Restaurant WiFi Marketing: The Complete Guide

In this guide, I’ll show you exactly how to use WiFi marketing to grow and promote your restaurant.

And let’s face it; the guest WiFi you offer patrons is one of the most effective ways that you have to attract them to your restaurant over and over again:

• First and foremost, it allows you to connect with those people and capture their email addresses.
• It gives you the opportunity to tell them about any unique promotions you’re running.
• Hell, it even helps you encourage reviews and star ratings (not to mention, tell you what they think about the experience.)

But unfortunately, restaurant WiFi marketing is not as simple as just enabling guest WiFi and hoping for the best.

Below, you’ll learn everything that will help you make it work.

So, let’s get to it.

What is Restaurant WiFi Marketing?

When we use the term – restaurant WiFi marketing – we refer to strategies that help leverage your restaurant’s guest WiFi network to promote the venue.

This usually happens through:

• Collecting customer emails and other valuable marketing data via a restaurant captive portal and a splash page in exchange for that free internet access.
• Using the data to enable targeted and highly-personalized marketing campaigns.
• Boosting engagement and loyalty with various relevant initiatives.
• Collecting customer feedback (i.e. through an NPS survey)
• Enticing more reviews and star ratings, and more.

We’ll cover the restaurant WiFi marketing process later in the guide. However, I want to give you a quick overview now, as it helps to better understand the concept.

Imagine a new patron entering your restaurant. They wait for their other party to arrive, and naturally, as we all do, they pull out their mobile phone and look up your free network.

However, before they can start using the network, they see a page asking them to sign up either by email or through social media.

It looks more or less like this:

This page is called a splash page.

The login process, however, happens through a system we call a captive portal software. The platform facilitates capturing the person’s contact information and acts as a gateway to connect them to your free network.

As a result of the login, the person can access your guest WiFi.

And you collect their data and add it to your CRM, email marketing platform, or another tool.

However, that’s just one part of the restaurant WiFi marketing process.

• The splash page, the page where user type their details to log in can display additional information: ads, promotions, or any other information.
• It can also display a prompt asking for a review or star rating. It could even connect them with the review engine you use (i.e. Google or Yelp.)
• And the data you’ve collected can be used to trigger personalized email campaigns, and more.

Why restaurant WiFi marketing is such a powerful strategy?

There are several reasons, actually.

First, because it uses something you not only already have but users expect and will use – your guest WiFi.

Research after research proves that customers expect free WiFi access. Further more, to many, it is one of the deciding factors when choosing a venue.

Let me quote some of these data points to you:

• 96% of consumers prefer businesses that offer free WiFi source.
• 74% of customers want free WiFi to be part of their restaurant experience source.
• The availability of WiFi influences 79.5% of customers when deciding where to shop or dine source.
• 53% of consumers have connected to WiFi at a café or restaurant; 50% at a fast food establishment source.
• Restaurants using WiFi marketing have seen up to 38% of at-risk customers return after receiving targeted offers source.

Similarly, there is a wealth of data confirming that, when free WiFi is available, customers tend to spend longer in restaurants and other establishments, and spend more money there.

• Over 50% of customers spend more money when free WiFi is available source.
• 60%–62% of businesses report that customers spend more time in their establishment when free WiFi is available source

Also, restaurant WiFi marketing is a relatively unobtrusive marketing strategy.

After all, the strategy activates only when a person decides to connect to your guest WiFi. This means that you are not disrupting their dining experience, and you are not pushing the marketing message in their face.

With restaurant WiFi marketing, you are interacting with them only at the time they’ve decided to do so.

And even when you use their details to send personalized offers, etc., the whole experience happens outside of their dining experience.

