The ability to engage tenants is essential when managing the marketing efforts of a mall or shopping center. In order to drive customers to the stores, you need to promote the very best news, offers and campaigns - preferably from each and every retailer under your roof. This process is oftentimes troublesome and time consuming, and planning for mall-wide campaigns or seasonal sales only make it worse. Before setting up a mall-wide marketing campaign, you need to collect content for it. That probably looks something along the lines of this:

• Collectively e-mail all tenants asking for content relevant to the campaign. Receive a handful of responses, of which only half contains relevant content.
• Physically visiting frequently contributing stores in the mall to inform of the upcoming campaign, once again asking for relevant content. Collect e-mails for retail headquarters, whom, according to stores, will supply the content needed.
• E-mail retail headquarters asking for content relevant to the campaign. E-mails get tossed around but finally reaches the relevant marketing manager. Ask for relevant content. Repeat for other retail headquarters.
• Send out e-mail reminder to tenants. Revisit stores and remind retail headquarters that have yet to respond or supply the promised content
• Seep through inbox for the relevant content. Crop and adjust all images to fit the right ratio. Ask retailers and stores that supplied low-quality images for better resolution.
• Organize all relevant content into one folder, upload and forward to your agencies.
  

Our very own Head of Communication describes it like this:

Content collection is troublesome, requires an extensive amount of time that is better spent elsewhere, and often involves manual and repetitive tasks for which mall management are most likely overqualified.

Jens Fibæk-Jensen
Emplate - Head of Communication

A better alternative

Instead of the troublesome and time consuming workflow, imagine this: A fully automatic, effortless and self-sufficient marketing platform that reaches customer easily and repeatedly. Now, add that 100% of your tenants regularly, continuously and happily contribute content to the platform. It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? We believe it is.

Establishing a fully automatic and self-sufficient marketing platform is not effortless, nor can you expect each and every one of your tenants to deliver heaps of content at all times.

What you can expect is that, with some effort on your part, it is very much possible to establish a marketing platform that customers and tenants love to use. You can also expect that most of your tenants will regularly deliver content to the platform - making the content collection self-sufficient and distribution fully automatic. But it will not be without effort on your part.

Results you can expect with the better alternative

At the time of writing, malls that uses Emplate products to establish their marketing platform report these results:

• On average more than 65% of tenants contribute with content to the platform on a monthly basis (see older statistic below in this post)
• On average, each active store contributes with 75 pieces of content each year - that’s 6 pieces of content a month!
• An average of 4100 contributions from tenants each year per shopping mall, or 343 pieces of content each month!
• 85% of surveyed stores report contributing with content a couple times a month or more
  

By implementing a self-sufficient marketing channel with a dedicated tool for content collection, mall management can reap a dozen of benefits.

First of all, it’s time-saving and will spare management the countless hours of repetitive, simple tasks of coordination via e-mail, phone and physical store visits. By optimizing the workflow, mall management can focus their energy on the decisions and tasks that matters the most.

The tenant tool, Emplate Shop, empowers mall stores, granting them control of what messages and content they wish to distribute to customers. Shifting the responsibility for content creation from mall management to tenants, doesn’t just save time for management; it also motivates stores to create their own successes and results, leading to more content being created more often.

Once tenants regularly contribute content own their own, it’s also a lot easier to gather content for certain occasions - like the mall-wide campaign we exemplified above. With a dedicated tool however, the process is much easy; simply pick all relevant content from the pool manually or allow tenants to associate content with the upcoming campaign.

Real examples of tenant engagement

Here’s a closer look on some individual malls, that have successfully implemented the semi-automatic marketing platform and their results with tenant engagement. All results are from 2019 - as we are not always allowed to share recent insights from each shopping mall we are working with. But we can disclose that the KPI's we look at when talking about tenant engagement have been increasing since 2019.

‍Mall name: Broen Shopping

‍Amount of tenants: 60

Average monthly active stores: 57% (KPI from 2019, it's higher today)

Percentage of stores with content in 2019: 96%

Amount of content contributed by tenants: 3551 in 2019, averaging 295 each month

Average pieces of content from each active store throughout 2019:  114 campaigns

Read another case study about Broen shopping: Launching a digital transformation in a mall with success

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Mall name: herningCentret

‍Amount of tenants: 80

Average monthly active stores: 51% (KPI from 2019, it's higher today)

Percentage of stores with content in 2019: 87%

Amount of content contributed by tenants: 3905 in 2019, averaging 325 each month (... and increasing)

Average pieces of content from each active store throughout 2019: 81 campaigns in 2019

Read another case study about herningCetnret: Must read case study for shopping malls – No matter the size of your mall

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Mall name: Storcenter Nord

Amount of tenants: 50

Average monthly active stores: 41% (KPI from 2019, it's higher today)

Percentage of stores with content in 2019: 74%

Amount of content contributed by tenants: 2613 in 2019, averaging 217 each month

Average pieces of content from each active stores throughout 2019: 101 campaigns

Yes, this mall had a slow start and not the best numbers, but you know what? We helped them change that and wrote a case study about it: A shopping mall went from a slow start online to 24 month of steady growth

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Always plenty of content

Solving the content issue does not happen overnight, nor does tenant engagement grow on it’s own. Other than an empowering tenants with the Tenant Engagement Module that enables local initiative, we’ve built some important processes into our solution that will help you engage your tenants, and bail out inactive stores. Here is just a few examples of the services and resources we've implemented: 

• Personalized e-mail flows to educate and engage tenants triggered by individual behavior, that have proven to engage 56% of newly launched tenants and reactive more than 55% of inactive stores
• Real time analytics on tenant contributions, motivating greatness and growth as store personnel can monitor the effects of each piece of content
• A close collaboration with leading retail headquarters, who deliver content to be distributed on behalf of their stores in multiple malls. We call it Emplate Retail+, and it’s an effortless shortcut to ensure even more content in your marketing platform.

Remember the dream of a fully automatic, effortless and self-sufficient marketing platform that reaches customer easily and repeatedly - and regular, continuous and happy content contribution from 100% of your tenants?

We can't guarantee that dream to come true, but we can help you come a whole lot closer.