What is Captive Portal?

Many people have come across captive portals and may not have even realized it. When people log into the guest WiFi in a place of business, a captive portal is what they must go through to use the WiFi network. A captive portal is a splash page on their mobile device, tablet, or laptop that displays information asking users to the web.  

Most captive portals will contain a list of the terms and services, or they may ask for some simple personal details before they prompt users to agree to the terms before allowing access.

Once guests agree, the captive portal can manage users’ access and engage at critical points in the visit. Businesses use these portals to capture essential insights into customers that physically access their location versus their webpage. 

In today’s highly tech-savvy world, people demand easy access to fast internet anywhere they go. Even in the age where telecommunications companies offer unlimited data, that data can only stretch so far, and sometimes, service can be a little spotty. We can all relate to being at a sports game, a festival, or a concert without a signal – it’s the worst. 

When people visit a coffee shop, hotel, or event venue and want to access the internet without using their data plan, they will opt to connect to the business’s guest WiFi. In utilizing captive portals, enterprises have begun to use a way to accommodate the growing needs for accessible WiFi while collecting essential data on their guests to help with their marketing efforts. 

Benefits of Using a Captive Portal 

Businesses worldwide can use captive portals to support their marketing strategies and help companies make changes needed to increase customer or guest satisfaction and loyalty. Using captive portals can benefit businesses by: 

Use Captive Portal to Collect essential Customer Data and Contact Data 

Businesses can customize captive portals to include fields to request additional information to collect accurate and rich data to build robust customer profiles. Collect data such as name, age, location, emails, gender, etc. Making a detailed customer profile can help marketing teams create more targeted marketing strategies.   

Providing a Level of Security 

Using a captive portal protects both the user and the business. The built-in security features can secure online business assets and protect users from phishing scams. The firm is also protected by freeing itself from liability for illegal online behavior. 

Set Limits to Prevent Users from Hogging Bandwidth 

Many public places can attract people who might sit for extended periods of time, and bog down the internet with their increased use. Setting up time limits can prevent users from staying connected for too long or set download limits to avoid large downloads to free up bandwidth – giving other users access.  

Using GoZone Smart WiFi captive portals at your place of business can be a convenient way to collect insights on the customers visiting your physical locations. Captive portals can help increase engagement, brand awareness, and customer profiles, improving businesses’ ROI and increasing overall revenue.  

20-Year Anniversary Celebration Coincides with Promotion of Wireless Broadband Alliance’s Hope For Connectivity Initiative and World WiFi Day

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., June 22, 2022–(BUSINESS WIRE)–GoZone WiFi, the leader in monetizing and managing guest WiFi, and its CEO Todd Myers are celebrating his pioneering efforts and involvement in the first passenger installation of WiFi technology in the Toledo Express Airport in 2002. The twenty-year anniversary also coincides with World WiFi Day and GoZone’s activities with the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) promotion of HOPE for Connectivity.

Myers is a WiFi industry pioneer and serial entrepreneur. He is responsible for creating four successful WiFi technology companies. In 2001, he created Airpath Wireless, the first cloud-based roaming, captive portal and payment system in the WiFi Industry. While at Airpath, he was behind the first passenger WiFi installation at Toledo Express in Toledo, Ohio. Now after twenty years, Myers is clearly dedicated to the WiFi industry and understands that WiFi has allowed people to stay connected wherever they go.

“From sharing information with loved ones to banking, shopping, and accessing news and critical data, the advancement of WiFi truly has improved the quality of everyday life. We are thrilled to celebrate our twenty-year anniversary of the first passenger installation of WiFi in an airport, and to help promote World WiFi Day and the WBA’s HOPE for Connectivity initiative. GoZone will continue to innovate and provide advanced WiFi technology solutions to our customers that can continue to help provide critical connectivity to consumers in a multitude of venues globally.”

GoZone WiFi, created in 2014 by Myers, offers industry-leading solutions to venue owners that enhance WiFi networks to provide revenue opportunities through venue analytics, guest intelligence, marketing automation and advertising. GoZone’s Smart WiFi Suite of products essentially enable WiFi monetization through rich location data, marketing engagements, and third-party sponsorships. These venues include sports and entertainment complexes such as stadiums and event locations, outdoor environments such as campgrounds and marinas, cities and communities, resorts and lodging, casinos and gaming, transportation, retail, and food and beverage establishments.

What is World WiFi Day?

