How to leverage SMS messages marketing to increase return visits

Welcome to the Purple technical briefing series. I'm your host, and today we're getting into something that a lot of venue operators know they should be doing but haven't quite nailed yet: SMS messages marketing, and specifically how to use it to bring guests back through your doors. Let me set the scene. You're running a hotel group, a retail chain, or a stadium. You've got thousands of people walking through your venues every week. Some of them connect to your guest WiFi. Some of them don't. But the ones who do? They're handing you something genuinely valuable: a verified phone number and, if your captive portal is set up correctly, explicit consent to market to them. The question is: what do you do with that? Section one. Why SMS, and why now. Let's start with the numbers, because they're hard to argue with. SMS messages carry a 98% open rate. Email, by comparison, sits at around 20%. Ninety percent of SMS messages are read within three minutes of delivery. And the average click-through rate for SMS is 18%, versus 2.5% for email. That's not a marginal difference. That's a different channel entirely. For every pound spent on SMS marketing, well-run programmes return between 21 and 41 pounds in revenue. Omnisend's data shows that brands integrating SMS into an omnichannel strategy see a 47.7% lift in customer engagement. So why aren't more venue operators doing this properly? Usually it comes down to three things: data quality, consent architecture, and campaign automation. Let's work through each of those. Section two. The data foundation: capturing verified phone numbers at the WiFi login. Here's the thing about phone numbers captured through a guest WiFi captive portal. They're different from phone numbers you'd get through a competition entry or a loyalty sign-up form. When someone connects to your WiFi, they're physically present in your venue. They're engaged. They want to be online. And if your splash page asks for a phone number as part of the login flow, the intent signal is high. Purple Engage captures verified guest phone data at the captive portal login and automates marketing campaigns from that point forward. Across 80,000 live venues and 440 million logins in 2024, we've seen that phone number capture rates at the portal consistently outperform post-visit data collection methods. The architecture here matters. Your captive portal sits between the guest's device and internet access. When a guest authenticates, whether that's via social login, email, or phone number with SMS verification, Purple writes that identity record to a centralised guest profile. That profile persists across visits, across locations if you're a multi-site operator, and across time. The hardware doesn't matter. Purple runs as a cloud overlay on Cisco Meraki, HPE Aruba, Ruckus, Juniper Mist, Ubiquiti UniFi, Cambium, Extreme, and Fortinet. You're not ripping out your network infrastructure. You're adding an intelligence layer on top of it. Section three. Consent architecture and GDPR compliance. This is where a lot of operators get nervous, and understandably so. GDPR and CCPA have real teeth. Getting consent wrong doesn't just create legal exposure; it destroys the trust that makes SMS marketing effective in the first place. The good news is that the captive portal is actually one of the cleanest consent capture mechanisms available. The guest is actively completing a form. They can see exactly what they're signing up for. And because the interaction is synchronous, you can implement a double opt-in flow without adding meaningful friction. Here's what a compliant SMS opt-in flow looks like at the portal level. First, the guest enters their phone number to authenticate. Second, they receive an SMS with a one-time passcode to verify the number is real. Third, the splash page presents a clearly labelled checkbox, separate from the WiFi access consent, stating something like: I agree to receive promotional SMS messages from the venue. Message frequency varies. Reply STOP to unsubscribe. Fourth, that consent record, including the timestamp, the IP address, and the specific consent language shown, is written to the guest profile and stored for audit purposes. That last point is critical. Under GDPR Article 7, you must be able to demonstrate that consent was given. Purple stores consent records with full audit trails, which means if you're ever asked to prove consent, you can. One more thing on this. Do not bundle SMS marketing consent with WiFi access. Accessing the internet is not conditional on agreeing to receive marketing messages. That's a violation of GDPR's requirement for freely given consent. Keep the two consent flows separate, clearly labelled, and independently revocable. Section four. Campaign architecture: segmentation, triggers, and timing. Once you have a verified, consented phone number attached to a guest profile, the next question is: what do you send, and when? The answer depends on your vertical, but the underlying logic is the same across hospitality, retail, and events. You're trying to identify the right moment to send a message that's relevant enough to prompt a return visit. Let me walk through three campaign types that consistently perform well. The first is the welcome series. A guest connects to your WiFi for the first time. Within 24 hours, they receive an SMS: Thanks for visiting. Here's 10% off your next visit. Valid for 30 days. Reply STOP to unsubscribe. Simple, immediate, and tied to a specific action. In hospitality, operators using this approach see welcome conversion rates of 12 to 18%. The second is the re-engagement trigger. A guest who visited regularly hasn't been back in 45 days. Purple Engage detects the lapse based on WiFi connection history and fires an automated SMS: We've missed you. Here's something to bring you back. The trigger is