Retailers positioned within busy airports 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. Customer journey analytics enable that. The right data inputs ingested into an advanced platform combined with expert analysis can help airport managers measure every facet of the passenger experience to increase customer spend and engagement.
Airports can use passenger data to deliver the right tenant mix, amenities, and promotional offers. Most importantly, customer journey 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-based retailer can reduce queue times by opening more registers, scheduling more staff for busier periods, or keeping popular products stocked and predominantly 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 optimise staff schedules and keep queue wait times down.
With Beonic, you can understand how passengers move through your airport and use those insights to improve the passenger experience.
Airport operators can use customer journey analytics 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
A great way to convert passengers into customers is to send your passengers targeted marketing messages. But first, you must collect and segment passenger information and preferences.
Beonic enables you to 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. You can progressively ask for new data on each passenger’s return visit to build a more detailed profile of each customer. 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 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, personalised content on their mobile devices.
Within the Beonic 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 Campaigns and Merchandising
It’s important to measure and tweak your marketing campaigns to ensure they are as effective as possible. With Beonic, 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 use customer journey analytics 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.
Use Customer Journey Analytics to Optimise 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 optimise 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.
Improve the Passenger Experience To Create Retail Customers
Customer journey analytics 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.
You can also check out our other airport solutions for enhancing the passenger experience.
