captive portal.
3. Set up the Captive Portal for Your Free Guest WiFi Network
The captive portal setup process for your free guest WiFi network may vary depending on the router you have. For example, a UniFi captive portal may have different configuration settings from a Meraki system. For most systems, setting up the captive portal allows you to configure how guests get access to the internet.
Your captive portal can be a fundamental term-of-use page that guests must agree to. Or you can customize it to display a welcome message or an ad. Newer router versions allow social login, which prompts guests to log in via their Gmail or Facebook credentials.
During captive portal configuration, you may also limit access to specific websites, block video streaming, limit the number of connected devices, and/or set a time limit for guest network use.
How to Boost the Benefits of Your Free Guest WiFi Portal
Free guest WiFi can do more than just connect your customers to the internet. You can use your free guest WiFi portal to enhance the overall guest experience and expand your marketing efforts. Here are excellent ways to boost the benefits of your guest WiFi network.
- Boost your sales. Use your captive portal to display promo codes, sales, and other special offers. This is a great way to convert visitors who are just looking into actual paying customers. You can also offer discount codes or a buy-one-take-one deal on their next visit to encourage customers to return and make another purchase soon.
- Ask guests to rate your business. Customer feedback is classic word-of-mouth advertising. Good reviews almost always deliver new business. On the other hand, average or poor reviews are an opportunity for you to step up and show current and potential customers that their satisfaction is important to you.
- Make shopping convenient. Give guests access to your online product/service catalog for easier browsing and shopping. Make the guest experience even more enjoyable by setting up a lounge area with comfortable chairs and couches. This is ideal for peak seasons when your establishment is busiest and most crowded.
- Redirect guests to your website or social media page. Online shopping has become the preferred mode of shopping for most customers, so don’t miss the chance to let your guests know that you have a website. Redirecting them to your social media page is a great way to grow your followers and engagement.
- Allow access to your printer, smart TV, and other devices. If you have a hotel or restaurant, guest access to these devices effectively promotes your business as the perfect venue for meetings and events.
What To Look For in a Free Guest WiFi Management Software
To guarantee the delivery of a superior guest WiFi experience, you need to get the right free guest WiFi management software for your needs. Remember that you always have to be one step ahead of the competition. You can out-match everybody with an all-in-one free guest WiFi marketing solution, like Beambox.
You can choose the Beambox Plug & Play hardware to connect to your existing router and launch a secure guest WiFi network. Or use cloud integration to add Beambox to your existing network. Beambox is compatible with UniFi, Meraki, Omada, Aruba, MikroTik, and Ruckus systems.
Beambox makes your free guest WiFi network smarter to continuously learn about your guests to enhance the guest WiFi experience and help your business grow. Beambox allows you to configure your captive portal any way you want.
You can automatically connect returning guests. You can customize your guest WiFi login page to display a special offer, your feedback form, or your latest social media post. Build detailed customer profiles and power up your marketing strategies by collecting actionable guest data. Control how and when guests can get connected. Grow your loyalty program. Create and manage targeted email campaigns.
Connect, capture, and keep more customers with an all-in-one WiFi marketing platform. Start your Beambox free trial today!
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