INSIGHTS
What role should malls take in the Digital Ecosystem? Emplate is a digital marketing and communications platform for shopping malls. They support approximately 60% of the Danish market, work with a thousand retail stores or chains and are currently rolling out the platform in several European countries. The Retail People Magazine had an opportunity to speak with Simon Staack, Founder of Emplate, to discuss a platform that is designed to serve customers with relevance and convenience.
T
he physical retail space is changing but the most important thing for malls is still to increase their footfall and sales in the shops which can be challenging. Some will say that fighting the growing e-commerce is the single biggest challenge for malls, but I think we look at it the wrong way. The rhetoric is wrong – it’s not a fight. Instead of fighting e-commerce we should ask ourselves “How can malls create synergies across online and offline worlds?”
Let me give you an example Before we jump into the data and give concrete examples from herningCentret, an award-winning Danish shopping mall, you should understand the background of the mall. By understanding the mall in question, you will be able to compare herningCentret digitalization and results with your own mall and by that, you will be able to calculate the potential ROI for your mall when creating synergies across on- and offline worlds.
Facts about the mall: 80 shops 3.5 Million annual visitors 44,000 people living in the nearby city 90-100,000 people in their target area The strategic goals in the mall herningCentret had four major cornerstones in their plans for the strategy summarised by the following statements: Increase footfall through the digital presence since 60% of the customers start their buying journey online Be relevant towards the single consumer and let them opt-in, in the communication, to fit their needs Get to know the consumers better by collecting valuable insights on 1:1 level Make sure new solutions doesn’t bring extra workload to management
18. RETAIL PEOPLE . JAN-MAR 2020
Start by engaging the tenants in the mall From the beginning, it has been an important task for herningCentret to make sure that tenants participated in the new digital platforms with campaigns and marketing material. There are two main reasons why this is important for herningCentret: To satisfy the tenants and implement solutions that fit their needs To engage tenants so the mall management can save time and resources while maintaining a successful presence online.
Connecting to the consumers the right way With all the content collected every month, the main challenge for having a successful owned media as a shopping mall was solved. Now, herningCentret has sufficient content to create relevant digital experiences for each individual consumer across online media. But herningCentret still needed to create synergies across on and offline. herningCentret, therefore, launched our white label consumer app to connect the right content to the right consumers. But they also choose to use loyalty modules – A functionality that creates a Pokemon Go effect, rewarding customers for physical behavior while giving the mall some unique insights about their local customers such as frequency of visit, time spent in mall and each customers personal preference. They used data-driven download acquisition guides to build a user base through the communication channels that they already have. The results you see in the following section were achieved by herningCentret during the first 12 months of using Emplate Management, Emplate Shop, Emplate Consumer, Emplate Web and Emplate Knowledge Bank.
