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Today’s restaurant & retail industries are as competitive as they have ever been. Likewise, diners have more options than they’ve ever had to choose from. This is why restaurant owners and retail operators should be concerned with not only acquiring as many new customers as possible, but also creating effective strategies to identify at-risk customers and keep current customers coming back for more. This will decrease your customer churn rates, or the number of customers who stop coming back to your locations.
Even if you have the best food, drink and environment, loyal customers will eventually stop visiting your place of business. Sometimes it is due to a negative experience. Most customers that have a negative experience do not talk to your staff or rate your business online. They will just leave and never come back. And they’ll tell all their friends and family about there negative experience at your establishment. Sometimes they move away, or their habits and tastes simply change. Whatever the cause, this is known as customer attrition, or customer churn, and it should be monitored closely.
There will always be some customers that can’t be saved – that’s just the nature of the business. But consider the many who can be saved. The safety net discussed below will help you retain those who can be saved, and that is worth every penny.
- Acquiring new customer can be as much as 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
- A mere increase of 5% in customer retention equates to more than a 25% increase in profit.
The financial and business sense of retaining loyal customers is evident. Done effectively, you will foster relationships, promote trust and benefit both your business and your customers.
How to Monitor Customer Churn Rates
This may leave you wondering what you can do to measure your customer churn, and reduce customer attrition at your place of business. Or, at the very minimum, how you can keep your churn rate as low as possible.
Even with a lighter amount of customer traffic and the best memory in the world, it is very difficult to accurately measure and monitor customer churn rates in a brick-and-mortar environment without the help of advanced WiFi marketing software.
With the DIGIMAX Intelligence WiFi marketing and customer intelligence hub, brick-and-mortar businesses have the ability to track customer behavior data at their physical locations – even if customers don’t log into WiFi. This means that restaurateurs and retailers can see anonymous customer behavior data on a vast majority of their clientele using DIGIMAX’s sensors to collect WiFi analytics without your customer logging into your guest WiFi, which includes:
- Daily traffic counts
- Dwell times and dwell times by hour of the day
- First-time visitors and first-time visitor return rates
- Average customer repeat rates
- Popular visit times
- Average customer churn rates
To learn more about how this data is collected, visit our WiFi analytics page.
Build Detailed Customer Profiles at Scale
When a customer decides to log into the guest WiFi, Bloom will create a detailed customer profile. It includes all of their past, current, and future behavior data. In addition, certain demographic data can be collected and verified, including age, gender, postal code and phone number. Over time you can passively build a customer database of tens, hundreds of thousands or millions of clean detailed customer profiles.
The customer only has to log into WiFi once, and their behavior will be tracked in their customer profile whether they ever log back in or not. DIGIMAX’s intelligent machine learning algorithm sets are monitoring each customer’s frequency distribution, individually and as a whole, to understand your customer attrition rate, and much more.
By analyzing customer frequency, the platform is able to 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. Then they are tagged as either low risk, medium risk, high risk or fully churned (is most likely never coming back to your locations).
How to Rescue At-Risk Customers
Once a customer profile has been created, and DIGIMAX has determined that they are at-risk of churning, there are additional steps which can be taken in order to get that customer back into your physical location.
Various campaigns can be configured and executed using DIGIMAX’s automated marketing suite of tools. The first step is to create the message that you would like to send to the at-risk customers. Most DIGIMAX users will create an upbeat, friendly message and include some sort of incentive to bring the customer back.
“We have missed you! We’d like to offer you a free appetizer with your next meal.
Looking forward to seeing you soon! Love….”
When the message is ready, the campaign can then be configured in less than 60 seconds. From then on, the marketing automation takes over and starts identifying and saving at-risk customers. DIGIMAX customers are saving up to 38% of all at-risk customers without lifting a finger. All you have to do is watch your campaign reports to see how the campaign is saving your churning customers at your locations. And you can optimize your campaigns over time.
Customer Segmentation Can Save Even More Customers
Since the DIGIMAX WiFi marketing platform collects and stores customer behavior and demographic data, it is possible to create multiple messages for various customer groups or buyer personas. For instance, you can send one message to women who are at-risk of churning, and a completely different message to men who are at-risk of churning. Likewise, you can create various segments based upon a customer’s visit count, age, average dwell time, and more.
By segmenting and targeting specific demographics with messages that are more likely to resonate with them, you will inherently increase engagement rates by personalizing your customers experience. See more customers coming back through your doors, decreasing your customer churn rates by using customer segmentation to personalize their individual experience with your brand.
With a enterprise WiFi marketing system like DIGIMAX Intelligence, retailers and restaurateurs now have the ability to measure their customers’ behavior at their locations and build rich customer profiles. So, when it comes to recognizing and rescuing at-risk customers, physical locations employing a WiFi marketing and analytics platform have a distinct advantage.
To learn more about the ways the DIGIMAX Intelligence WiFi marketing & analytics growth tools can help you improve your restaurant marketing to drive more sales, improve overall customer experience, measure customer sentiment and grow your business, schedule a free demo today.