Design an onboarding strategy
Even when your customer joins the guest WiFi to get a larger benefit than simply getting internet connectivity, you still should take into account that the onboarding experience in a WiFi portal is not the most frictionless process ever. The way modern devices handle the WiFi connection forces the user to interact with the portal in a special type of browser handled directly by the operative system that requires the user to take some actions he may not be used to.
Collecting better customer's data most of the times comes with more efforts requested form the customer to provide his data. You need to design the experience by adopting a good tradeoff between:
- maximize the number of contacts collected
- maximize the amount of data collected for each contact - consistently with your business and marketing strategy
- maximize the quality of the data collected
These 3 dimensions cannot be maximized at the same time. For example, collecting more data means presenting longer registration forms creating more friction, and this leads to a reduced number of people who complete the sign-up process. In the same way, asking for the validation of a contact point (phone or email) may lead to a reduction of the number of contacts collected.
Maximize the number of contacts
Click through should always be enabled. Stick to the minimum amount of data fields needed to make it valuable. One contact filed among phone or email is in general always necessary to be able to reconcile the customer data with other data sources.
Social Login is great in general, as it has become a habit for any consumer to log in with their social accounts and it reduces the number of inputs required to access (not always the number of clicks). But guest WiFi is not an authentication tool! Note that most of the Social services do not provide a lot of customer data! Sex, Age and phone number are rarely available (see more details here). So, if the email is the most important data point in your data strategy, you'd rather ask email with click-through. Moreover, data collected with Facebook it is subject to many more privacy restrictions than the first party data collected directly by using a form (for example you can't use it for running ads on other ad platforms like Google).
The main advantage of Social Login is that the few data we get are most likely real data (no fake emails). Pick the social that are most common and do not overwhelm the user with too many options. Facebook and Instagram are the 2 most use Social network in Europe and US, so stick with these two. However, other regions may have different best practices.
Other best practices:
- NEVER USE GOOGLE+ or GMAIL: enabling these social network requires opening Google domains in the walled garden, and, as a result, when the customer connects to the WiFi their Android phone won't automatically open the Splash Page as nowadays expected by the users. Moreover, Google+ is in end of life and we are removing it soon form the product.
- NEVER USE USERNAME AND PASSWORD - People already have too many accounts and WiFi is not a critical service that you require to protect via credentials. The only case when this strong authentication is indicated is when the user pays for internet access. In this case, it is a good practice to lock the credit to a secure and personal account.
- To maximize the percentage of Marketing opt-ins, put the marketing opt-in before the terms of use using this hack (we'll make it as the default behavior in the product in future)
- If click-through is the only published method and there are less then 3 customer fields (as it should), use this hack to show the form in the first page.
Maximize the richness of each Contact
Of course the more you know about the visitors the better. But be aware, more data gathering means in general less volume of contacts simply because people don't like to fill long forms on mobile and sometimes they give up.
Often you can gather more data via a simple click-through form than what we get from the social networks. However, if your strategy requires collecting customer's emails, the social login provides validated emails so it is a valid option to present to them.
NOTE - the best practice to gather more data is with progressive enrichment or asking more data in exchange for benefits for the user. We'll consolidate these practices in futures as we learn and evolve the product. For example, asking the user to provide the phone number, in addition to what already provided, to get a benefit, is a way to collect more data.
Maximize the reliability of data
Quality of data means data that can be used for the purposes of your business: real and validated contacts points, gender and age ranges.
By minimizing the number of inputs to the strictly necessary, usually stimulates the user to fill it correctly with his real data. The best way to get validated data without activating the validation techniques is to give an incentive to the user to provide their real data in exchange for a benefit that will be delivered to the contact (via email or SMS) - see this article for examples and best practices.
Cloud4Wi provides some additional validation techniques, that requires the user to validate his email or phone during the onboarding. These processes, however, requires more interactions form the users and we suggest to activate them only if these touchpoints are mission critical.
Read more about email validation here.
Moreover, consider that phone validation with OTP offers a smoother user experience, so if your main identifier is the phone number, you can enable the OTP validation without affecting too much the user experience.
Read more about phone number validation.