World WiFi Day is a global event orchestrated by the Wireless Broadband Alliance that shines a light on the many communities and cities worldwide that remain without WiFi access. WiFi is a vital service that keeps economies moving, and by working to address the digital divide, the WBA hopes to bring governments and companies together to close the gap.

What is HOPE for Connectivity?

The HOPE for Connectivity calls for action from local government and industry leaders to recognize and celebrate WiFi’s role in advancing our society while helping to accelerate the availability of affordable connectivity for those who remain unconnected. There are four key themes rooted in the WBA’s vision for World WiFi Day:

Help: funding WiFi deployments to connect the unconnected communities
Offer: affordable WiFi access in both rural and urban areas
Promote: how WiFi has been successful in connecting cities and communities
Engage: and address the role of WiFi in the digital divide

For more information, please visit https://wballiance.com/world-WiFi-day-get-involved/.

About GoZone:

GoZone WiFi is a SaaS company and leader in monetizing and managing Guest WiFi. The company offers business analytics, venue intelligence and guest engagement by using WiFi networks to deliver branded content, provide customer analytics, and display advertising. GoZone’s Smart WiFi Suite of products enables WiFi monetization through rich location data, marketing engagements, and third-party sponsorships. GoZone’s venue intelligence enables enterprises to strategically refine operations, bridging the gap between marketing and IT. Learn more at GoZoneWiFi.com.

See full article on Yahoo! Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gozone-wifi-celebrates-20-anniversary

GoZone WiFi, a U.S. marketing, analytics, and advertising platform, has released new Smart WiFi outcomes to help restaurants gather information, increase loyalty, and advertise to customers in a time when many businesses are still reeling from COVID.

Given the fact that 84% of restaurant-goers base their decision to patronize a restaurant upon the presence and quality of its WiFi, it’s never been more important to integrate Smart WiFi.

GoZone WiFi solutions provide restaurants with various tools needed to succeed at getting customers to patronize their businesses.

Each option provides different outcomes to bolster a specific part of a restaurant’s plan to offer a unique customer experience that keeps people coming back while increasing revenue pathways.

Marketing4Wifi simplifies the marketing experience, empowering restaurants to:

• Entice customers with free access to WiFi
• Gain valuable information upon customer logins, such as email address, surveys, or SMS
  • Restaurants may then use data to send targeted emails and SMS to engage customers at opportune times, providing reminders or deals for birthdays or simply to get a repeat visit
• Brand a customers’ entire WiFi experience to promote deals, events, and offerings like delivery

With this setup, everyone gets what they want. Customers get WiFi to use while they dine, and the business obtains valuable data that it can use to increase return visits, learn about customer demographics, and attract new patrons.

A hallmark of successful restaurants in the post-COVID world will be the opportunity to regain customer loyalty. The past year has been a trying time for all businesses, and restaurants continue to face difficulties. Fortunately, Smart WiFi can rise to the challenge to help restaurants overcome many of the most significant problems.

For starters, analyzing WiFi login data can help a business determine its busiest times and then use that data to aid with traffic flow and seating in a building. This can promote overcrowding and promote feelings of safety among patrons.

Smart WiFi is also a valuable tool for creating a customer loyalty program. The SMS numbers and emails gathered during WiFi logins can be directly integrated into a business’s CRM software, providing businesses with a direct link to customers’ information.

That data can be used to incentivize customers to return at opportune times by sending direct messages while also providing them with individualized offers that are most likely to get them into the restaurant. Birthdays, anniversaries, or other regular interactions can each be added to the CRM and utilized to promote sales.

Furthermore, a business gains the ability to directly request customer reviews which have greater potential to be positive, thereby increasing the likelihood that more people will come to the restaurant.

Utilizing GoZone’s WiFi for restaurants will promote safety and sales side by side while also generating a significant ROI, minimizing the relative cost of engaging GoZone WiFi’s Smart system.

GoZone’s Smart WiFi framework is already established; restaurants can start setting up their WiFi systems right now to gain customers, actionable data, and an edge in their market.

About GoZone WiFi

GoZone WiFi is a SaaS company providing guest engagement and advertising solutions to businesses large and small. GoZone’s Smart WiFi Suite helps companies innovate as they reach out to their customers and advertising partners. You can contact GoZone WiFi at (877) 554-WiFi or [email protected]

Providing guest WiFi gives businesses a way to create a captive audience for marketing. By properly leveraging the full capabilities of a quality guest WiFi system, your business can funnel customers towards making purchases at an integrated POS system.

