For small businesses, free guest WiFi started as a bonus amenity — a way to stand out from the competition. Now, it’s become an expected part of the customer experience, not just an add-on. Modern analytics, however, have moved guest WiFi from a consumer-goodwill cost center to a source of valuable information about your customers and preferences, as well as trends and patterns around your business.

Your guest WiFi data can provide valuable information you can use to enhance customer experience, reimagine marketing, and drive new revenue. Here are the top six insights you can mine from your guest WiFi:

1. Foot-Traffic Conversions: By analyzing footfall traffic, you can see how many people are walking by your business with WiFi-enabled phones, and how many of them are actually coming inside. Use this data to test the effectiveness of displays to attract customers or analyze traffic patterns on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

2. Balance of New vs. Repeat Users: Are you drawing people back to your business? Dive into a specific window of time and see how many of the guests who logged onto your network were new and how many of them were repeat customers. You can even look at the average duration of time between visits for repeat customers.

3. Dwell Time: How long are you keeping customers engaged? See how long customers stay in your store or business. Drill down into specific times of day to see when turnover is longer or shorter to drive staffing decisions and create promotions to keep guests on site for longer, if needed.

4. Purchase Patterns: When you tie your WiFi data to your customer database, you open up new worlds in terms of personalization. See what an in-store customer has purchased in the past and how they have interacted with your brand. If you can match a WiFi ID to customer history, you can create individual promotions and bespoke experiences based on context to foster stickiness.

5. Login & Social Media Preferences: How are your customers getting to you? Analyze the social networks customers are using to log on to your WiFi network. Reinforce marketing activities on social channels and meet customers where they are with content that’s contextually relevant.

6. Customer Feedback: There’s no doubt that analytics are powerful, but even the most advanced techniques sometimes aren’t a match for the old-fashioned suggestion box. Customize your landing page to link out to an online feedback form so you can make it easy for customers to offer feedback on-site, in real time.

These rich insights are no longer exclusively for large businesses with big budgets. Small businesses can now run analytics on WiFi for short money, pulling actionable insights to inform decisions and make impactful changes. For more information on innovative solutions created for small business owners from Comcast Business, visit www.comcastbusiness.com.

Learn more about how your small business can leverage technology to connect with customers:
How Small Business Owners Can Build Community with Social Media