Lastly, WiFi marketing offers incredible benefits for your restaurant:

• Building a customer database: With WiFi marketing you can collect emails, phone numbers, social profiles, visit frequency, demographics, and more data about your customers.
• Personalized marketing: All the data you’ve collected allows you to send targeted messages, offers, and coupons both through the splash page and email.
• Real-time analytics: Most WiFi marketing tools let you track campaign performance, open rates, coupon redemptions, and more. And that’s an invaluable data to help you improve marketing performance further.
• Social media growth: You can encourage follows, likes, and reviews by redirecting users to your social accounts post-login or using social WiFi to log them to your guest network with their social media profiles.

How restaurant WiFi marketing works

We’ve already covered the first step of the process – collecting data during the guest WiFi signup process.

This is when you use a WiFi email capture software (aka a WiFi captive portal) to ask the person to log in and also, to display targeted messages or promotions.

The captive portal will, in turn, create or update that contact in your CRM or email marketing platform via a direct integration.

It will also collect additional information about the restaurant’s patron – frequency of visits, basic demographic, etc.

All that data combined will allow you to create personalized campaigns for the person.

Let’s review the process again, this time focusing on what happens AFTER they’ve signed up for your guest WiFi.

Since your captive portal creates (or updates) customer profile based on the capture data, you now have a new opportunity to communicate with them.

Email campaigns

You can use the data to enrich your email marketing efforts.

First of all, with the person’s email, you can send them messages:

• Promoting new dishes or menu items.
• Offering discounts or promotions (or simply telling them of any new promotions you run)
• Inviting them (or offering incentives) to revisit your restaurant.

But also, you can use email to send:

• Birthday offers
• Loyalty rewards
• Information about any referral programs you run, and more.

Finally, you can use email marketing to send win-back emails to customers who haven’t visited your restaurant in a while.

Customer experience feedback

Since you’ve connected with the patron, you can also entice them to leave feedback about their customer experience, and even respond to their comments, if necessary.

This will communicate dedication to providing the best experience and respect for each patron.

Part of this process can happen through your captive portal, which can display prompts to leave reviews or an NPS survey directly as the person engages with your free WiFi.

Return visitors marketing

Finally, you can use restaurant WiFi marketing to engage returning visitors:

• Automatically recognize returning guests when they log in to WiFi and show them personalized greetings or welcome-back messages.
• Offer tailored discounts upon login, such as a special deal on a favorite dish or a loyalty reward for repeat visits.
• Use collected data to send personalized emails or push notifications during the visit, such as exclusive offers, event invitations, or menu recommendations based on previous orders.
• Encourage social media engagement by prompting returning customers to check in online, follow the restaurant’s social pages, or share their experience for a reward.
• Use analytics to identify and segment returning visitors, allowing for ongoing refinement of engagement strategies and more relevant marketing.

Note the wealth of potential here.

Not only restaurant WiFi marketing allows you to provide free network access. It strengthens your communication with customers, both new and returning:

• It allows you to welcome new patrons.
• It will also help you make returning patrons more welcome.
• It will even build almost unbreakable bond between you and your customers. Just imagine how they’d feel, receiving a birthday voucher from you a couple of days from the day?

But naturally, restaurant WiFi marketing has some drawbacks, too.

Setup. Although it doesn’t require any major technology to implement (more on this in just a moment,) it does demand some planning for it to work.

You need to decide how you want to engage patrons. Then, you need to implement those strategies across your captive portal, email and other marketing tools, etc. And finally, you need to test them over at least a couple of weeks to see how well they work.

But it’s worth it.

Privacy and data security. Some customers may raise concerns about their data being collected, and you might need to have policies in place to ensure compliance with all relevant data and privacy regulations (i.e., GDPR.)

Issues with slow connections. This isn’t a drawback of WiFi marketing, rather of offering guest WiFi. Nonetheless, to some customers slow, unreliable, or insecure WiFi connections might be synonymous with negative customer experience. Naturally, that only occurs if your connection speed drops but still, it can be an issue.

NOTE: MyPlace – my captive portal software for restaurants – offers the ability to limit network usage or restrict access to prevent bandwidth overload.

How to Get Started with Restaurant WiFi Marketing?

First, I am assuming that you are already offering guest WiFi access to your restaurant’s patrons.

