Who said loyalty is dead?

Is guest loyalty on the decline? At Wireless Social we hear this question get asked a lot.

It is a topic that is often discussed at various hospitality industry events, round tables, and panel debates. 

We thought we would have a look at the data collected from a cross section of our many hospitality customers to see if we could draw any insights to determine if there is any truth behind the notion that loyalty is in fact dying, or not. 

As many of our customers are aware, Wireless Social offer the capability to analyse guest behaviour in terms of visit frequency, recency and dwell time. In addition, the guest profile data is collected when people login to the Wi-Fi, enabling a more targeted approach when segmenting the data for ongoing guest engagement and loyalty campaigns. Furthermore, with the addition of Presence Analytics, we also provide a means to track how successful the marketing activity and various tactics have been in terms of generating more repeat visits and what impact this has on loyalty over time. 

In short, Presence Analytics is a source of data that is often described as the Google Analytics for the real world, offering real time data and reporting using WiFi technology.  

The unique insight Presence Analytics offers is unprecedented in the level of detailed information around consumer behaviour in terms of footfall, repeat vs new visitors, average number of visits, average visitor duration and recency of visits, for example. 

Presence works by tracking the MAC address (unique number associated with any WiFi enabled device), and the received signal strength indicator (RSSI), which identifies roughly how far away the device is from the Wi-Fi Access Point, even if a device is not logged into the network. This gives operators a powerful and accurate method of understanding loyalty, by monitoring how often they see each device over a given period of time.

By taking an average of anonymised data points across casual dining, bars & QSR, we can see that all our customers are making steady progress towards breeding loyalty. Twelve months ago, 76.2% of their guests visited only once, but now that’s down to 71.7%. Those who visited twice was previously 13.4% and is now up to 15.5% and those visiting three times is up from 4.4% to 5.5%. These statistics are very encouraging and would suggest that the digital engagement strategies across our customer base are really starting to reap rewards. Another statistic that backs up this hypothesis is the consistent results seen from email and social marketing. Our customers, on average, see an increase of 54% visit frequency for those guests who receive regular email marketing messages, with up to 300% more visit frequency for more tailored and personalised messages.

See below for the loyalty results for QSRs, Casual Dining, and Bars.