Your business needs customer data. The more data you have about your customers, the better insights you have about them. Adequate customer data helps you make smarter business decisions.
But how you do go about getting customers data?
The most common way offline businesses use to collect customer data is a POS system. And they are quite powerful. With a POS system you can monitor what your customers are buying, how often they visit your business, how much they spend on each visit, etc.
POS systems are pretty useful and can collect enough data to improve your marketing. You can know as much about your customers as online businesses do using POS.
But there’s one thing…
POS Systems Are Great, But Not Perfect
As amazing as POS systems are, in terms of collecting valuable customer data, they are not without flaws. You may get a good deal of customer data but you will not get the total package.
POS systems have three major flaws…
For one, it does not capture every visitor that walks in through your doors. Say for instance, 4 friends walk into your restaurant to grab a bite. But one of them decides to be generous and pay for everyone’s orders. Your POS system won’t capture the other three friends.
For another, it does not catch every purchase data. When a customer pays with a credit card, the POS stores that customer’s purchase data for that transaction. When the customer returns the POS recognizes them when they make payment with the same credit card.
However, if the same customer makes a purchase using cash or a different credit card, the POS records card transaction as a different transaction from a different customer. And the cash transaction data is lost.
For yet another, a POS system cannot help you measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It cannot tell you if a new customer came through your ads. To know this, you might have to use paper coupons with a promo code.
So you cannot evaluate or gauge how effective your marketing is. Even though you can tell when there’s increase or decrease in sales, you may not be able to tell if your marketing campaign caused it.
Luckily, there’s a solution…
And that is…
Integrating Wi-Fi to Your POS System
Where the POS system falls short, Wi-Fi can pick up the slack. Using both systems together combines their strengths and helps you maximize the amount of customer data you can collect.
So let’s look at four major benefits of combining POS and Wi-Fi systems:
- Increased Customer Data Collection
Integrating Wi-Fi to your POS system helps you collect 7 times more customer data than with POS alone. Wi-Fi is a more robust tool for collecting customer information. While POS can collect details such as name, email, item purchased, and amount spend, Wi-Fi can collect all that plus demographic data, psychographic data, social media accounts, churn rate, attrition rate, etc.
Wi-Fi systems can collect data even when the customer doesn’t make a purchase. For example, in our previous scenario, a Wi-Fi system will collect the details of the other three friends, regardless of whether they made any purchases.
- Improved Understanding Of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Using Wi-Fi together with your POS system, you can gather better insight to the lifetime value of your customers. This is because a robust Wi-Fi system can help you collect data like when a customer visits, what time they visit, average amount of money they spend per visit, and what items they buy frequently.
These data points can be used to forecast how much profit a customer will bring you over the period of your business relationship. The result of the forecast will show which set of customers you should focus on.
- Better Targeting And Personalization
The more data you have, the more you know about your customers. And the more you know about your customers, the better you can communicate. You marketing messages become more persuasive and compelling.
With a more compelling message, you can get your customers to take the right action. And the result? More effective marketing, improved customer loyalty, and ultimately an increase in sales.
- You Get Insight Into Your Customers’ Journey
While POS can gather a good deal of valuable information, you can’t tell what stage in the buying journey a customer is in. Wi-Fi system helps you define customers’ stage in the buyer’s journey and helps you segment them.
With this segmentation you can communicate with them based on where they are in the journey. This means you will communicate with first-time subscribers in different way than you would a regular customer.
I believe the benefits listed above are enough to convince you to consider integrating Wi-Fi to your POS. The great thing about Wi-Fi is that once you ‘plug it in’ you don’t have to do anything. The data is collected on autopilot.
Cutting-edge Wi-Fi platforms like SpotOn Wi-Fi come with an intuitive dashboard where you can see how your customer data is organized. With it you can easy spot trends, see customer segments, and plan effective marketing campaigns.
Want to see what our dashboard looks like? Simply request a free demo. You can also contact us for more information.
POSTED ON October 9, 2019Share:
