Top 5 reasons why business owners need to provide Free Wi-Fi to their customers

Talking to a lot of small and medium business owners, they often tell me that they don’t really see any need in proposing free Wi-Fi to their customers. It sounds like it will be a real struggle for them.
The new Wi-Fi technologies actually bring a lot of advantages for businesses to deploy Wi-Fi and offer free Wi-Fi to their customers.

Here are the top 5 reasons why business owners need to provide free Wi-Fi to their customers:

# 1 - Retain your customers

Providing Free Wi-Fi to your customers makes them stay longer. Therefore, you are increasing the probability that they will spend money in your business.
Secondly, they would most likely come back to your shop knowing that they will be able to connect to the internet via Wi-Fi for free. According to a study conducted by the Yankee Group, “96% of customers prefer location that offer Free Wi-Fi and would return to stores that offer it”.

# 2 - Promote your business through Social Medias

Having a Free Guest Wi-Fi is a wonderful tool to promote your business through social medias.
Some tools provided by Wi-Fi vendors (Airtight) or by third party companies (Purple Wi-Fi, Cloud4Wi,...) allow the users to authenticate through their social medias account. Doing so, they use their own credentials to connect to the business Wi-Fi network. There is no need to share a password anymore! This way, it is way more secured and easier to manage.
Business owners also have the opportunity to link their Facebook Page to their Free Wi-Fi network and ask the users to “like” their page if they want to use the internet. The users will basically promote the business in exchange of using the business internet. Knowing that a Facebook like is worth 174$, setting up a Free Wi-Fi can be a very good investment!
Of course, this process also works with the other big social medias (Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+).

# 3 - Use the Free Wi-Fi as a powerful marketing Tool

In exchange of connecting to your Wi-Fi for free, you can ask for your guest name and email addresses. This way, you will be able to send them coupons and vouchers to keep them engaged. Using the social medias, you will also be able to performed targeted marketing based on your guest profiles.

# 4 - Don't stay out of the competition

When I go places, I always check if Wi-Fi will be available or not. It is important for me and I am sure it is for a lot of people. So to stand out from the competition or to not be left behind, you should start offering Free Wi-Fi to your guest. It has now became a must-have and you could actually lose customers (like me) if you are not. Think about all these teenagers out there with smartphones but no data plan. All they are looking for all day long is a Wi-Fi connection!

# 5 - Develop & Grow your business

With the power of analytics, businesses that offer Guest Wi-Fi are now able to retrieve a lot of useful information for the development and growth of their business. Here are a few examples of type of data you can get:

• Age of your guests
  
• Email addresses of your guests
  
• Gender of your guests
  
• Times spent in your store
  
• Number of people passing by your store (potential customers)
  
• Locations of your guests
  
• Number of visits (engagement)
  

So as you can see, it can be quite powerful as a business intelligence tool!

Providing free Wi-Fi to your customers can be very beneficial. I see it as a win-win solution. However, you need to make sure that the service is working as expected. Indeed, remember than poor guest Wi-Fi is worse than no guest Wi-Fi!

Do not hesitate to contact us for more information! We will be happy to help you out.

written by François Vergès