How to leverage what is SMS marketing to increase return visits

Speak in British English with a confident, authoritative, conversational tone - like a senior consultant briefing a client in a boardroom. Measured pace, clear articulation, warm but professional. Not a lecturer, not a salesperson. Someone who knows their subject and respects the listener's time: Welcome to the Purple Intelligence Series. I'm your host, and today we're getting into something that a lot of venue operators know they should be doing but aren't quite doing right. SMS marketing. Specifically, how you use it to bring visitors back through your doors. [short pause] Now, before we get into the mechanics, let me give you the number that should stop you in your tracks. SMS messages have a 98% open rate. Not 98% delivered. 98% opened. Compare that to email, which sits at around 20 to 22%. And 97% of those text messages are read within 15 minutes of delivery. So if you send a promotional message at 5pm on a Thursday, by 5:15 most of your audience has seen it. That's a channel characteristic that no other marketing tool can match. [short pause] The ROI figures are equally striking. Attentive's 2024 data puts SMS marketing at 71 dollars return for every dollar spent. Email, for context, delivers 36 to 42 dollars per dollar. So SMS is nearly twice as efficient on direct revenue attribution. These aren't marginal gains. They're structural advantages. [medium pause] Right. So what exactly is SMS marketing in the context of a venue? At its core, it's the practice of sending permission-based text messages to visitors who have opted in to receive communications from you. The key phrase there is permission-based. Under GDPR in the UK and EU, and under PECR - the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations - you cannot send marketing texts without explicit, freely given consent. That consent has to be recorded, timestamped, and auditable. If you can't demonstrate it, you're exposed. [short pause] This is where the architecture gets interesting. The most effective way to build a compliant SMS list at scale is through your Guest WiFi login. When a visitor connects to your network through a captive portal, they enter their phone number as part of the login flow. At that exact moment, you present a clear, unambiguous opt-in checkbox for marketing communications. They tick it. You capture the number. You have consent. That's first-party data, collected directly from the individual, at the point of engagement, with full audit trail. [short pause] Purple Engage does exactly this. Across 80,000 venues and 440 million logins in 2024, we've built a system that captures verified phone numbers at the WiFi login stage, stores them in a first-party profile, and connects them to behavioural data - visit frequency, dwell time, which zones of your venue they spent time in, whether they're a first-time visitor or a regular. That profile becomes the foundation for every SMS campaign you run. [medium pause] Now let's talk about the technical architecture, because this is where a lot of implementations fall over. The data flow looks like this. A guest connects to your WiFi via a captive portal - what some people call a splash page. The portal is served by Purple's cloud overlay, which sits on top of your existing hardware. We support Cisco Meraki, HPE Aruba, Ruckus, Juniper Mist, Ubiquiti UniFi, Cambium, Extreme, and Fortinet. Hardware-agnostic by design. [short pause] At login, the guest's phone number is captured and validated - typically via a one-time passcode sent to the number, which also confirms it's real and active. Consent preferences are recorded. The profile is created or updated in Purple Engage. From that point, the visitor's behaviour during their session - connection time, duration, location zone if you're using our analytics - enriches the profile. [short pause] The campaign automation layer then uses that profile data to trigger messages. Not broadcast blasts to everyone on your list. Behaviour-triggered messages, timed to the right moment. A post-visit thank-you message sent two hours after departure. A re-engagement message sent 30 days after a last visit. A promotional offer sent to visitors who haven't returned in 60 days. An event announcement sent to everyone who visited your venue in the last 90 days. [short pause] This distinction between broadcast and triggered campaigns matters enormously for ROI. Klaviyo's 2026 SMS benchmarks found that automated flows account for just 7.6% of total SMS sends but drive 45.2% of total SMS revenue. The maths is clear. Automation, not volume, is where the return lives. [medium pause] Let me give you two concrete implementation scenarios so you can see how this plays out in practice. [short pause] First scenario: a 200-room hotel. The hotel runs Purple Engage on its guest WiFi network, deployed across Cisco Meraki access points in all rooms, the lobby, the