How to leverage marketing by SMS to increase return visits

Speak in British English with a confident, authoritative, and conversational tone - like a senior consultant briefing a client in a boardroom. Measured pace, clear diction, warm but professional. Occasional natural pauses for emphasis. No filler sounds. UK English pronunciation throughout: Welcome to the Purple technical briefing series. Today we are talking about marketing by SMS - specifically, how venue operators can use it to drive return visits from guests, shoppers, and attendees who have already connected to your WiFi. [medium pause] Let me set the scene. You have a hotel with three hundred rooms. Every guest connects to your WiFi at check-in. You capture their phone number at the login portal. They check out. And then... nothing. No follow-up. No incentive to book direct next time. That guest goes back to an OTA and you pay commission again. That is the problem we are solving today. [medium pause] Section one: why SMS, and why now. The numbers here are hard to ignore. SMS achieves a ninety-eight percent open rate. Email sits at around twenty percent. SMS messages are read within three minutes of delivery in ninety percent of cases. The click-through rate for SMS sits at eighteen percent - email manages two point five. And the return on investment? Between twenty-one and forty-one pounds for every pound spent, according to Upcity's 2023 benchmarks. But here is the critical point for venue operators: SMS only works when the phone number is verified and consent is explicit. That is where your Guest WiFi infrastructure becomes the foundation of your entire SMS marketing programme. [medium pause] When a guest connects to your WiFi through a captive portal - that login page they see before they get internet access - they provide a phone number and tick a consent box. That is a conscious-choice opt-in. It is GDPR-compliant. It is first-party data that you own. No third-party cookies. No data broker. You collected it directly, with permission, at the moment of visit. Purple Engage captures that data at login across eighty thousand venues. Four hundred and forty million logins in 2024 alone. That is the scale of the first-party data pipeline we are talking about. [medium pause] Section two: the technical architecture. Let me walk you through how this actually works end to end. Step one: the guest connects to your WiFi. The captive portal presents a login form. The form requests a name, an email address, and a mobile number. Critically, it includes a clearly worded SMS marketing opt-in checkbox - separate from the terms of service. This is required under UK GDPR and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, known as PECR. Step two: that data flows into your CRM or marketing automation platform. Purple integrates natively with platforms including Salesforce, HubSpot, and Mailchimp, as well as direct API connections for custom stacks. Step three: the segmentation engine categorises that visitor. Are they a first-time guest? A lapsed visitor who has not returned in sixty days? A frequent guest who visits weekly? Each segment gets a different SMS sequence. Step four: automated campaigns fire based on triggers. A first-time guest receives a welcome message with a return incentive twenty-four hours after their visit. A lapsed visitor receives a re-engagement offer at the thirty-day mark. A frequent visitor receives an exclusive loyalty reward. Step five: when the guest returns and reconnects to your WiFi, the system closes the loop. The return visit is attributed to the SMS campaign. You have a measurable conversion. [medium pause] This is the architecture that makes marketing by SMS genuinely attributable. You are not guessing whether the SMS drove the return visit. You know, because the same WiFi login system that captured the number also confirms the return. [medium pause] Section three: segmentation strategy. The biggest mistake operators make with SMS marketing is treating their entire contact list as one audience. That produces generic messages, high opt-out rates, and wasted spend. Segment by visit behaviour. Three segments cover the majority of use cases. Segment one: lapsed visitors. These are guests who connected once and have not returned in thirty to ninety days. This is your highest-opportunity segment. The re-engagement rate for personalised SMS to this group runs at around forty-five percent when the message references their visit history. A message that says "We have not seen you in a while - here is twenty percent off your next visit" outperforms a generic promotional blast by a factor of three. Segment two: frequent visitors. These are your most valuable guests. They do not need a discount - they need recognition. An SMS that says "As one of our regulars, you have early access to our new menu" drives loyalty without eroding margin. Segment three: event or seasonal visitors. Guests who attended a specific event, stayed during a specific period, or visited during a peak season. These respond well to anniversary messages and seasonal re-engagement. [medium pause] Section four: compliance and consent architecture. This is where I want to spend a moment, because getting this wrong is expensive. Under UK GDPR and PECR, you need explicit opt-in consent to send marketing SMS messages. That consent