Ultimately, you’ll obtain customers, delight them with offers, finish an order, and follow up with clients in an effective, fluid way.

What is Guest Wi-Fi?
A guest WiFi system is a secondary access point on your network system to which guests can connect. In the context of business, guest WiFi is the wireless internet that your customers connect to rather than your company’s personal network.

This separate gateway can direct customers to specific pages, provide your business with valuable data, and allow you to schedule marketing campaigns. In short, properly utilized guest WiFi can be the difference between just another passerby and a customer.

What is Wi-Fi Marketing?
Guest WiFi systems are multi-faceted, providing a direct path for advertising to users while simultaneously gaining actionable information from them.

Signing into a guest WiFi system requires the user to provide data, such as:

• Name
• Email
• Phone number
• Date of birth

WiFi marketing uses that information to send clients general and customized offers while also creating a profile for that user.

So, what is WiFi marketing? It’s a system that both gives and takes information from a business to draw in customers, impress them and win them over, and then direct them to a company’s POS system to finish the sale and guarantee repeated transactions.

What are the Benefits of WiFi Marketing?
By viewing WiFi marketing as a system that draws in, delights, wins over, and encourages customers, it’s easy to see where the benefits of this type of marketing emerge.

From the moment customers sign into your guest WiFi, they will be subject to your advertising whims. For starters, WiFi marketing gives businesses a platform for advertising by turning the WiFi homepage into a digital billboard that advertises directly to them.

As your system continues to gain the personal data of the users, your business can generate profiles to aid in specific WiFi marketing campaigns. You’ll have the opportunity to integrate aspects from your POS system into this marketing campaign, too.

Your guest WiFi system could identify your customer’s habits and set a trigger for an offer to appear at the POS system. For example, if a repeat customer comes into the store and makes a purchase, your system could trigger an offer that provides them 20% off on their sale if they meet a certain condition.

Your business could use that to increase outright sales by requiring a higher purchase amount or it could make customers sign up for your email service to get that coupon, giving you more information to use in the future. Both of those measures, and the multitude of others available, give your business options to get more out of your interactions with customers.

Integrating marketing and guest WiFi systems can drive sales, provide customer insights, and facilitate better promotions for your entire business. GoZone WiFi’s powerful Marketing4WiFi provides companies like yours with a highly customizable, effective marketing portal.

Trying to get create an effective digital captive portal that results in better sales might seem daunting, but GoZone WiFi can help you establish the systems you need to get the results you want.

COVID has thrown many businesses’ advertising and marketing schemes into disarray, leading to many cities losing out on valuable revenue in the form of tax money. A new opportunity for growth has emerged in the form of city-wide WiFi, something that has already been implemented in some areas to great effect.

Take a look at how city-wide WiFi could be the future of a city’s economy in these unique and trying times.

Implementing City WiFi
Implementing city-wide WiFi is often a matter of utilizing existing structural space, like public buildings and the former sites of payphones, and transforming that area into a node to promote a WiFi signal.

By doing so, first responders can access a network of cameras to gain valuable information, people can use a secure network at home or on the go, and the city can use analytics to inspire future development.

Of course, providing this WiFi comes at a cost to a city, but those expenses can be offset in numerous ways.

City-Wide WiFi Can Promote Local Businesses
The beneficial impacts of city-wide WiFi on a city’s economy are both significant and varied. A city’s local economy is highly dependent upon the businesses in the area doing well.

The recent economic uncertainty caused by COVID has left many businesses looking for new and innovative ways to gain customers, and cities have become strapped for cash as their coffers dwindled without tax income.

Fortunately, city-wide WiFi represents a mutually beneficial system that can give both businesses and the cities they call home a boost.

The cities that have employed an area-wide WiFi system have found that plenty of companies are willing to support the costs of development and upkeep on the infrastructure seeing that it helps everyone involved.

For example, GoZone WiFi has implemented its Ads4WiFi model in Clermont, Florida, allowing businesses to pay to have their company advertised on the interactive city landing page, guest flow page, and in the follow-up emails stemming from the initial contact with a prospective customer.

The vast advertising space available through the Ads4WiFi system from GoZone WiFi allows for a multitude of businesses to seek recognition and drive sales.

Not only do these companies get more web and foot traffic from their city-wide advertisements, but their revenue also becomes the city’s tax dollars. This symbiotic relationship also reduces the costs to businesses that currently have their own WiFi systems; there’s no need to pay for an individual store’s WiFi if it’s supplied by the city.