the absence of a WiFi connection event. No manual segmentation required. The third is the visit-frequency campaign. You identify guests who visit more than twice a month. They're your high-value segment. You send them an exclusive offer, early access to an event, or a loyalty reward. The message feels personal because it's based on real behaviour data, not a demographic assumption. In retail, a chain with 50 locations using Purple Engage to run these three campaign types can expect to see a 15 to 25% increase in repeat visit frequency among opted-in guests within the first 90 days. Section five. Integration with your existing marketing stack. Purple Engage doesn't operate in isolation. The guest data captured at the WiFi portal needs to flow into your CRM, your marketing automation platform, and your analytics tools. Purple integrates natively with Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, and a range of other platforms via webhook and API. When a guest opts in at the portal, their profile, including phone number, consent record, visit history, and location data, syncs to your CRM in real time. This matters for two reasons. First, it means your SMS campaigns can be orchestrated from the same platform you use for email, so you're not managing a separate tool. Second, it means your guest data is enriched over time. Every WiFi connection event adds a data point: which location, what time, how long. After six months, you have a behavioural profile that's genuinely useful for segmentation. The analytics side of this is handled through Purple's WiFi analytics platform. You can see opt-in rates by location, campaign performance by segment, and return visit attribution. If you send an SMS campaign on a Tuesday and see a 20% uplift in WiFi connections the following weekend, you can attribute that directly. Section six. Implementation pitfalls and how to avoid them. Let me give you the four failure modes I see most often. The first is low opt-in rates at the portal. If fewer than 15% of your WiFi logins are capturing a phone number, your splash page copy is the problem. The value exchange needs to be explicit. Entering your number to get online and receive exclusive offers outperforms simply entering your number to get online by a significant margin. Test the copy. A/B test it if your platform supports it. The second is message fatigue. Sending more than four SMS messages per month to the same contact without strong personalisation will drive up your opt-out rate. Keep frequency low and relevance high. One well-timed, contextually relevant message outperforms four generic ones every time. The third is attribution gaps. If you're not connecting your SMS campaign sends to WiFi connection events, you can't measure return visit lift. Make sure your Purple Engage campaigns are tagged so that subsequent WiFi logins from the same device or phone number are attributed back to the campaign. The fourth is consent record gaps. If you can't produce a timestamped consent record for every phone number on your SMS list, you have a compliance problem. Run a consent audit before you launch any campaign. Remove any contacts where the consent record is incomplete. Section seven. Rapid-fire questions. Can we use SMS for transactional messages as well as marketing? Yes, and you should. Booking confirmations, check-in reminders, and event notifications all have high open rates and reinforce the value of being on your list. Just make sure your consent language covers both transactional and marketing messages, or keep them on separate opt-in flows. What's a realistic opt-in rate to target? For a well-optimised captive portal in a hospitality or retail setting, 20 to 35% of WiFi logins converting to SMS opt-ins is achievable. Stadiums and events venues often see higher rates because the value exchange is more immediate. How do we handle guests who opt out? Immediately. GDPR requires you to process opt-out requests without delay. Purple Engage handles this automatically: a STOP reply removes the contact from all SMS sends and updates the consent record. You do not need to manually manage opt-outs. Can we run SMS campaigns across multiple locations with different offers? Yes. Purple Engage supports location-level segmentation, so you can run a campaign that sends one offer to guests of your Manchester locations and a different offer to guests of your London locations, all from the same campaign interface. Section eight. Summary and next steps. Let me bring this together. SMS messages marketing, when built on a foundation of verified first-party data from your guest WiFi, is one of the highest-return marketing channels available to venue operators. The data is clear: 98% open rates, 18% click-through rates, and returns of 21 to 41 pounds per pound spent. The three things you need to get right are: consent architecture at the captive portal, segmentation logic that uses real visit behaviour rather than demographic assumptions, and integration between your WiFi analytics platform and your marketing automation stack. Purple Engage handles all three. It captures verified phone data at login, automates campaign triggers based on visit behaviour, and integrates with your existing CRM and marketing tools. If you're not already running SMS campaigns from your guest WiFi data, the starting point is a consent audit of your current captive portal flow. Check whether your splash page includes a separate, clearly labelled SMS opt-in checkbox. If it doesn't, that's the first thing to fix. From there, build your three core campaigns: the welcome series, the re-engagement trigger, and the high-value guest programme. Measure return visit lift over 90 days. The numbers will tell you whether to scale. Thank you for listening. If you want to explore how Purple Engage can work for your venues, visit purple.ai or speak to your account manager. We'll see you in the next episode.