Rebecca Moy | November 29th, 2018. The WiFi boom continues, giving way to more opportunities than ever for so-called “digital transformation”.
While there’s a lot of ideas about exactly what this means, a few things are clear: it can give physical retailers of all types a fighting chance against online stores, and there are plenty of ways they can make money off of it. Exactly how these goals are met was the subject of the business breakfast co-organized by Fontech and Flame Analytics in Madrid on November 28th.
From the Fontech side, Agustín Sánchez Fonseca (Enterprise Solutions Sales Manager) gave context to the current state of WiFi for retailers (hint: it keeps growing) but also explored the many reasons that it keeps failing to live up to its potential in terms of generating revenue. These reasons often include inadequate, insufficient, or even redundant infrastructure, the complexity of using big data, and non-compliance with GDPR. He then demonstrated just how Fontech’s WiFi products and solutions bridge the gap between the current, often inadequate state and one that is ideal and profitable for retailers in terms of being able to generate and profile leads, and attract and maintain customers.
On the other hand, Lucía González Ramos (Communication, Marketing & Sales) from Flame Analytics, gave an engaging overview of how the retail landscape has been completely transformed, mostly negatively, by three clear factors: the global financial crisis of the last decade, the relentless growth of ecommerce, and changes in consumer behavior. The light at the end of tunnel, however, is digital marketing strongly backed by WiFi.
Lucía explained how in-store analytics, guest WiFi, and location-based marketing allow physical retailers to get to know and connect with their customers in order to give them a very personalized offering. By collecting in-store statistics (e.g. how many people enter a location, what products they touch, how much they spend, etc.), we can then gather even further insights by offering guest WiFi, enabling personal data collection that is fully compliant. Once we have this much deeper level of understanding of them, we now know what we can offer that they’ll actually want, and design targeted, location-based marketing campaigns for them. To make her point, Lucía gave five very clear use cases to demonstrate just how retailers of all types (e.g. shops, department stores, hotels, gyms, restaurantes) can take advantage of these tools to bolster attraction, upselling, satisfaction, engagement and loyalty.
We were so pleased with the turnout for the breakfast, and would like to thank all of you who made it for coffee and good conversation!
