How HOCO grew its customer database

HOCO Entertainment, Inc. is one of the largest tourism organizations in Canada. Based in Ontario, HOCO provides destinations, attractions, restaurants, accommodations, and retail for the many guests who visit Niagara Falls. It runs Clifton Hill — the “authority for FUN in Niagara Falls” — with attractions like the Niagara SkyWheel, Dino Adventures Golf, and Wizards Golf, plus a variety of restaurants (Boston Pizza, Kelsey’s, Wendy’s, Tim Hortons).

Clifton Hill draws a massive number of visitors each year — but because the park is completely open, with no gates, HOCO struggled to collect visitor information or understand behavior, relying on anecdotal data. HOCO had a database of 200,000 email addresses but no data on customers who visited the park without staying at the property, and no view of how customers interacted with the park itself.

Missing on-site behavioral data prevented HOCO from engaging customers in relevant, targeted ways. Typical Clifton Hill visitors live about two hours away and come 3–4 times a year. HOCO needed a solution to identify, retarget, and communicate with them — one that would:

• Offer easy-to-use WiFi at the park
• Enable customer data collection while respecting privacy
• Help the company grow its database so it can better perform retargeting

To implement the WiFi infrastructure, HOCO selected Extreme Networks (formerly Aerohive). Extreme introduced three over-the-top options — one of which was Cloud4Wi. HOCO ran pilots of all three, and Cloud4Wi performed best.

HOCO’s marketing and IT teams selected and implemented Cloud4Wi together, impressed by both the platform and the team’s hands-on approach. Cloud4Wi let HOCO extract actionable insight across the on-site journey — collecting phone number and email at opt-in, and revealing on-site journeys including the specific areas visited and dwell time.

“Cloud4Wi is not just a tech supplier, it’s our partner. With Cloud4Wi and a data-driven approach, we have been able to transform one-time visitors into loyal customers: get people to come in, retarget customers, and make them come back.”
— Joel Noden, Director of Marketing, HOCO

HOCO deployed Cloud4Wi at Clifton Hill in spring 2017, offering WiFi in outdoor areas, restaurants, and indoor attractions (like the Wax Museum). Cloud4Wi made it easy to create a custom WiFi experience matching Clifton Hill’s website look and feel, in English and French.

Logging in was easy — email and phone number, or Facebook — which lifted subscriptions to HOCO’s promotional communications while staying compliant with privacy regulations. Collected details flowed automatically into HOCO’s CRM via APIs, growing the marketing database.

Results included:

• 112K+ customer profiles collected per year
• 70% marketing opt-in
• 79% reduction in bounce rate
• 178% uplift in email open rate in the first year

With analytics, HOCO understood entrance points, dwell time, popular areas, and visit frequency, turning large data volumes into actionable insight and improving retargeting by focusing on recent visitors — boosting conversion and engagement. 

HOCO planned to expand retargeting using WiFi data, engaging existing customers (who live ~2 hours away and visit 3–4 times a year) to maximize traffic and revenue. With a rich database of on-site behavior, HOCO can tailor marketing rather than send blanket messages — nurturing current customers more cost-effectively than acquiring new ones.