What Role Should Malls Take in the Digital Ecosytem?

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.

The 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

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.

herningCentret introduced a consumer-facing application Let us start by having a look at what herningCentret achieved with their mobile app within the first 12 months after launching it (Spoiler alert: They influenced +3% increased footfall)

Change the way they use their website Besides launching a herningCentret app with the Emplate platform, the mall also wanted to distribute the content to their existing website which they did in three ways:

Integration to the front page of the website in a campaign slider where 4-10 featured news and offers are shown An Integration with a brand new menu tab called “News and Offers” where all news and offers can be found in fitting categories Extending Shop profile pages with trending offers from each shop on their informative subpages

After implementing Emplate Mall Web herningCentret’s website evolved from being a place where consumers can check opening hours and events into a place where products could be found. It increased the time consumers were staying on the website significantly.

Weekly effects by using Emplate Mall Web

During a normal week in the mall 6,100+ customers visit the mall’s website. Before implementing Emplate it was mainly to see events and opening hours, but after implementing Emplate Mall Web something has changed. 6,100+ Weekly website visits

After implementing Emplate Mall Web the mall shows more than 43,200 campaigns every week on their website. This is done through both frontpage integration and with a content universe in its own menu on the site and everything is done by simply integrating Emplate to their existing website. 43,200+ Weekly campaign views

The data shows that an average website visitor today sees 7 campaigns when they are visiting. This makes the customers stay longer on the site as well as increases their engagement. 7 campaigns per visitor

Do you want to learn more? Read more than 30 different articles and case studies hyper-relevant for shopping malls on our website www.emplate.it/blog

Annual effects by using Emplate Consumer App

herningCebtret has used our customer acquisition guides to acquire the users and most of the users live within 10km from the shopping mall. 18,000+ Downloads

After one year 20.5% of users still actively using the app. This means that our mall apps have 4X higher retention than average retail apps across Europe. 40% App retention

During the last year in herningCebtret the campaigns have generated 809,605 views in the app newsfeed which have generated 224,510 interactions/clicks – giving a click rate of 28%. 809,605 Campaign views

During the last year in herningCebtret more than 3,300 campaigns have been uploaded and sent out to customers who have shown interest in the single shops by following the in the mall app. 3,300+ Campaigns uploaded

During the last year the 18,000 app users used the mall inside the mall 94,25 times which means the average app user used the app inside the mall 5 times a year. 94,258 Mall visits

59,907 times a app user visited a shop within 7 days after interacting with a campaign in the newsfeed and stayed there for more than 2 minutes. 59,907 Campaign visits

This means that 26% of campaign interactions convert to a physical shop visit or 63.5% of all in mall app opens result in a physical shop visit.