How to leverage SMS marketing for business to increase return visits

Welcome to the Purple Technical Briefing series. Today we're covering a topic that sits right at the intersection of your WiFi infrastructure and your marketing revenue: SMS marketing for business, and specifically how to use it to drive return visits to your venue. [medium pause] If you're a marketing director, a CRM manager, or you run operations at a hotel, retail chain, or stadium, this is directly relevant to your next quarter. We'll cover the architecture, the compliance requirements, the implementation steps, and the numbers you should expect. [short pause] Let's get into it. [medium pause] First, the context. SMS marketing achieves a 98% open rate. That's not a typo. Ninety-eight percent. Email, by comparison, sits at around 20 to 28 percent. And 90% of SMS messages are read within three minutes of delivery. The average return on investment for SMS marketing sits at around 71 dollars for every dollar spent, according to Infobip's 2026 messaging trends data. That's a 7,100% ROI. [short pause] So why aren't more venue operators using it effectively? The answer is almost always the same: data quality. You can't run SMS campaigns without verified phone numbers. And most venues are sitting on a goldmine of visitor data that they're not capturing correctly. [medium pause] This is where Guest WiFi becomes your most important marketing asset. [short pause] Here's how the architecture works. When a visitor connects to your Guest WiFi network, they pass through a Captive Portal - that's the login page they see before they get internet access. At that point, you have a conscious-choice opt-in moment. The visitor enters their phone number and email address, ticks a box confirming they consent to receive marketing communications, and connects. That data is verified - it's a real number attached to a real person who is physically in your venue right now. [short pause] Purple Engage captures that data at the point of login and feeds it directly into your CRM. Across our 80,000-plus live venues, we've processed 440 million logins in 2024 alone. That's 440 million verified data points, each one a potential SMS marketing contact. [medium pause] Now let's talk about the technical implementation in more detail. [short pause] The first component is your WiFi hardware. Purple operates as a cloud overlay on top of your existing infrastructure. Whether you're running Cisco Meraki, HPE Aruba, Ruckus, Juniper Mist, or Ubiquiti UniFi, the Purple platform sits above the hardware layer and manages the Captive Portal experience. You don't need to rip and replace anything. [short pause] The second component is the Captive Portal itself. This is where the opt-in happens. GDPR and the UK's Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations - PECR - require explicit, informed consent before you can send marketing SMS messages. The consent must be granular: the visitor needs to understand they're opting in to SMS marketing specifically, not just agreeing to terms of service. Purple's splash page templates are pre-built to meet these requirements, with separate tick boxes for email and SMS consent. [short pause] The third component is audience segmentation. Once you have phone numbers in your database, you segment them. First-time visitors get a different message to repeat visitors. Visitors who haven't returned in 30 days get a win-back message. VIP customers - those who've visited five or more times - get exclusive early access offers. Purple Engage automates this segmentation based on visit frequency, dwell time, and time since last visit. [short pause] The fourth component is the trigger logic. This is where the automation earns its keep. You define the rules: if a visitor hasn't returned within 14 days, send a re-engagement SMS. If a visitor connects on a Friday, send a weekend offer. If a visitor's birthday is this month, send a personalised discount. These triggers fire automatically, without any manual intervention from your team. Let me give you two concrete examples of this working in practice. [short pause] First, a hotel scenario. A 150-room property was capturing guest email addresses through Guest WiFi but not phone numbers. They added a phone number field to their Captive Portal with explicit SMS consent. Within 90 days, they had 2,400 verified phone numbers. They set up a single automated trigger: any guest who checked out and hadn't made a new booking within 21 days received an SMS with a direct booking link and a 10% return discount. The campaign achieved a 34% click-through rate and generated 180 direct bookings in the first quarter - revenue that would otherwise have gone through an OTA at 15 to 25% commission. [short pause] Second, a retail scenario. A fashion retailer with 12 stores was running email campaigns with a 22% open rate. They added SMS to their Guest WiFi capture flow. Within six months, they had built an SMS list of 18,000 opted-in shoppers. They ran a flash sale campaign - a single SMS sent at 10am on a Saturday morning. By 2pm, footfall across all 12 stores was up 28% compared to the same Saturday the previous month. The message was 147 characters. The campaign cost less than 200 pounds to send. [medium pause] Now let's talk about the pitfalls, because there are several ways to get this wrong. [short pause] The most common mistake is treating SMS like email. Email can be long, rich, and image-heavy. SMS cannot. Your message needs to be under 160 characters to avoid being split into multiple segments, which increases cost and looks unprofessional. Get to the point in the first sentence. Include one clear call to action. Include your brand name at the start so the recipient knows immediately who's messaging them. [short pause] The second mistake is sending too frequently. SMS is intimate - it lands in the same place as messages from family and friends. If you send more than four messages per month to the same contact, opt-out rates climb sharply. Industry data suggests two to three messages per month is the optimal frequency for most venue operators. [short pause] The third mistake is ignoring the compliance requirements. Under GDPR, you must be able to demonstrate consent for every contact in your list. You need a clear opt-out mechanism in every message - typically Reply STOP to unsubscribe. You must process opt-outs within 24 hours. And you must not send messages between 9pm and 8am. Purple's platform handles all of this automatically, but if you're building a custom integration, these are non-negotiable. [short pause] The fourth mistake is not measuring correctly. The metrics that matter for SMS are: delivery rate, which should be above 95%; click-through rate, which should be above 15% for a well-segmented list; opt-out rate, which should be below 2%; and revenue attributed, which you track by giving each campaign a unique UTM parameter or a unique discount code. [medium pause] Now, a rapid-fire round of the questions we hear most often. [short pause] Do I need a dedicated short code? For most venue operators, a shared short code or a long number works fine for campaigns under 10,000 messages per month. If you're sending at scale, a dedicated short code improves deliverability and brand recognition. [short pause] Can I send SMS internationally? Yes, but the regulations vary significantly by country. The UK operates under GDPR and PECR. The US operates under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act - TCPA. Always check local regulations before sending cross-border campaigns. [short pause] What's the difference between a promotional SMS and a transactional SMS? Transactional messages - booking confirmations, receipts, alerts - don't require marketing consent. Promotional messages - offers, discounts, re-engagement campaigns - do. Keep these lists separate. [short pause] How do I integrate SMS with my existing CRM? Purple Engage integrates with major CRM platforms via API. If you're running Salesforce, HubSpot, or a custom system, the phone numbers and consent flags export via webhook or CSV, and you can feed them directly into your existing campaign tooling. [medium pause] To wrap up. Three things to take away from this briefing. [short pause] One: your Guest WiFi is a data capture asset. If you're not collecting verified phone numbers at login with explicit SMS consent, you're leaving revenue on the table. Start there. [short pause] Two: SMS outperforms email on every engagement metric that matters - open rate, read time, click-through rate, and ROI. It belongs in your marketing mix alongside email, not instead of it. [short pause] Three: compliance is not optional. GDPR, PECR, and TCPA have teeth. Build your opt-in flow correctly from day one. Purple's platform is ISO 27001 certified, GDPR compliant, and CCPA compliant - the consent architecture is built in. [short pause] The full technical guide is available at purple.ai. You can also explore our guide on SMS marketing best practices, which covers message templates, timing strategies, and A/B testing frameworks in detail. Thanks for listening.