About BROEN Shopping

BROEN Shopping is a 2 years old Danish shopping mall with 60 stores owned by TK Development who also operate malls in e.g. Poland.

The mall is placed in Esbjerg, the 5th largest city in Denmark with a population of 75.000 citizens, and the mall has 3 million visits annually.

Currently the mall is undergoing a new development establishing a new luxury cinema and a handful of new shops and restaurants.

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Strategic goals

Building loyalty

BROEN Shopping’s top priority is to build a strong and loyal relationship with the local customers, making sure they come back every time they are leaving home for shopping. An important KPI in regard to the project with Emplate has from the beginning been to increase general footfall in the mall.

Increasing relevance in communication

BROEN SHOPPING has recognized that it is more important than ever to avoid “information overload” towards the customers. Relevance is therefore a key factor for them in regard to how they communicate with their visitors and their goal is always to communicate campaigns on a individually level based on insights about each customer (red: customer data).

Bringing local stories to the customers

Another way of bringing relevance to the customers is by creating a channel of communication between the local stores in the mall and the customers, where local stories can be shared. This goal has been defined as bringing the local shops closer to the customers who shop there or are likely to do so.

Building strong owned media

Having a strong owned media platform is something all shopping malls should strive for in the same way as much retail-chains are doing it today. Owned media is typical free to use because you own it, it helps you collect the necessary customer insights and it is a direct channel towards the most loyal customers in the mall. The goal in BROEN Shopping has therefore been to establish such media with Emplates solution to increase the Return on Investment on their paid marketing e.g. Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

The sum of the strategic goals is all connected to increased visit frequency and increased revenue.

The solution

Emplate’s platform was chosen to help BROEN Shopping carry out this strategy. The solution consists of following parts:

Customer facing app

All communication should be on the premises of the customers, which is why customers in the app choose the stores they would like to follow, and afterwards they get access to a feed of local stories, news and offers from those stores. Furthermore, the app comes with an iBeacon-based loyalty program where customers can earn prizes and rewards based on their visits to the mall and their behavior while visiting.

Inspirational and interactive website

An integration to their existing website which changes the website from being a place where customer only visited to find opening hours and shop information into a platform where customers can find all relevant products from their favorite shops in their local malls as well as getting inspired before going there to shop.

Tenant facing app

An easy-to-use tool that gives each tenant the opportunity to upload their stories, news and offers directly to the app. To keep tenants motivated they are provided with real time statistics on the performance of each post based on reach and attribution (number of physical customer-visits to the tenant after they have seen their post).

Mall management system

In the management system the marketing team can follow the effects in terms of user acquisition, tenant adoption and the amount of influenced physical customer visits to the mall. Furthermore, all content in the app can be managed from here and out to the customers.

The results during the first two months of using Emplate

Results as we see in the following infographic is not something every mall will see just by starting their digital transformation, so we highly recommend you to also read the section “Bonus reading” in the end of this article to gain more insights about the efforts invested and more details about the effects gained.

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Bonus reading

Preparing for the launch

Getting success with a digital transformation in a shopping mall is much more than developing an app with cool features and algorithms that increases relevance for the consumers.

Two main areas need to be considered before launching a new digital strategy to get success:

1. Engaging all stakeholders in the project

2. Setting up the right KPI’s to act upon.

Engaging stakeholders in the project

Of course, the consumer is the most important stakeholder in regards to having success with a consumer facing shopping mall app. But the success of the consumer depends on relevant content in the app. The content can come from different sources:

• The local tenants (and their headquarters)
• Marketing agencies
• The mall marketing team

In most malls it is too time consuming or too expensive to have either the mall marketing team or their agency creating all content for the app. This means that the local store and in some cases their headquarters must be engaged in the solution to provide valuable content.

A great onboarding of the tenants is crucial to secure a constant flow of relevant content to the app. In BROEN Shopping all tenants were invited to an onboarding meeting where more than 80 % showed up. The tenants got access to Emplate Shop and were presented with the value of driving customers to their own stores in an easy way which got them motivated.

After the meeting an email-flow as well as a notification flow in the tenant tool were setup to remind the stores of the new opportunity, making sure it became a part of their daily work in their stores.

The onboarding was very successful and resulted in 1.192 campaigns being within the first two months from 49 of the 60 tenants. This is an average of almost 25 campaigns pr. tenant.

Setting up the right KPI’s

As a result of many stakeholders it is important to set up KPI’s that cover both the consumers as well as the tenants. Furthermore, all KPI’s must be related to true business value, meaning that looking at the number of downloads is worth nothing itself. It is important to analyze the acquisition cost (downloads), but more importantly is the actual engagement with the solution and in the end the retention on the solution – both for consumers and tenants.

The following KPI’s where setup for monthly PDF reports and in their own perfomance management dashboard:

• Downloads
• Monthly Active Users
• Views and interactions with campaigns
• Physical visits to each tenant within 7 days after seeing their campaign (tracked with beacons)
• Overall physical visits influenced to the mall (app-behaviour linked to the tracked visit with beacons)
• Tenant adoption of solution
• Amount of campaign uploaded pr. tenant
• Tenant performance dashboard (to see which tenants creates the best campaigns in terms of the most influenced visits)

To accommodate these KPI’s the following plan was made by the help of the Emplate team

• BROEN Shopping made a marketing campaign to secure downloads based on general guidelines from Emplate and their knowledge bank consisting of learnings from launching in multiple other malls.
• A notification-based reactivation flow was created to keep customers engaged
• Competitions among the tenants were initiated based on the tenants being the most effective with their campaigns.
• The first 4 weeks all KPI’s were followed closely and discussed on weekly basis by Emplate and BROEN Shopping, and changes were made based on learnings.
• After the first month Emplate provided monthly reports on the KPI’s with an analysis resulting in actionable initiatives to improve selected KPI’s. Suggestions can be both communicational changes or changes to the product based on consumer or tenant feedback.

… that’s it for now. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you want to learn more or talk to the staff from TK Development and BROEN SHOPPING yourself.

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We had high expectations to the launch of our new digital profile with the Emplate platform and can safely say everything lived up to our expectations. Emplate delivered as promised and we can clearly recommend others to work with Emplate. Our launch was particularly successful because we succeeded in generating a lot of motivation amongst our tenants so that they contribute to the solution on a daily basis. Finally, Emplate's persistent support, both towards mall management and our tenants, is worth mentioning. It has worked impeccably.


‍Janni Baslund Dam, Mall manager
‍Broen Shopping / TK Development  / 60 shops

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