‘Free’ As A Conversion Resource
{ February 16th, 2008 }
If you run a cafe, a restaurant, a dinner and airport, bus terminal or anything related here is a tip: increase the number of electrical outlets in your facilities. You may also want to consider free wi-fi or free wi-fi with a purchase. All of these things increase traffic and the circulation in your store by laptop carrying customers. Relate the cost of the extra electricity or wifi payment to the amount of money lost when customers don’t stick around because they can’t use the internet.
This week I went to a little coffeshop/dinner called Nani’s in San Francisco. They get it. They have electrical outlets everywhere, free wifi and they don’t give you the evil eye when you’ve been there for 12 hours. In return for all of these amenities I stayed all day, ate every meal there, bought lots of drinks and tipped a lot. I stopped by another place called Velo Rouge that also offered the same. So I did the same over-spending and over-tipping to show my gratitude.
We’re almost a decade into the 21st century, and Starbucks JUST ended it’s contract with T-Mobile that charged customers $9.00 a day for internet access. $9 dollars for one freakin day! $9 is almost 1/4 my monthly wifi bill! So four days at Starbucks or 1 month at home….hrmmmmm.
Think of how much business that cost them. Most of the laptop carrying customers would walk in to a Starbucks, find out they have to pay or Wi-Fi and walk right out heading over to someplace else where it’s free…usually the local coffee shop. As high as their coffee is marked up it seems like it would make more sense to give away a wifi-password with a purchasse. They could even charge ten cents or a quarter extra. Instead they adopted a new plan: to give away two hours and then charge for more time.
Which just means in San Fran or New York you go right across the street to another Starbucks and hop on a new connection for your next two hours. Outside of those two cities and I still I doubt customers would be inclined to stay for another, when they can just work a little faster to get in and get out.
This piece from Computer World highlights that very argument. It’s simply not in a businesses best interest to charge for Wifi. Instead businesses should be using it as a conversion tool. Make it the loss leader and then work on making turning the business it draws into repeat and loyal business. Charging customers for Wifi these days is like a restaurant that still charges for water. It should become the new cost of providing a service, write it into the bottom line.
If you aren’t already reading it, make sure you tune into Chris Anderson’s blog for more discussion related to his upcoming book FREE which will be about the many practices of making “free” work for you instead of against you.
Technorati Tags: free, chris anderson, wifi, conversion
