If you want to increase your business by acquiring more customers in your shop and engage them effectively, you should rely on in-store Wi-Fi. In this post, we discuss the 5 main benefits of in-store Wi-Fi deployments for the retail industry.
Nowadays, the success of shops, department stores, and shopping malls revolves around meeting the increasingly demanding customer needs. Accordingly, a good strategy to acquire customers and increase in-store engagement to retain them is mandatory. The best way to do so is by adopting a Wi-Fi solution in your shop. Let’s see the 5 main advantages of in-store Wi-Fi for retailers.
1. Better market segmentation
Wi-Fi is a valuable resource for shops to collect customer data easily. Indeed, when users authenticate to a network, they are required to provide personal information, such as name, email, or phone numbers, age, gender, etc. In this way, customers are no longer unknown, and network admins of shops and stores can use data gathered through Wi-Fi logins to identify and segment their customers accordingly. On the captive portal provided by Tanaza, you can create personalized login pages choosing among a variety of user authentication methods: login through email addresses or phone number, authentication through a personal code (for example, the fidelity card code), or SMS and social login.
2. Enhanced customer experience
In-store Wi-Fi allows you to offer a personalized experience to your customers. Indeed, through Wi-Fi, you can capture and analyze customer data to better know and serve your store’s visitors. Tanaza features an Analytics Dashboard where you can analyze all user data collected through your Wi-Fi network. For instance, you see the number of people who visited your shop last week, month, or during a selected period, how many times they came back, their demographic information, the number of receipts of a specific day, etc. In this way, you can easily detect people’s shopping trends and base your offering on that: if you see that during the weekends’ families are the main shoppers, you can focus your sales strategy on children collections. At the same time, if you notice a significant trend of female shoppers during certain hours, you can decide to target them with tailored discounts on female items of clothing.
3. Improved brand and product promotion
You can leverage the customizable login page provided by Tanaza to further advertise your brand and products and target your customers in a personalized way: for instance, you can add discount coupons for new customers to use on their next visit, as a way to incentivize them to come back to your location. At the same time, you can give suggestions about specific items to those customers who, on average, usually stay more than 10 minutes in your shop. In doing so, customers will feel more engaged and will be keener to buy your products. Also, by simply adding an HTML widget on your login page, you can improve your ranking on platforms such as Yelp. Last but not least, you can consider adding a connection with your e-commerce, so as to further promote your business: firstly, you can add it in the walled garden and then link it from your login page.
4. Improved customer loyalty
Not only in-store Wi-Fi helps you to target your visitors better, but it is also a useful marketing tool to retain them effectively. With Tanaza, you can export the list of your Wi-Fi users to any CRM and marketing platform, such as MailChimp, and divide them among new and returning customers. In doing so, you can create real-time triggered marketing campaigns, by sending personalized emails to promote your new collections and products or send an SMS to incentivize new customers to join your loyalty program. In addition, in order to improve your customer loyalty, you can rely on the “Remember me” feature enabled by Tanaza, thanks to which customers connect automatically every time they come back to your shop: indeed, after the first authentication to the Wi-Fi network, users are remembered for a certain amount of time and are welcomed back on their next logins.
5. Increased social visibility
An effective way to attract customers and enhance your brand awareness is to leverage social media. Among the user authentication processes enabled by Tanaza,social login is the most suitable to increase social visibility and online engagement in a fast way. Through social login, customers access your network using their social accounts, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Thanks to this authentication method, you can ask users to like your Facebook page or to share their positions through a Facebook Check-in: in this way, more people will hear about your store. With Tanaza, network admins can real-time monitor their social hotspot usage and, for instance, compare Facebook insights and social media analytics on their social dashboards.
Understand the power gain with the Rule of 10s and 3s
In the datasheet of your access points, you will find the device’s radio power. This value describes how well the transmitting antenna converts the input power into radio waves (output power). This is also called “power gain”.
The power of an access point is the intensity of its wireless signal. In general, people believe that the higher the power, the further distance you can cover. But this is not true, as the mathematical relation between the covered area and the power of the access point is much more subtle.
Before explaining the formulas, let’s make a practical example.
Imagine that the intensity of the wireless signal is represented by a light bulb. If you light the bulb in a dark room, the room will be equally illuminated by the bulb, in all directions with the same intensity.
This change in intensity is what is called the gain; it represents the increase of power, in other words the ratio between the input power and the output power.
Gain = Power output / Power input
The gain of antennas is expressed in decibels (dB). In the wireless communication sector, the power output and input are in milliWatts (mW).
To be simple, let’s see the so-called Rule of 10s and 3s, that allows us to calculate output power of an access point.
For every gain of 3 dB, the power in mW is doubled
For every loss of 3 dB, the power in mW is halved
For every gain of 10 dB, the power in mW is multiplied by 10
For every loss of 10 dB, the power in mW is divided by 10
Example: we have an access point that can transmit 100 mW. We add an antenna that it supposes to give a gain of 3 dB.
100 mW + 3 dB = 100 x 2 = 200 mW
To conclude, if you want to optimise your WLAN performances, you have to think carefully about the power level you need and the direction in which you want to spread the wireless signal. Prefer mono-directional antennas if you want to cover a small specific area, rather than an access point with omnidirectional antennas for bigger deployment.
Lewisham becomes the first smart London’s borough thanks to Smart benches
Lewisham, the Londoner borough is experiencing the Smart Benches technology since January 2017.
Smart cities are the new trend and projects born every day to make our cities smartest and easiest to live. To reach this goal, the London city is experimenting in one of its boroughs, Lewisham, the Smart benches Technology, a solar-powered bench that provides mobile device charging port and free Wi-Fi.
