StoriesBlogBest practicesHow tenants of a shopping mall got 34.237 customer visits from a loyalty program

How tenants of a shopping mall got 34.237 customer visits from a loyalty program

December 13, 2017

Today most shopping malls plan to implement a loyalty program to increase customers visit frequency. However, they all face a challenge that is hard to overcome:

The challenge of getting tenants to participate

Loyalty programs work by rewarding customers for being loyal. However, malls usually don’t have anything of value to the customer. Therefore it’s not possible to launch a loyalty program without the help from the tenants of the mall.

The malls that we provide solutions for also face this challenge, and therefore we found a solution to the problem.

The solution is to create a new marketing channel for the tenants to increase the revenue produced in their stores and launch it together with a loyalty program.

Sct. Mathias Centret, a Danish shopping mall with 35 shops launched an Emplate consumer app including a loyalty program in October 2017.

The app did not just include a loyalty program, but also a feed where customers could choose which tenant shops to follow, and receive special offers from.

Thereby, tenants, had a new free marketing channel making them able to send offers directly to the customers via the app.

Together with the app, tenants got access to the Emplate shop app. An app, where they could follow how many customers were seeing their offers, how many that click on it to read more and most importantly, how many customers who visited the store after clicking on one of their offers in the app.

Telling the tenants directly how many more visits they got from uploading offers.

If Sct. Mathias Centret had launched an app including only a loyalty program where customers could get discounts for visiting the mall; tenants would lack the incentive to participate. Tenants would have felt they were giving discounts for no reason, and the app would have been a ghost town. But that didn’t happen.

The results where astonishing

Percentage of tenants contributing to the malls marketing each month

Here you see the percentage of tenants that have created content for the app. Starting with very few in the first month, but quickly rising to an average of 80 % due to one obvious reason: A flow of new customers to the tenant shops.

Every time a tenant uploaded an offer to the app, it resulted in 23 customers seeing the offer and afterwards visiting the store within 7 days.

In a year this became 34.237 customers visits, making the app the most valuable growth driver for the tenants and the mall.

How we convinced tenants to participate

Your tenants time is valuable! They have booked a store space to sell products and increased store revenue is their primary measurement of success.

Therefore we put much work into onboarding tenants correctly, because an app without new content is an app without engagement from customers.

Practically we took 3 actions:

  1. Invited all tenants to an introduction meeting
  2. Created an e-mail flow to help tenants get started
  3. Created a solution for marketing departments in chain stores

1. Invited all tenants to an introduction meeting

At first, we sent all tenants an invitation to a meeting where we described the new solution, and how they could benefit from it. We also showed them exactly how it worked, so they could upload offers to the app and measure how many customers engaging with their offers.

The meeting went well, nearly all of the tenants were represented by the minimum of one staff.

Thereby the tenants got an introduction and were now aware of the new possibilities, but to create new habits take time and therefore, we created an e-mail flow to help tenants start using the new app.

2. Created an E-mail flow to help tenants get started

We have all tried to launch a new project, where we are dependent on others, and if we do not remind and support, again and again, the old habits will stick.

Therefore, we created an e-mail flow designed to give tenants the right information at the right phase and walk them through how the new solution works.

The flow was designed to send the first e-mail 5 days after the meeting to tenants, who haven’t uploaded an offer to the app since the meeting. Reminding them about the new task.

Those who had uploaded an offer got another e-mail, telling them about features and how they could get even more out of their efforts. Showing that their efforts were worth doing.

The e-mail flow were designed to go on for 3 months and after the period 80% of the tenants was uploading content every month.

3. Created a solution for marketing departments in chain stores

Some tenants are part of big retail chains were all marketing is managed from the headquarter. To make these chains participate, we called them all by phone in order to get permission to use content from their Facebook and Instagram page as well as their website.

The process is automated and it enables Sct. Mathias Centret to get content from these chains without e-mailing them every time. A task that until now has been a pain for both parties.

This process today creates more than 100 offers every week and engages customers who follow these tenants.

Book a demo and let us show you how to benefit from your loyalty program.

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