Blogs
DannSant
New Contributor
Enterprise brick-and-mortar organizations need a way to understand customer and visitor behavior, demographics, and psychographics as well as the business operations as a whole inside a space to stay competitive. There are several hurdles for physical venues to overcome, however, that range from privacy and security concerns to data collection and processing.

The Aislelabs platform is used by enterprise customers to offer scalable and agile business intelligence solutions with Fortinet infrastructure. Aislelabs collects over 12 billion data points a day, processing and storing over a million data points per second for interactive queries of both historical and real-time data streaming.

There are two distinct, scalable flagship use cases the software addresses: Aislelabs Flow for location behavioral intelligence and Aislelabs Connect for demographic/psychographic data capture and marketing automation designed to unify online and offline marketing.

Aiselabs is a Fortinet Fabric-Ready technology alliance partner, and the Aislelabs integration with Fortinet FortiGate and FortiAPs uses Real-time Location Service (RTLS) for anonymous Wi-Fi location analytics, offering advanced capabilities for Wi-Fi marketing.

Processing Aggregated Data

The Aislelabs location engine provides the best accuracy in the industry which is achieved by providing a highly customizable engine that can be tuned to match the physical characteristics of any site.

All visitor data is captured passively as behavioral information by triangulating active Wi-Fi signals from mobile devices with no action from users required. All visitor data is presented as anonymous aggregated insights at a space, protecting visitor privacy while providing real-time metrics across all locations to an enterprise.
The platform uses filters and rule-based triggers to remove non-shopper and staff devices. All non-phone devices such as wirelessly networked printers are also filtered out to accurately capture customer visits.

Behavioral Analytics for Marketing and Sales

Using behavioral metrics, changes in new customers, engagement, dwell time, and repeat visits are attributed to marketing campaigns. If, for example, there is a marketing initiative for sale at a specific vendor in a retail space, increase in footfall and dwell time compared to historical trends can reveal the efficacy of the campaign. With persistent identity, the retail space will also be able to understand what kind of effect it had on the surrounding vendors as well.

Operational Use Cases

  • Layout and leasing teams can also leverage behavioral data, gaining insights on measurable metrics across a portfolio to identify and attract the right retail mix.
  • Understanding cross-space affinity between retailers provides a better look at which of them are best placed within a layout and which retail types attract customers and visitors to a space.
  • Using data obtained from across a portfolio, a case can be made to pitch a specific retailer that is lacking at a particular location.

Connected Users vs Anonymous Visitors

Another way to monetize the wireless network is to capture contact, demographic, and psychographic user information of guests and customers for marketing purposes. Through the use of a guest Wi-Fi capture portal, a customer is able to associate with an access point and is presented the option to opt in to marketing and access the internet. If they opt in through a social media account like Facebook, it will provide demographic and interests data along with name and contact information.
Behavioral information of these connected users inside a space can now also be collected at the individual level. With a large enough database of connected users, interests and demographics can be correlated to physical retailers and spaces inside a venue allowing far better insights. This allows a business to target with greater clarity and focus to maximize marketing ROI through rule-based, omnichannel campaigns via email, SMS, and digital advertising.

Marketing Versatility

Automation and rule-based identification also allows businesses to run campaigns that are triggered to send at any time, engaging visitors as soon as they opt-in, thank them when they purchase a product, or ask them to leave a review on popular review sites when the network establishes that they have left. A sophisticated smart coupon function is also available for scheduled campaigns or based on user behavior (such as not having returned to a venue in over 90 days). Each coupon is unique to each user and redeemable through an email which can be presented to a cashier via a mobile device. Coupons are non-transferable and expire when used or after a certain length of time.

With each customer’s persistent journey understood throughout a location and across a portfolio, their return rate to a venue is also collected. These metrics can be combined with open and click rates from email and SMS campaigns to evaluate the marketing effectiveness and ROI. Using this data, a true representation of the return on investment is understood.

Learn more about how Aislelabs integrates with Fortinet to deliver enterprise level business intelligence and analytics at: https://www.aislelabs.com/fortinet-social-wifi-analytics/