How to leverage tools for SMS marketing to increase return visits

Speak in British English with a confident, authoritative, and conversational tone - like a senior consultant briefing a client over coffee. Measured pace, clear diction, warm but direct. No filler sounds. Occasional natural pauses for emphasis: Welcome to the Purple technical briefing series. I'm talking today about SMS marketing tools and, specifically, how venue operators - hotels, retailers, stadiums, conference centres - can use them to bring guests back through the door. [short pause] Let's start with the numbers, because they make the case faster than anything else. SMS messages carry a 98% open rate. 90% are read within three minutes of delivery. Compare that to email, where you're lucky to hit 25% opens. The response rate for SMS campaigns sits at around 45%, versus roughly 6% for email. And the ROI? Between 21 and 41 pounds for every pound spent, according to data from Upcity and Sakari. [short pause] So the channel works. The question is: how do you build a compliant, scalable programme that actually drives return visits - not just one-off redemptions? [medium pause] Let's get into the architecture. The foundation of any effective SMS marketing programme at a physical venue is first-party data. Not third-party lists. Not purchased numbers. Verified, opted-in mobile numbers collected at the point of visit. [short pause] The most reliable mechanism for this is Guest WiFi. When a guest connects to your network through a Captive Portal - that's the login screen they see before they get internet access - you have a structured, consent-driven moment to capture their phone number. Purple Engage does exactly this. Across 80,000 venues and 440 million logins in 2024, we've seen that a well-designed Captive Portal with a clear, unbundled SMS opt-in converts at between 15% and 30% of connecting guests. [short pause] The word unbundled matters here. Under GDPR and the UK's Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations - PECR - you cannot make WiFi access conditional on accepting marketing messages. The opt-in must be separate, voluntary, and specific. Guests must understand they're signing up for SMS communications, not just ticking a box to get online. If you get this wrong, you're not just risking regulatory fines. You're building a list of people who didn't actually want to hear from you, and your unsubscribe rates will reflect that. [medium pause] Once you have verified, opted-in numbers, the next layer is your SMS platform. There are several strong options in the enterprise space. Twilio gives you the most flexibility - it's essentially a programmable SMS API that you connect to your CRM and automate through your own logic. Klaviyo is the dominant choice for retail and hospitality operators who want SMS and email in a single platform, with pre-built automation flows. Attentive is strong for high-volume retail, particularly where you need sophisticated segmentation and two-way conversational SMS. [short pause] The key integration point is your CRM or guest data platform. Purple Engage captures the verified phone number, enriches it with visit data - when they came, how often, which location, dwell time - and then pushes that enriched profile to your SMS platform via API. That's what makes the difference between a generic broadcast and a message that lands. [short pause] Let me give you a concrete example. A hotel group using Purple Engage on Cisco Meraki hardware captures guest phone numbers at WiFi login. The guest profile records check-in date, room type, and whether they visited the spa or restaurant. Three days after checkout, the SMS platform triggers an automated message: Hi Sarah, we hope you enjoyed your stay. Book your next visit before the end of the month and get 15% off. Reply BOOK or visit the link. That message is sent to a verified number, with explicit consent, personalised with visit data, and timed to hit when the guest is most likely to be planning their next trip. [short pause] That's not complicated to build. But it requires the data layer to be right from the start. Speak in British English with a confident, authoritative, and conversational tone - like a senior consultant briefing a client. Measured pace, clear diction, warm but direct: Now let's talk about the tools themselves and what to look for when you're evaluating them. [short pause] First: data capture quality. Your SMS platform is only as good as the numbers going into it. Platforms that rely on web forms or loyalty app sign-ups tend to have lower capture rates and more data quality issues than WiFi-based capture, because guests are motivated to connect and the phone number is verified by the network at login. [short pause] Second: segmentation capability. The difference between a 10% redemption rate and a 30% redemption rate is usually segmentation. Can you send a different message to a guest who visited twice in the last 90 days versus someone who hasn't been back in six months? Can you target by location, by visit frequency, by spend category? Klaviyo and Attentive both support this natively. If you're using Twilio, you'll build it yourself. [short pause] Third: automation triggers. The most effective SMS campaigns aren't