This give and take helps the city as a whole, the businesses involved, and the people that visit the area, too. A WiFi-friendly city is more appealing to consumers, tourists, and residents of the area.

Aside from the economic benefits of developing a city-wide WiFi plan, the wealth of data provided by having citizens connect to the WiFi plan makes the entire concept more desirable, especially in the context of COVID.

The WiFi infrastructure can:

• Real-time data on user density can show if a gathering is getting too large to be safe
• Integrated WiFi structures in city-operated venues can be used to identify potentially dangerous foot traffic
• Emergency public health messages can be displayed to WiFi users

The versatility of a modern WiFi system means cities get another tool in their arsenal as they fight their way back to normalcy.

Applying GoZone WiFi’s Ads4WiFi can help hasten any city’s development into a futuristic, symbiotic economy where the businesses and government work together to bolster one another.

Becoming an adopter of Ads4WiFi as a company or a city can help eliminate some of the uncertainty about your economic future. Keeping people connected and informed about their options promotes higher income, and that is something that most businesses and local governments sorely need right now.

Contact GoZone WiFi today and learn about all the possibilities that you can claim to help stimulate your earnings.

SecurePass™ Offers Enterprise, Property Management Clients, Operators and Reseller Channel Partners the Immediate Ability to Securely On-Board Multiple Devices to Guest WiFi Networks Quickly and Easily

PETERSBURG, FL August 17, 2021 — GoZone WiFi, leading U.S.-based WiFi analytics and marketing SaaS company, today launched SecurePass™ — a turn-key secure multi-device management solution for seamless guest access at a variety of facility types. Immediate prime verticals and use cases for this solution include outdoor recreational areas such as campgrounds, RV parks, marinas, and state or national parks, as well as MDUs, smart buildings, convention facilities, and campus communities.

And with the historical rise in demand as customers return to the outdoors and other public venues due to the pandemic, enterprise environments, property managers, operators, and reseller channel partners can now immediately offer the ability to on-board multiple devices on a Guest WiFi network quickly and easily, ultimately providing a simple, seamless experience for their guests while keeping costs to a minimum.

“GoZone WiFi is known for providing best-in-class cloud-based platforms that drive visibility, intelligence, and revenues from WiFi networks,” said Todd Myers, GoZone WiFi CEO.  “We are excited to now add SecurePass™ to our Marketing4WiFi™ platform, providing operators and venues with a turn-key solution for a multitude of devices to quickly and cost-effectively connect and manage guest access.  SecurePass™ is truly a much-needed solution across many verticals and complements our strategic focus of delivering high-performance venue intelligence and guest engagement solutions to our enterprise and property management clients, as well as to our white label and reseller channel partners.”

SecurePass™ Highlights:

• The SecurePass™ multi-device management solution offers a way for venues to connect guest WiFi users’ devices that wouldn’t normally be able to connect using a traditional captive portal-based guest registration.
• Offered as a usage-based subscription model, the solution offers self-service WiFi connectivity so neither the venue nor an IT department must actively manage or create device profiles to support different user group levels.
• SecurePass™ offers a full spectrum of guest access features and functionality, including free, advertisement, payment or voucher-based service plans, self-provisioning, and dynamic password generation.
• The solution also offers the ability to manage, register, and onboard any smart or WiFi-enabled IoT device as easily as entering a home network WiFi password.
• Passwords and guest registrations no longer need to be managed manually and support time is dramatically reduced for enterprises, property managers, and operators.
• SecurePass™ offers a seamless and simple way to securely manage the connectivity of many kinds of devices, with low transactional costs and the ability to optimize revenue and service, while also reducing support calls and administrative efforts.
• Guests can now have a secure, safe onboarding experience, as well as the ability to register and utilize multiple devices in these environments quickly and easily.
• SecurePass™ is an added feature to GoZone WiFi’s Marketing4WiFi™
• SecurePass™ is now available for any existing or new Ruckus WiFi network deployment, with additional enhancements and availability forthcoming.

About GoZone WiFi:
GoZone WiFi is a SaaS company offering venue intelligence and guest engagement by using WiFi networks to deliver branded content, provide customer analytics, and display advertising. GoZone’s Smart WiFi Suite of products enables WiFi monetization through rich location data, marketing engagements, and third-party sponsorships. GoZone’s venue intelligence enables enterprises to strategically refine operations, bridging the gap between online and offline business. Learn more at GoZoneWiFi.com.