If you’re also already using email marketing to promote your restaurant, then it’s even better.

The process of launching a restaurant WiFi marketing will be relatively simple.

In a nutshell, you will need to:

Select a captive portal software to facilitate guest signup and display the splash page.

There are several captive portal platforms available on the market.

I’ve actually collected the best ones in this guide.

However, here, I want to tell you about MyPlace – the captive portal software I created for restaurants and companies in the hospitality sector.

MyPlace is a captive portal software focusing on helping clients to capture more emails and customer data on guest WiFi networks.

With MyPlace restaurants, hotels, bars, and other companies in the hospitality industry can capture valuable email and marketing data on their customers and forward it to their CRM or other marketing tools.

And needless to say, such data gives them an incredible opportunity to:

• build much better and more focused email lists,
• remarket and/or upsell to the customer after they have left the physical location
• understand their customers better to build stronger connections with them
• boost sales, increase signups to loyalty programs, get more reviews, and more.

I like to tell our customers that with MyPlace, they turn your guest WiFi into an amazing marketing powerhouse.

MyPlace provides a whole range of features to power your WiFi marketing:

• Email capture
• Social logins
• Advanced email verification
• Customizable splash page
• Return guest recognition
• Dual-branded portals per site
• Visitor analytics
• Smart WiFi usage controls
• User segmentation
• Micro-targeting
• Event tracking
• Device recognition
• Data export
• UniFi site hosting
• NPS surveys
• Review prompts
• API and webhooks
• Advanced dynamic integrations, and more.

MyPlace supports the following network infrastructures: UniFi, Meraki, Cambium, Ruckus, Aruba, and Omada.

Finally, MyPlace intergrates with a whole range of marketing tools: Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Airship, Facebook Custom Audiences, Klaviyo, Hubspot, Salesforce, and many others through Zapier.

Design a branded captive portal (login page) to collect customer data and display promotions.

The key to this step is to ensure that your guest WiFi provides a branded journey for customers.

Rather than seeing a default captive portal and splash page, one that wouldn’t look anything like your brand, they instantly recognize it as part of your restaurant.

At minimum, it means that it features your logo, brand colors, and the overall look and feel is tailored to your venue.

This personalization ensures every user interaction is infused with your unique brand essence.

Decide on data collection methods

Typically, you can use any of the three most common methods to collect customer data:

• Email
• Social login, or
• A custom form.

It’s also perfectly fine to offer more than one method for customers to sign up for your free WiFi.

However, keep in mind that the method will tie in to the data you collect.

For example, if you only use social WiFi, you will not be able to send them personalized emails. After all, you haven’t collected their email addresses.

Similarly, if you focus on creating a custom form with many fields, you might alienate more privacy conscious patrons who might not want to share too many details about themselves.

I recommend that you start simple, with email signup, and test other methods to see which one works best for you.

Train staff to assist customers with WiFi access and basic troubleshooting

Unfortunately, some customers might experience issues with accessing your guest WiFi.

It might be because something’s wrong with it, or their device simply isn’t connecting.

The important thing is that they will turn to your staff for help, and the last thing they want to hear is that you’ll call your network supplier to try and help them.

So, train your staff on what to do when customers face the most common issues with accessing the guest WiFi:

• Captive portal not loading properly
• Weak or inconsistent signal strength
• Device incompatibility
• Interference from kitchen equipment, metal surfaces, or nearby networks causing connection drops
• Difficulty with login (because, let’s face it, sometimes customers don’t follow instructions to the dot, causing issues when connecting.)

Promote your free WiFi

Finally, tell all patrons that your restaurant offers free WiFi to entice more of them to connect (and initiate the restaurant WiFi marketing process.)

