How to leverage marketing SMS 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 diction, warm but professional. Not a lecture, not a sales pitch - a peer-to-peer expert briefing: Welcome to the Purple technical briefing series. I'm here to walk you through one of the most underutilised tools in the venue operator's marketing stack - SMS. Not because it's new. Because most operators are sitting on a verified, consented phone number database and doing absolutely nothing with it. Let me set the scene. Your guest WiFi infrastructure already captures phone numbers at login. Every time a shopper, guest, or fan connects to your network, Purple Engage logs a verified mobile number alongside explicit marketing consent. Across our 80,000 live venues, we processed 440 million logins in 2024 alone. That is 440 million opportunities to send a message that brings someone back. Most venues use maybe 10% of that data. Today I want to change that. [medium pause] Let's start with why SMS outperforms every other re-engagement channel. The headline number is 98% - that is the open rate for SMS messages, compared to roughly 20% for email. But the more important number is three minutes. 90% of SMS messages are read within three minutes of delivery. When you send a bounce-back offer to a guest who visited your hotel last Tuesday, they are reading it before they have finished their morning coffee. No algorithm filters it. No spam folder. It lands directly in the native messaging app on their phone. Now, the reason most venue operators have not cracked this is not technology - it is data quality and consent. This is where the WiFi login flow becomes genuinely valuable. When a guest connects through a Purple-powered captive portal, they complete a conscious-choice opt-in. They tick a box. They see clear language explaining what they are agreeing to. That consent record is timestamped, stored, and auditable. Under GDPR, that is exactly the explicit consent standard you need for marketing SMS. Under TCPA in the United States, it satisfies the written consent requirement. You are not buying a list. You are not scraping data. You are capturing first-party data from people who are physically in your venue, engaged with your brand, and have actively agreed to hear from you. [medium pause] Let me walk you through the architecture. At the core, you have three components working together. First, the data capture layer. Purple's captive portal - which runs hardware-agnostic across Cisco Meraki, HPE Aruba, Ruckus, Juniper Mist, and Ubiquiti UniFi - presents the login form. Phone number capture is optional but incentivised. You can offer faster connection, exclusive offers, or loyalty points in exchange for a mobile number. Conversion rates for phone capture typically run between 40 and 65% of logins, depending on the incentive and the venue type. Second, the segmentation engine. Purple Engage builds visitor profiles automatically. Every login adds data points - visit frequency, dwell time, time of day, day of week, location within a multi-site estate. You can segment by first-time visitor versus returning guest, by lapsed visitor who has not been back in 30 days, by high-frequency shopper who visits more than twice a month, or by event attendee at a specific venue. These segments update in real time as new login data arrives. Third, the campaign automation layer. You configure triggers and templates once. Purple fires the messages automatically. A guest who visited your Premier Inn property on a Tuesday and has not returned in 28 days receives a targeted rate offer on day 29. A shopper who visited your Harrods concession three times in a month receives an early-access invitation to a new collection. A fan who attended a stadium event receives a pre-sale code for the next fixture. None of this requires manual intervention once the rules are set. [medium pause] Now let me give you two concrete implementation scenarios. Scenario one: a mid-scale hotel chain with 40 properties. The challenge is that 60% of bookings come through OTAs, which means the hotel does not own the guest relationship. The guest's email is masked. The phone number is not shared. But when that guest arrives and connects to the hotel WiFi, Purple captures their phone number with consent. The hotel configures a post-stay SMS sequence: a feedback request 48 hours after checkout, followed by a direct booking offer 21 days later with a rate that undercuts the OTA by 10%. In a pilot across six properties, this sequence drove a 23% increase in direct bookings from previously OTA-dependent guests within 90 days. The cost per recovered direct booking was under three pounds, compared to an OTA commission of typically 15 to 20% of room rate. Scenario two: a retail food and beverage operator with 80 sites. The challenge is footfall - specifically, getting lapsed customers back through the door. The operator segments their WiFi database by visit recency: active visitors in the last 14 days, dormant visitors between 15 and 60 days, and lapsed visitors beyond 60 days. For the dormant segment, they trigger a win-back SMS at day 20 with a time-limited offer. Message length: 47 words. Redemption rate: 18%. That is nearly one in five lapsed customers returning within seven days of receiving a single text message. For context, their email win-back campaign running the same offer achieved a 4% redemption rate. [medium pause] Right - implementation pitfalls. There are four I see consistently. The first is message frequency. SMS is a high-trust channel. You earn that trust by sending relevant messages infrequently. More than two messages per month to the same number is where opt-out rates start climbing. Set a global frequency cap in your campaign settings and enforce it across all campaign types. The second is timing. Do not send at 8am on a Monday or after 9pm on any day. Midday Tuesday to Thursday is consistently the highest-engagement window across hospitality and retail verticals. For event venues, send 48 to 72 hours before the event, not the morning of. The third is personalisation depth. "Hi, here is an offer" performs significantly worse than "Hi Sarah, it has been three weeks since your last visit - here is something just for you." Purple Engage pulls first name, last visit date, and venue name into message templates automatically. Use them. The fourth is attribution. You need to close the loop. When a guest redeems an SMS offer, that redemption event needs to feed back into the platform so you can measure actual return visits, not just click-through rates. Purple's WiFi analytics layer does this automatically - when a guest who received an SMS reconnects to your network, the return visit is logged against the campaign. That is how you get real ROI data, not vanity metrics. [medium pause] Quick-fire questions I get asked regularly. Can I run SMS campaigns without replacing my existing WiFi hardware? Yes. Purple is a cloud overlay. It sits on top of your existing Cisco Meraki, Aruba, or Ruckus infrastructure. No hardware changes required. What about GDPR? Every consent record captured through Purple's captive portal is timestamped, attributed to a specific login event, and stored in an auditable log. You can export consent records on request. Purple is ISO 27001 certified, GDPR compliant, and B Corp certified. How long does it take to build a usable SMS audience? At a venue processing 500 logins per week with a 50% phone capture rate, you have 1,000 consented numbers after four weeks. That is a statistically meaningful audience for your first campaign. What is the typical ROI? Across Purple's venue estate, SMS campaigns targeting lapsed visitors generate between 8 and 15 times return on campaign spend. The Forbes benchmark for SMS marketing broadly is 71 dollars returned per dollar spent. Venue-specific results vary, but the directional picture is consistent. [medium pause] To summarise. Your Guest WiFi infrastructure is already capturing verified, consented phone numbers at scale. The segmentation data to target the right people at the right time already exists in your Purple analytics dashboard. The automation tools to run campaigns without manual overhead are already available in Purple Engage. What most venues are missing is the decision to activate. Start with one campaign type - the lapsed visitor win-back is the highest-ROI starting point. Set a 30-day window, write a single message template, configure the trigger, and measure the return visit rate over 60 days. The data will make the case for everything that follows. If you want to go deeper on implementation, the full technical guide is available at purple.ai. You can also explore our WiFi Analytics platform and the Engage plan to see exactly how the data capture and campaign automation layers connect. Thanks for listening. We will see you in the next briefing.