batch-and-blast. They're triggered by behaviour. A guest connects to WiFi for the first time - trigger a welcome message. A guest hasn't visited in 60 days - trigger a win-back offer. A guest visits three times in a month - trigger a loyalty reward. Purple Engage supports these event-driven triggers natively, and they push to your SMS platform in real time. [short pause] Fourth: compliance infrastructure. Your platform must support STOP keyword processing, maintain suppression lists, and log consent records. This isn't optional. Under GDPR and PECR in the UK, and TCPA in the US, you need to demonstrate that every number on your list was opted in, when, and through what mechanism. Purple stores consent records with timestamps at the point of WiFi login. [medium pause] Let me walk through two real-world scenarios where this architecture delivers measurable outcomes. [short pause] Scenario one: a retail chain with 40 locations. The marketing team wants to increase return visit frequency among shoppers who visit once but don't come back. They deploy Purple Engage across their estate on HPE Aruba hardware. The captive portal captures phone numbers with explicit SMS opt-in. Within 90 days, they have 85,000 opted-in numbers - all verified, all first-party. They segment by last visit date and send a re-engagement campaign to anyone who hasn't visited in 45 days: a 10% discount, valid for two weeks, with a unique tracking code. The campaign achieves a 34% redemption rate and a 22% increase in 90-day return visit frequency. The cost per re-engaged customer works out at under two pounds. [short pause] Scenario two: a conference centre running a series of events. They want to build a database of attendees for future event promotion. At each event, attendees connect to Guest WiFi and opt in to SMS communications. After each event, an automated SMS goes out 48 hours later: Thanks for attending. Our next event is on the 15th. Early-bird tickets are available for the next 72 hours. The SMS drives a 28% click-through rate to the booking page, and 40% of those clicks convert to ticket purchases. The conference centre attributes 18% of their annual ticket revenue to SMS re-engagement. Speak in British English with a confident, authoritative, and conversational tone - like a senior consultant wrapping up a client briefing. Measured pace, clear diction, warm but direct: A few implementation pitfalls to flag before we wrap up. [short pause] The first is frequency. 23% of consumers will stop supporting a brand if they feel spammed, according to SAP Engagement Cloud data. For venue operators, one to two messages per month is the safe zone. More than that and you'll see opt-out rates climb above 3.5%, which is the industry threshold for a healthy list. [short pause] The second is timing. Don't send SMS messages before 9 in the morning or after 8 in the evening. This isn't just courtesy - in many jurisdictions it's a legal requirement. Purple's automation engine respects time-zone-aware sending windows by default. [short pause] The third is attribution. If you can't measure it, you can't justify the budget. Use unique discount codes or UTM-tagged URLs in every SMS campaign. Track redemption rates, not just click-through rates. The metric that matters to your finance director is revenue per message sent, not open rate. [medium pause] Let me do a quick rapid-fire on the questions we hear most often. [short pause] Do we need a dedicated SMS platform or can we use our existing email tool? If your email platform - Klaviyo, for example - already supports SMS, start there. It simplifies your data model and your reporting. Only move to a dedicated SMS tool like Attentive or Twilio if you need capabilities your email platform can't deliver. [short pause] How do we handle guests who visit multiple locations? Purple Engage maintains a unified guest profile across your entire estate. A guest who visits your Manchester location and your Birmingham location is one record, not two. Your SMS platform sees a single profile with multi-location visit history. [short pause] What's the minimum viable dataset to start? You need opted-in numbers, a single automation trigger, and a way to track redemptions. You don't need 50,000 contacts to start. Run your first campaign with 500 and measure everything. [medium pause] To summarise. SMS is the highest-engagement channel available to venue operators right now. The data is unambiguous: 98% open rates, 45% response rates, and ROI between 21 and 41 pounds per pound spent. The infrastructure to capture verified, opted-in numbers at scale already exists in your Guest WiFi network. Purple Engage connects that data layer to your SMS platform of choice - whether that's Twilio, Klaviyo, or Attentive - and automates the campaigns that bring guests back. [short pause] The three things to do this quarter: audit your current data capture at WiFi login and add an explicit SMS opt-in if you don't have one; connect your guest data to your SMS platform via API; and build three automation triggers - welcome, win-back at 60 days, and loyalty reward at three visits. [short pause] That's it for today's briefing. If you want to see how Purple Engage handles the data capture and integration layer, visit purple.ai. Thanks for listening.