Airport retailers are guaranteed a significant amount of foot traffic as thousands of passengers make their way through airport terminals daily. Converting a passenger into a customer may sound simple—but it is not easy. According to Collinson’s Airport Journey research, passengers who enjoy their airport experience spend significantly more at the airport. However, creating an ecosystem of enjoyable passenger experiences is challenging as there are many factors that can impact passenger sentiment. From keeping queues short to presenting exclusive offers at opportune times, an airport must ensure everything positively impacts the passenger experience.
Airports must create the most efficient and enjoyable experience from start to finish if they want to increase retail spend. The most effective way to do this is for airports to understand who their passengers are and how they behave in airports. Data analysis enables that. The right data inputs ingested into an advanced platform combined with expert analysis can help airport managers measure every step of the passenger journey to increase customer spend and engagement.
The Skyfii platform allows airports to rapidly build a passenger database, segment audiences, and increase passenger engagement, sentiment, and conversion. The more you learn about your passenger, the better you can improve the passenger experience which directly translates to retail spend. Airports can use this valuable passenger data to deliver the right tenant mix, amenities, and promotional offers. Most importantly, analytics from various data sources allow airports to act decisively to increase efficiency and retail conversion in real time.
Here are the ways data from cameras, WiFi, people counters, and LiDAR, help airports convert passengers into retail customers.
Understand passenger movement
One way to provide an enjoyable passenger experience is to to reduce the time it will take to pass through a retail store and complete a purchase. When an airport can reduce retail queue times by opening more registers, scheduling more staff for busier periods, or keeping popular products stocked and predominately placed in high traffic areas, this can be a game-changer.
In order to do this, airports need to first understand the entire customer journey. By leveraging data from WiFi, cameras, LiDAR, people counters, and other data sources, airports can get granular, real-time information about movement, occupancy, and dwell time throughout all areas. This information can help airport retailers optimize staff schedules and keep queue wait times down.
With the Skyfii platform, you can understand how passengers move through your airport and use those insights to improve the passenger experience.
Airport operators can use customer journey patterns to provide significant insight into an effective complement of retailer categories and brands. Customer journey patterns correlated with sales data can determine performance and preference of products, categories, and brands.
Build a passenger database and segment audiences
A great way to convert passengers into customers is to send your passengers targeted marketing messages. But before you can do so, you must collect and segment passenger information and preferences.
Skyfii’s platform helps you collect rich profile information about passengers when they login to guest WiFi via captive portal. A captive portal landing page allows you to gather passenger data like name, email, phone, or social media profiles. This will help you develop passenger profiles based on who your passengers are and if they are a repeat customer. You can progressively ask for new data on each passenger’s return visit to build a more detailed profile. In addition, you can collect timely feedback about customer experience or sentiment by sending surveys.
Communicate with passengers in real time
After you’ve built your passenger database and segmented your audience, you can tailor customer experiences through the use of tools like guest WiFi and IO Engage. This ensures customers have access to information, rewards, and offers that are relevant to them.
Airports can engage customers over WiFi, SMS, mobile apps, digital signage, and email. With automated campaigns, you can deliver targeted retail offers at opportune times, also known as proximity marketing. Proximity marketing allows you to communicate with passengers at the right place and time, with highly relevant, personalized content on their mobile devices. You can engage passengers with messages at entry points, while in specific locations, or even after they leave a retail store to influence their next best action.
Within the Skyfii platform, you can engage passengers with messages at entry points, while in specific locations, or even after they leave a retail store.
Measure and improve merchandising and campaign performance
It is important to measure and tweak your marketing campaigns to ensure they are as effective as possible. Through the use of Skyfii’s platform, you can attribute campaigns to visits and purchases. You will understand how marketing campaigns, promotions, and product launches impact conversion to retail. You can also measure the ROI of spend across multiple concurrent marketing channels on driving store conversion and loyalty.
Data analysis can also help airports improve merchandising. Airports can analyze customer journey patterns to determine the best product placement, displays, and signage. For example, this information helps you determine the highest yielding products you should prominently display in the most trafficked parts of your duty free areas. Data analysis enables these planning decisions to be made quickly and with greater certainty.
Optimize tenancy mix
Airports can help retailers increase their conversions by using data analysis to make decisions around tenancy mix. Airports can measure the amount of traffic to an area, and discover the percentage of passengers that visit each of the retailers there. By understanding how effective different retailers are at attracting passengers, airports can better optimize tenant mix across terminals.
When an airport understands the categories of retail that passengers prefer or that are complementary to one another, they can create an environment for retailers that gives them the best opportunity to thrive.
Want to convert your airport passengers into retail customers?
Data analysis can help you convert passengers into retail customers by ensuring your passengers have a less stressed and more satisfying experience. When your airport operates efficiently, keeps queue wait times down, never runs out of passengers’ favorite products, and sends targeted offers, you will attract more passengers and increase repeat visits.
If you are looking to increase your retail conversion rates, we can help provide the passenger data and insights that you need to make better decisions.
Check out the other solutions we enable in the airport vertical.
