Turning Workspace Guests Into Members by Using Wifi Onboarding and Mailchimp

Published on August 19, 2016 - By Cecilia Amador

On any given day, a typical workspace will see some traffic that comes from non-members; these are either people that are attending an event in your space, friends of members, meeting room users, or curious souls. Regardless of the reason why they’re in your workspace, you need to see them not only as guests, but also (and more importantly) as potential members.

Let’s say, for example, that one of your members books a meeting room for 8 people. You have your member’s name and contact info, but what about the other 7 people that will also be there? These other 7 individuals are potential members that you could be losing by not having a strategy to acquire their contact information.

“Workspace operators focus and see the booking; they don’t see the people coming in.” -Tony Freeth, Medusa Business

Wifi Onboarding and Email Marketing

One simple way to acquire guests’ contact information is through wifi onboarding, says Tony Freeth from Medusa Business.

“Today, most people want wifi during a meeting. Why not trade your workspace’s wifi service for the identity of the person involved?” “Workspace operators focus and see the booking; they don’t see the people coming in,” says Tony.

It’s a simple and non-intrusive method to obtaining someone’s email address: guests arrive, they sign-in, and then sign-up for wifi access.

Why do you want their email addresses?

Simple, to make them a part of your marketing campaigns and efforts and to make sure that they remember your workspace even after they step out of it. Tony mentions that, “Once you have their email, you can push the data into an email service platform such as Mailchimp, to later send them a follow up response of their visit and let them know how they can contact you in the future should they require your services or more information about who you are and what you do.”

The tricky part of this method is getting the timing for your follow up email right. “I usually suggest sending the first email a couple of days after their visit. If you send it immediately after their visit, you’ll get a higher unsubscribe rate than if you wait a day or two, when the unsubscribe rate tends to flop down to 1%.”

“I also suggest you include vouchers, discount codes, coupons, and information about networking events in your email. Depending on your marketing and promotional angle, you need to include something that will prompt them even more to come back.”

If you think about it, it’s a pretty cheap and powerful approach towards marketing. And if you’re still not yet convinced, here are some numbers that Tony shared with us:

• About 1/3rd of people open and view the content
• Clickthrough rate ranges between 30% to 35%
• From these new contacts, we get about 1% to 2% in initial sales (1-1.5 months). These sales can be in the form of memberships, meeting room bookings, event rentals, etc.

Although Medusa Business does this type of wifi onboarding process, Tony mentions that it’s simple enough for workspace operators to do it independently.

It’s a win-win method: your guests get wifi and connected, you get email addresses to strengthen your marketing efforts.