Guest data
One record for every guest, from every door
WiFi sign-ins, till receipts, bookings, hotel stays, forms and files become one guest record, matched on email, with one history of about 60 kinds of event. It works with Purple WiFi or without it.
How does Engage build a guest profile?
From every system that sees the guest, matched on email address. A WiFi sign-in adds a guest and a visit at that venue, a till sale adds spend, a booking or stay adds a reservation, and forms, CSV imports and the API add the rest. Engage never writes sales, customers or products back to a till.
- Purple WiFi sign-ins, with contact details and the email opt-in
- Sign-ins from Cisco Spaces, Cisco Meraki and Juniper Mist. Meraki and Mist send no consent by default
- Sales, refunds and voids from Square, Lightspeed X-Series, Epos Now, Loyverse and Oracle Simphony, plus Shopify and Stripe
- Bookings and stays from ResDiary, Mews and apaleo
- Website forms, CSV imports, CSV files over SFTP (secure file transfer) and the public API
- Venues created in Engage, for groups without Purple WiFi
What does a guest record show?
One timeline per guest, with every event written once in about 60 kinds, from email and text to visits, purchases, consent changes and stays. Engage adds calculated fields such as lifetime value, last visited and latest NPS score, and works out each guest's time zone.
- One history of about 60 kinds of event, with duplicate deliveries dropped and machine opens never counted
- Nine calculated fields, including engagement rating, lifetime value, last visited and latest NPS score
- A time zone per guest: one set by a person, else the last venue visited, else your account's
- A till or booking record with no email waits unlinked, and joins the guest when they give one, for example at the WiFi login
- Imported rows, and rows linked more than 24 hours late, show on the timeline and start nothing
What are engagement stars?
A 1 to 5 star rating for how engaged each guest is: Champion, Loyal, Occasional, Fading or Dormant. It weighs how recently and how often a guest was active, and their human click rate. Only human, positive signals count, so an unsubscribe does not lower it: a guest who unsubscribed and still visits every week is engaged with the venue.
- Champion, Loyal, Occasional, Fading and Dormant, or Not rated yet
- Human, positive signals only: machine opens never count and an unsubscribe does not lower it
- A "why 4 stars?" panel on every guest that shows the working
Can I bring my own data in and take it out?
Yes. Add your own fields for anything Engage does not track, and import contacts by CSV with a preview before anything is written. You confirm that you hold consent and name the channels it covers, so consent for email is never read as consent to text. Take it all out again by CSV or a scheduled warehouse export.
- Your own fields in ten types, compared by type, so "age over 18" matches a guest aged 100 and not one aged 9
- CSV import with a preview of the first rows, consent confirmed and the channels it covers named
- No import, connector or API call can undo a guest's own opt-out with older or undated evidence: only the guest's own newer choice can
- CSV export of up to 250 columns, including your own and calculated fields
- Scheduled export to your own BigQuery, Snowflake or Amazon S3, set up with the Purple team. Erased guests are never exported
Can Engage predict what a guest will do next?
Engage can predict when each guest is next likely to visit, how likely they are to lapse and their value over the next 12 months, each labelled "predicted". Predictions are off by default, need a history of repeat visits, skip guests who object to profiling and show an accuracy backtest before you rely on them.
- Predicted churn risk, from each guest's usual gap between visits
- Predicted next visit, read across WiFi, till, bookings and stays
- Predicted 12-month value: expected visits times typical spend per visit
- An accuracy backtest that shows how well the predictions would have done, before you rely on them
Questions
Do I need Purple WiFi to build guest profiles?
No. You can create venues in Engage and build profiles from your tills, bookings, hotel system, forms and imports. A connected WiFi system (Purple WiFi, Cisco Spaces, Cisco Meraki or Juniper Mist) adds a visit history. Without one, bookings and sales are still measured.
How does Engage match a till customer to a WiFi guest?
By email address, ignoring upper and lower case. A till or booking record without an email is kept unlinked and joined when the guest later gives one, for example at the WiFi login. Engage never invents a guest from a receipt.
Do Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens count as engagement?
No. Apple Mail Privacy Protection fetches every image, so those opens are machines, and link scanners click links. Neither counts towards engagement stars. Where opens cannot be measured, reports show "not measured" instead of 0%.
Which time zone does Engage use for each guest?
The guest's own: a time zone set by a person, else the zone of the venue they last visited, else your account's. Engage uses it to send at a set local time and to keep SMS out of quiet hours.
Can I add fields Engage does not track?
Yes. Your own fields hold anything else you record about a guest, in ten types, and segments, merge fields and exports can use any of them.
See what your guest data already knows
The free plan is listed at 500 credits a month, with unlimited* contacts and no card needed.