The Walkabout bar brand has seen a huge increase in traffic to its website following a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system implemented by digital customer experience specialist Airship.
With Airship working in partnership with Sky Cloud, Walkabout’s WiFi provider, email traffic to the Walkabout website has increased almost one-hundredfold, up by 9100%. The Airship system has also seen an increase in the opening rate of Walkabout’s marketing emails to its 360,000-strong customer database.
Initially implemented in November 2015, the new CRM strategy helped Walkabout increase revenue for pre-booked Christmas parties by 203%, and continues to drive sales for the business.
Owned by leisure operator Intertain, the 24 site Walkabout brand features big-screen sport, live music and other entertainment seven days a week. Airship was set the challenge of linking Walkabout’s CRM programme to the data gathered through The Cloud, the Sky-owned brand which provides free customer WiFi, in order to increase footfall and improve overall customer loyalty.
Dan Brookman, commercial director of Airship, says, “Walkabout’s customer visits are event-driven, so mapping the events taking place to the time customers are connecting to WiFi gives a clearer understanding of the behaviour of their most loyal customer types.
“Once we’d ‘cleaned’ their existing customer database by removing duplicates, standardising the entries and completing missing data, we then integrated the database far more closely with Walkabout’s website and party/table booking platform.
“We were then able to link with Sky to collect data on a daily basis from customers using the WiFi connection, both for the first time and every time they re-connect.”
Segmenting the data by session of the day and day of the week helped build a better picture of each customer and the type of events that bought them to Walkabout. By integrating with Sky, Airship was able to make use of Knowledge Repeat, which records every customer WiFi session as it happens and reconnects the customer automatically on their next visit; removing the need to sign up again or remember log in details.
As just one example, this means that if the customer’s visit coincided with rugby union being on the big screen, Walkabout can automatically notify the customer via email of upcoming rugby matches, and reward their loyalty with special offers.
Walkabout now has around 30,000 WiFi sessions a week with 13,000 unique users. By linking the email marketing with the WiFi data, the Airship system has been able to deliver results for Walkabout including:
• Revenue for pre-booked Christmas parties increased by 203%, the brand’s best-ever festive performance;
• An increase in email traffic to the website of 9100%;
• Open rates of emails increased by 2%
• The number of triggered emails for birthdays up by 9%;
• The number of triggered emails welcoming new customers up by 17%.
John Bettinson, market & customer insights manager at Sky, says, “Knowledge Repeat gives The Cloud’s commercial users a far greater and deeper understanding of the frequency of visits of their own customers, enabling them to see who’s visiting and returning to venue.
“Working with Airship’s analytics and segmentation platform, brands can compare WiFi analytics across multiple venues, as well as proactively market to WiFi users to drive more revenue or extend loyalty and customer feedback initiatives.
“Together, The Cloud and Airship are at the forefront of delivering the understanding businesses need into how WiFi data can deliver incremental revenue.”
