About Kolding Storcenter

• 120 shops and 62.000 m2 – making it the biggest mall in the southern region of Jutland.
• 6.000.000 annual visits
• Located in Kolding, a city of 60.000 inhabitants.
• 76.000 followers on Facebook and 5.500 Instagram followers

Kolding Storcenter is part of a portfolio, Danske Shoppingcentre, that consists of 17 Danish malls. The mall was among the first of the portofolio’s malls to launch with Emplate and wanted to set an example for the other malls that had yet to launch.

One month after launch, it’s safe to say that Kolding Storcenter did just that. The launch of their consumer faced app on the 31st of January, 2020, was a textbook example of how to execute a perfect launch, engage tenants and achieve instant results!

Results at a glance – in just 30 days

It only took the mall 30 days to create outstanding results. This is what was achieved just one month after launching the app:

• 650 campaigns were created by the tenants
• 5100 customers that actively used the app during the first month
• 220.000+ views of the created campaigns
• 400 mall visits that were influenced by the new mall app.

… All that, in just thirty days.

Strategic objectives

When Danske Shoppingcentre chose to launch owned and mobile-based marketing channels for their malls, they did so with the following objectives that were set in unison with individual mall marketing managers:

• They aimed to increase footfall in the mall, securing more traffic to both the mall in general and each individual store.
• They wanted to increase loyalty among new and existing customers.
• By increasing traffic and loyalty, they sought to increase sales in individual stores throughout the mall.
• Additionally they wanted all of the above with a minimum of extra workload on mall management, meaning that engaging tenants to operate the initiatives was essential.

Onboarding and engaging tenants

After deciding to implement a digital loyalty- and owned marketing solution with Emplate, the mall started to prepare for launching:

• Emplate Consumer
• Emplate Shop
• Empate Management

An important part of launching a customer faced mall app that is powered in part by tenant provided content is to engage store staff in the platform. First up is onboarding in Emplate Shop App, the tool that tenants use to create and manage the content that is distributed in the mall app.

Onboarding

To onboard the tenants, Kolding Storcenter informed all stores about the new investment into an owned marketing channel as well as how it would benefit the shopping center, the stores and the customers that shop there.

They also invited all 120 stores in the mall to participate in one of two morning meeting on which the purpose and possibilities of the new initiatives would be presented and discussed. After inviting all tenants, the mall reached out to stores that had not responded, resulting in a turnout at the onboarding meetings of close to 90% of shops – equivalent to 120-140 store staffers.

Emplate participated on both meetings and did an hour-long presentation on how tenants could and should use the tool they were now given access to.

Prior to the meetings, Emplate automatically sent informational onboarding e-mails to all stores that contained login information so shops could start using Emplate Shop App at the walk-through in the meeting.

As a result of the joint efforts from Kolding Storcenter and Emplate, 40% of stores in the mall had created content for the app prior to the launch date – this meant that more than 150 different campaigns created by local store staff was awaiting the first customers to download the mall app.

… But it didn’t stop here. 30 days after launching the mall app, 82% of stores had created content through Emplate Shop App, meaning that 650 campaigns were distributed through the Kolding Storcenter App!

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BONUS INFORMATION

At new app launches, Emplate sets up an automatic e-mail flow in the relevant language to help tenants get to know the tool and get off to a good start. The mailflow has a conversion rate of 56% - meaning that you’ll spend less time onboarding and engaging your tenants and more time utilizing the content that they contribute via Emplate Shop.

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Engagement

Kolding Storcenter went even further and decided to engage their stores to such a degree that they would contribute to the app not only with content, but also with prizes for the loyalty program and the app kick-off.

The mall repeatedly reached out to  tenants asking for prizes in various categories and prize tiers in order to stock up their loyalty shop. The shops responded with heaps of prizes, which gave the mall numerous possibilities in terms of market the app and retaining the customers that downloaded it. We’ll get back to the marketing-part in a minute, but in terms of retention, Kolding Storcenter made it much easier to hold on to customers, due to their well-equipped loyalty point shop. We’ve seen time and again that malls that utilize their loyalty program efficiently will see the better retention among their users.

Due to the efforts in encouraging shops to contribute to the loyalty program, Kolding Storcenter currently has 58 different prizes in the loyalty program – there’s surely something to entice each and every customer!

Tenants at the shopping mall even participated in marketing the app at launch. With the assistance of Emplate, the mall set up an internal competition among stores. Emplate provided each store with unique download-links and associated QR-codes so that the stores could convert their visiting customers to app users. The store that created the most downloads during the 30 days after launch would receive an attractive prize of a gift card for ~€ 650,- to any one of the restaurants in the mall.

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Extra insights

At Emplate we regularly suggest malls to run internal competitions, as it’s a great way to increase desired KPI’s. No matter if malls intend to increase downloads, monthly active users, followers, campaign views or influenced mall visits, we’re ready with tools and initiatives that can help do just that and it's all documented in our Knowledge Hub.

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The stores took to the challenge and converted visitors to users in order to win the big prize and spoil their staff. During the 30 days that the competition lasted, the mall regularly informed stores about the ongoing competition, reminded about the possibilities and benefits and encouraged stores to contribute prizes to the loyalty shop.

After the thirty days, Emplate pulled the results of the competition, revealing that the winning store had converted no less than 255 downloads. The stores combined had generated 758 downloads in just 30 days!

Launch and results

Upon launch, the mall had planned a download campaign to convert as many customers to app users as quickly as possible. They coupled the launch of the app to their existing campaign revolving around the Chinese New Year, which has become a successful tradition at the mall. During the campaign, the mall wasdrawing winners of give-aways (supplied by the tenants) from the pool of everyone who downloaded and signed up in the new app.

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The mall regularly advertised the new mall app on their social media and also had set up in-mall marketing to promote the app.

As a result of their download-campaign, Kolding Storcenter reached amazing results in just 30 days. Here’s what they accomplished by the end of the first month:

• 5.396 downloads of the new mall-app
• 5.141 users actively used the app
• 4.400 mall visits were influenced by the app. in 3.300 cases the app had been used no more than 7 days prior to the visit.
• 75 prizes were redeemed from the loyalty program. Prizes are redeemed with points earned by visiting the mall, so more redemptions are expected as more customers will earn more points from more visits.
• 201 coupons redeemed for campaigns from the mall app

But as the mall had promised, they were not the only ones benefiting from their new mall app. The stores also saw some results on their own:

• 220.000 views of the store-created content within the app – and 13.700 interactions!
• More than 1.700 campaign visits were recorded. That means, that a customer has viewed a campaign in a specific store and visited that exact store within seven days of viewing the content. It’s not a sale set in stone – but it’s definitely a step in the right direction

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