There are several simple ways to do that:

• Place simple signage at the entrance, near the cash register, or on the walls introducing your free guest WiFi and telling patrons how to access it.
• Generate a QR code that will connect your guest automatically to your WiFi. Place the QR code image in your restaurant to promote the free WiFi service. MyPlace includes a free QR code generator matched to your guest SSID
• Add a note about free WiFi on your menus to reach all customers directly.
• Advertise free WiFi on your restaurant’s social media profiles and Google Business profile.
• Use window decals to promote free WiFi from the outside, making it visible to passersby.
• Place small table tents or cards on tables with information about free WiFi and any login instructions.

And that’s it, with that, you have your restaurant WiFi marketing program running.

Now, let’s discuss how to implement it further and ensure success.

Best practices for restaurant WiFi marketing

There are five key factors that affect how the WiFi marketing strategy works out for your restaurant:

1. Reliable WiFi network

Naturally, without that, anything else in the strategy will fall apart.

So, make sure that you have a fast, reliable, and secure guest WiFi network.

Not only this will provide good and positive customer experience. It will also mean that patrons at your restaurant will want to continue logging in, providing you with more and more data points to use in your marketing.

2. WiFi access experience

The second thing to look for is the entire experience of accessing your guest WiFi.

For this, make sure that:

• You provide clear instructions that will help patrons access and log in to the network
• You display an engaging (and on-brand) splash page during the process.

Particularly, the splash page is critical here.

First of all, an on-brand splash page will reassure your patrons that they are indeed accessing your network, and are not being duped to provide their details to some third-party.

Secondly, a simple splash page will help establish connection with them through promotions or discounts.

3. Use the log in process to entice more reviews

The key purpose of the splash page is to log someone into your free WiFi AND capture their details for your CRM.

But you should (and I can’t stress it enough) also use it to entice more patrons to review your restaurant.

Connect your splash page to any review sites where you’d like to build a stronger presence (i.e., Google Maps, Yelp, etc.) and let customers choose whether they want to review your restaurant.

4. Train your staff to communicate the benefits of your guest WiFi

Let’s face it; your staff are the frontline ambassadors of your restaurant’s brand and services.

So, how they introduce and explain your WiFi sign-up can make a huge difference between guests ignoring the offer or enthusiastically participating.

An informed and friendly approach helps guests see the value in signing up, leading to higher engagement rates and a richer customer database for your marketing efforts.

Remember, the more people signing up, the more emails you collect, and more data you have to enrich your campaigns.

Here are just some of the aspects of the WiFi strategy that your staff should know how to address:

• Privacy and concerns issues. Equip staff with clear, honest answers about how guest data is protected and used only for restaurant communications.
• Sign-up process. Show staff how the WiFi sign-up works, so they can confidently guide guests through it if needed.
• Guest benefits of the free WiFi. Train staff to clearly and enthusiastically communicate what guests will gain by accessing your free WiFi network.

How to measure the success of your restaurant WiFi marketing strategy

Finally, let me tell you how to evaluate whether your restaurant WiFi marketing is working.

You do that my monitoring key metrics:

• Number of sign-ups, naturally, which will tell you whether people actually engage with your guest WiFi.
• Repeat visits – This will determine that patrons you’ve engaged with the WiFi marketing strategy are responding positively to your efforts.
• Email campaign engagement – email opens, etc. – that will reveal how well patrons respond to your messages.
• Coupon redemptions (providing that you offer coupons as part of your WiFi marketing strategy.)
• Finally, growth of social media following, providing that you offer social WiFi signup option.

As you can see, these metrics relate to different aspects of WiFi marketing. Some focus on your email list, others on the performance of your email campaigns.

This means that you’ll have to collect them through various platforms. But even if you monitor just the number of sign-ups first, something that you can easily do with tools like MyPlace – you will get a good picture of how well your strategy is fueling other marketing efforts.

And that’s it…

Guest WiFi is a must-have for every restaurant.

But with restaurant WiFi marketing, you don’t just offer guest network access. You use it to grow your list, get reviews, and keep customers coming back.

In other words, restaurant WiFi marketing isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a revenue channel. And with the right setup, it runs quietly in the background, doing the heavy lifting.