Together with the Council, MKTG and the Cancer Research UK, they launched the world’s first network of smart benches in London, Lewisham. The idea was to feature, in addition to the free Wi-Fi access, a contactless technology that promotes and fundraises for World Cancer Day. The public had the opportunity to donate £2 to the charity’s life-saving research to beat cancer just by tapping their contactless debit or credit card on the Smart Bench.
Each smart bench has been installed according to a location planning by MKTG to identify the high footfall locations in the city.
This project started with the deployment of 10 smart benches around the Lewisham borough in January 2017, followed by the installation of 10 additional smart benches in February. In total, 80 smart benches should be deployed this year. Each smart bench is powered by solar technology that makes them autonomous. Also, each device features a free Wi-Fi access, an environmental sensor that calculates the air quality and other data about the city that residents can check through the mobile app “Strawberry energy”.
Miloš Milisavljević, founder and CEO of Strawberry Energy, said: “We have been working with London boroughs to breathe life into our dream of a network of solar-powered Smart Benches, making energy free for all Londoners” and easier access to a Wi-Fi network to all residents in need of connectivity.
How user authentication works with Tanaza’s access points and captive portal
In this article, you will learn about the steps needed to authenticate users on your captive portal through Tanaza’s access points, together with the most used authentication processes enabled by Tanaza (Facebook login, etc.).
Tanaza is a software that allows network admins to manage user authentication in a very intuitive way through the configuration of a customizable captive portal. A captive portal is the web page people see before accessing a public Wi-Fi network, i.e. when they use the free Wi-Fi connection of a bar, restaurant, hotel, shop, etc. At first, when clients try to log in to your Wi-Fi to browse a webpage, they are unauthenticated. Being unauthenticated means that their access to your network is limited to the captive portal, other than content and services included in the Walled Garden. To learn more about which websites and URLs are accessible by a client before authentication read this article. On the captive portal, users can then authenticate themselves and browse the web on their Wi-Fi-enabled devices. Let’s now see the steps needed to authenticate users on a captive portal and the main login methods featured by Tanaza.
Opening of the login page of the captive portal
Clients’ login flow starts in this way: the unauthenticated user’s device reaches your access point and requests access to the Internet. The access point, that is connected to the Tanaza Cloud, sees the request but doesn’t recognize the client as authenticated. Accordingly, instead of showing the user a web page, it redirects the unauthenticated user to the login page, aka your captive portal. Once here, the user authenticates through the captive portal and is therefore authorized to browse the web. Now, the user can freely browse any webpage, using your Wi-Fi network. To better understand how to use the Tanaza captive portal functionality, read this article.
In general, network administrators cannot see the list of users connected to their network in real-time. Instead, Tanaza allows network admins to see the list of connected clients from anywhere, anytime, through a web dashboard, cloud.tanaza.com. Specifically, they see real-time users connected and authenticated (or even in the process of authenticating) through their cloud.tanaza.com management platform. Also, they see the historical data from all authenticated users, together with their personal information, in the Tanaza Analytics Dashboard. The screenshots below show how data about users and connections are viewed on the management platform of the Tanaza Analytics Dashboard.
Why does it matter? This twofold kind of information helps you to understand better how the user authentication process to your Wi-Fi network works and the source of some related issues. For instance, visualizing a client in the list of connected clients on the Tanaza Cloud Platform, but not on the analytics dashboard, allows you to know that that user is in the process of authenticating, but didn’t provide his credentials to access Internet yet. Also, Tanaza can help you to detect potential network issues. The following screenshot shows an example of a connected client: here you can see the signal strength. If this element is red, for instance, it means that the user may have problems in reaching your captive portal due to a weak wireless signal, or that he may experience slow WiFi. The best choice in this case is to add one more access point to your network, in order to provide a stronger signal.
When you configure a click-through login page for user registration, clients authenticate to your network by simply clicking on a button, without providing any personal data. In this case, the authentication process starts once users click on the button and are redirected to the captive portal before accessing the Internet. When the cloud receives users’ request, it notifies the access point of the network that users have authenticated. Now, the access point clears away the captive portal on clients’ devices, and users can fully access Internet. The screenshot below shows how connected clients appear on the Tanaza dashboard: compared to the previous example, you can see more information about clients, as they have successfully authenticated on the captive portal, although in this case no personal data is available. Read this article to know how the Tanaza Analytics Dashboard works.
Typical use case: the click-through login method is favored by companies with an advertising-based business model, which value clicks for their ads and do not need any other personal data the clientele. Usually, network admins add videos, ads and banners on the login page, so as to further emphasise and advertise their products on the captive portal.
Other login methods: social login
Tanaza features a broad range of authentication methods within its captive portal, i.e. access through email or phone, voucher-based authentication, registration by filling a form and authentication using social networks, aka social login. Lately, the extensive use of social media among people led to the spread of social login among the different user login methods adopted by businesses. In this way, users can connect to an SSID using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, etc. In this case, user authentication is completed when the login flow through social networks ends, meaning when the user accepts the terms and conditions requested by the social network, i.e. Facebook. The cloud then receives the user device’s request and notifies the access point of the network that the client has authenticated. At this point, full network access is granted. The following screenshot shows the Tanaza dashboard containing a connected client, who authenticated through the social login provided by Tanaza using his Twitter account.
Typical use case: any business whose goal is to boost its social visibility and increase its brand awareness leveraging the power of social media. A bar, for instance, could ask its visitors to like its Facebook page or to share their position to gain more visibility among other Facebook users. Also, a well-working wifi enhances the possibilities to gain positive reviews about your business on websites like TripAdvisor and Yelp. Read these instructions to learn how to setup a Tanaza built-in login page with social login.
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