must be freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous. Pre-ticked boxes do not count. Bundling SMS consent into your terms of service does not count. Your captive portal must present a separate, clearly labelled SMS marketing opt-in. The consent record - who opted in, when, and what they consented to - must be stored and retrievable. Purple stores these consent records automatically, with timestamps, as part of the login data. You also need a clear opt-out mechanism in every message. "Reply STOP to unsubscribe" is the standard. Your platform must honour opt-outs immediately and suppress that number from future sends. For multi-site operators - hotel chains, retail groups, stadium operators - consent is venue-specific unless your privacy notice explicitly states otherwise. A guest who opted in at your Manchester venue has not consented to receive messages from your Birmingham venue. Manage this carefully. [medium pause] Section five: real-world implementation. Let me give you two concrete examples. First: a mid-market hotel group. One hundred and fifty properties. They deployed Purple Engage across all sites and activated SMS re-engagement campaigns targeting guests who had not returned within sixty days. The campaign sent a single personalised message with a direct-book incentive. Over a twelve-week period, they saw a twenty-two percent increase in direct bookings from the lapsed visitor segment. Commission costs dropped because guests bypassed OTAs. The cost per re-engaged guest was under two pounds. Second: a retail shopping centre with forty-five tenants. They used WiFi login data to identify shoppers who had visited once and not returned. An SMS campaign offering a parking discount for return visits within thirty days achieved a thirty-one percent return rate from the targeted segment. Footfall data, captured by the same WiFi analytics platform, confirmed the attribution. [medium pause] Section six: implementation pitfalls to avoid. Number one: sending too frequently. Fifty-three percent of SMS opt-outs are caused by over-messaging. For venue re-engagement, one message per thirty days per segment is the safe ceiling. More than that and you are training your audience to opt out. Number two: generic copy. "Come back and visit us" is not a message. "We saved your favourite table - book before Friday and get a complimentary starter" is a message. Personalisation requires data. Your WiFi login data gives you visit date, visit frequency, and sometimes demographic data from the login form. Use it. Number three: no attribution model. If you cannot measure whether the SMS drove the return visit, you cannot optimise the campaign. The WiFi reconnection event is your attribution signal. Make sure your analytics platform connects the outbound SMS send to the inbound WiFi login. Number four: ignoring hardware compatibility. Your SMS campaign is only as good as the data your WiFi infrastructure captures. Purple operates as a cloud overlay on top of Cisco Meraki, HPE Aruba, Ruckus, Juniper Mist, Ubiquiti UniFi, Cambium, Extreme, and Fortinet hardware. If your access points do not support captive portal authentication, you cannot capture phone numbers at login. [medium pause] Section seven: rapid-fire questions. How long should an SMS message be? Under one hundred and sixty characters for a single segment. If you need more, use a link to a landing page. Long SMS messages split into multiple parts and look unprofessional. What time of day should I send? For hospitality, Tuesday to Thursday between ten in the morning and noon performs best. Avoid Monday mornings and Friday afternoons. For retail, Thursday and Friday afternoons drive weekend footfall. Should I use SMS or MMS? SMS for re-engagement. MMS - which includes images - for event announcements and seasonal campaigns where visual impact matters. MMS costs more per send, so reserve it for high-value segments. Can I run SMS and email simultaneously? Yes, and you should. Brands that integrate SMS into omnichannel strategies see a forty-seven point seven percent lift in customer engagement, according to Omnisend research. SMS handles urgency. Email handles depth. They amplify each other. [medium pause] Summary and next steps. Marketing by SMS is not a new idea. What is new is the quality of the data underpinning it. When your phone number list comes from verified WiFi logins with explicit consent, rather than purchased lists or unverified form fills, the performance difference is significant. The architecture is straightforward: Guest WiFi login captures the number and consent, segmentation identifies the right audience, automated campaigns deliver the right message at the right time, and WiFi reconnection data closes the attribution loop. If you are running Guest WiFi across multiple venues and you are not using that login data to drive SMS re-engagement, you are leaving a measurable revenue opportunity on the table. The next step is to audit your current captive portal setup. Does it capture mobile numbers? Does it present a compliant SMS opt-in? Does it connect to your CRM or marketing automation platform? If the answer to any of those is no, that is where to start. Purple Engage handles all three. You can find more detail at purple dot ai. [medium pause] That is it for today's briefing. Thank you for listening.