2,700 Shoppers Brought Back for AED 250,000
A regional shopping centre used the profile data captured through its EZELINK guest WiFi to target 10,000 known visitors with an email campaign. More than a quarter came back — an estimated AED 250,000 of retail value from a list the mall already owned.
How Do You Bring a Shopper Back?
A large regional shopping centre wanted to promote its latest offers, promotions and in-mall activities — and, more than that, to bring as many past visitors back through the doors as possible. That is the hardest problem in physical retail: not attracting a first visit, but earning the second.
Traditional advertising sprays a message at everyone and hopes. What the mall actually needed was to reach the specific people who had already visited, knew where it was, and were the right age and profile to respond — and to reach them directly, on the phones in their pockets.
The mall already had that audience. Every shopper who had connected to the guest WiFi had, with consent, left a profile behind. The question was whether that data could be turned into footfall.
A Campaign Built From the Mall's Own Data
The guest WiFi platform had been building detailed, consented profiles of every visitor who connected — age, interests and contact details, captured at login. Rather than buying an audience, the mall could now segment the one it already had.
The team built the campaign in the platform's own email tools and targeted its entire list of past shoppers aged 25 to 50. Then it did the thing most campaigns skip: it followed up specifically with the people who had not opened the first email — and measured that group separately.
Capture
Consented profiles — age, interests, contact — built passively as shoppers used the guest WiFi.
Segment
Past visitors aged 25–50 selected from the existing database — roughly 10,000 known shoppers.
Send
An offers-and-promotions email built in the platform's own campaign tools.
Follow up & measure
A second email to non-openers, tracked separately, then footfall matched back against the targeted list.
On data: profiles are captured with the shopper's consent when they opt in to the free WiFi, and campaigns are sent to that opted-in audience. Any deployment today should be reviewed against current UAE data protection requirements before launch.
The Follow-Up Beat the First Send
The first email opened at 19.1% — already above the industry average. The interesting result came from the follow-up. The second email, sent only to people who had ignored the first, was expected to underperform. Instead it opened at 49.4% — a highly engaged group the mall had almost written off, now clearly identified for everything that comes next.
Of roughly 10,000 targeted shoppers, more than 28% visited the mall during the campaign period, with about 2,700 of the targeted list returning. The centre put an estimated AED 250,000 of retail value to its tenants against those returning customers — from a list it already owned, at effectively no media cost.
- 19.1% open rate on the first email, above industry average
- 49.4% open rate on the follow-up to non-openers
- 28%+ of 10,000 targeted shoppers visited during the campaign
- ~2,700 returning customers, worth an estimated AED 250,000 to retailers
- A re-usable, highly engaged audience identified for future campaigns
Two More UAE Venues, Same Idea
The guest-WiFi-to-marketing engine behind that campaign runs across other sectors too. Two more anonymised UAE deployments, both built on the same consented-data model.
A franchising group running 28 outlets across two countries started with no customer database. Free guest WiFi and consented data capture built it to 169,000 profiled users over sixteen months — enough of an audience that the group used it to launch a brand-new store.
One of the region's largest malls — 628,000 sqm, 750 stores — turned its WiFi login page into a multi-tier advertising platform for its retail tenants. Over 14 months it captured 219,000 users, lifted dwell time by 9%, and raised customer engagement by 75% while generating new advertising revenue.
The Solutions Behind This Project
Let's Turn Your Guest WiFi Into Footfall
If you offer guest WiFi, you may already be sitting on a marketing audience you've never used. Tell us about your venue and we'll show you how to capture and activate it — with consent, and compliantly.
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