restaurant, and the conference suite. Every guest who connects to the WiFi is presented with the option to opt in to SMS updates during check-in or at any point during their stay. The hotel builds a segment of guests who stayed for two or more nights and visited the restaurant at least once. That segment receives an SMS 14 days after checkout: a personalised message with a direct booking link and a 10% discount on their next stay. The message goes out at 6pm on a Tuesday. By 6:15, 97% of recipients have seen it. The click-through rate on the booking link runs at 24%. The return booking rate from that campaign is 11%. For a hotel with 200 rooms at an average nightly rate of 120 pounds, that's material revenue from a single automated campaign. [short pause] Second scenario: a retail chain with 40 stores. The chain uses Purple Engage to capture shopper data at WiFi login across all locations. They build a segment of shoppers who visited a specific store but haven't returned in 45 days. That segment receives an SMS with a time-limited offer - valid for the next seven days only. The urgency is deliberate. Klaviyo's research shows 65% of people who made an SMS purchase in the last year said they bought earlier than planned because of a promotional text. The chain sees a 19% redemption rate on the offer. The cost of the campaign is negligible compared to the revenue generated from re-activated shoppers. [medium pause] Now, implementation pitfalls. There are four that I see consistently. [short pause] The first is frequency. 61% of SMS unsubscribes happen because people receive too many messages. The safe operating range is two to four messages per month. Anything above that and you start burning your list. Once someone unsubscribes, they're gone. [short pause] The second is irrelevance. Sending the same message to your entire list is the fastest way to generate unsubscribes and complaints. Segment by behaviour. A first-time visitor should not receive the same message as someone who has visited 12 times. [short pause] The third is timing. 45% of SMS purchases happen in the evening. Morning sends underperform. If you're targeting UK venues, evening sends between 6pm and 8pm consistently outperform midday sends. And remember - PECR in the UK prohibits sending marketing messages before 8am or after 9pm. [short pause] The fourth is the opt-out mechanism. Every SMS you send must include a clear, simple way to unsubscribe. In the UK, that's typically a reply STOP instruction. If you don't include it, you're in breach of PECR. Purple Engage handles this automatically, but if you're building your own stack, it's non-negotiable. [medium pause] Right, rapid-fire questions. Three common ones I get from marketing directors and CRM managers. [short pause] "Can we use our existing CRM phone data for SMS campaigns?" Technically yes, but only if that data was collected with explicit SMS marketing consent. Data collected for a different purpose - say, order confirmations - cannot be repurposed for promotional SMS without fresh consent. Don't assume. Check your consent records. [short pause] "How do we measure return visits from SMS?" The cleanest method is WiFi reconnection tracking. When a guest who received an SMS returns to your venue and reconnects to your WiFi, Purple Engage logs that reconnection against the profile and the campaign. You get a direct attribution line from message sent to return visit recorded. No reliance on cookies, no third-party tracking. [short pause] "What's the minimum viable list size to make SMS worthwhile?" In our experience, 500 opted-in contacts is enough to run a meaningful pilot. You'll see statistically significant results from a well-segmented campaign at that scale. The unit economics work even at small volumes because the cost per message is low and the conversion rate is high. [medium pause] So, to summarise. SMS marketing is the practice of sending permission-based text messages to opted-in visitors to drive measurable behaviour - in this case, return visits. The channel delivers a 98% open rate, a 45% response rate, and 71 dollars ROI per dollar spent. The foundation is first-party data captured at WiFi login with explicit GDPR-compliant consent. The architecture runs through a captive portal, a cloud overlay platform, and an automation engine that triggers messages based on visitor behaviour rather than broadcasting to everyone. The ROI lives in automation, not volume. And the four pitfalls to avoid are over-frequency, irrelevance, poor timing, and missing opt-out mechanisms. [short pause] If you want to see how this works in practice, visit purple.ai and look at the Engage plan. We're running this across 80,000 venues today. The data is there. The infrastructure is proven. The question is whether you're capturing the phone numbers you need to make it work. [short pause] Thanks for listening. We'll be back with more from the Purple Intelligence Series shortly.