A new report by Engagement Agents shows a considerable disconnect between what’s featured on shopping centres’ physical and digital marketing channels, compared to what is actually happening at the stores within shopping centres. The result collectively adds up annually to billions in lost impressions, traffic and sales to retailers and shopping centres, according to the company.
As mentioned in a previous article in Retail Insider, each retailer pays into the shopping centre marketing fund and has at least one campaign to promote at any given time. Despite having already paid into the fund, 90% of retailers, on average, do not engage their centres’ physical & digital marketing channels.
The results, seen in the chart below, show that less than a quarter of retailers in Canada’s top malls are seeing optimal engagement.
To capitalize on the rest of the 2016 shopping season and beyond, Engagement Agents has the following suggestions for retailers:
1. Engage Your Shopping Centres as Part of Your Marketing Strategy: You are already paying for it via your lease agreement. Moreover, you’ve spent the time, energy and money to create a marketing campaign, design the physical and digital assets, print the creative & ship it to the store. Add to that the time and cost associated with your store team changing the signage and any other collateral that goes into ensuring the campaign is visible and enticing to consumers.
As an example, a 100-store retail chain pays over $1 million annually into their collective shopping centres’ marketing funds and not engaging any of their shopping centres’ marketing channels. Why? Because communicating and distributing their marketing campaigns to their shopping centres is a complex, time-consuming and fragmented process.
2. It’s Not Just About the Discounts: The shopping centres want your content. They are asking for it but, according to many shopping centres “it’s like pulling teeth to get it”. Promoting your store isn’t just about sales and discounts. It’s also about rich content. It’s about romancing your brand and engaging consumers by showcasing all that your store has to offer, including:
- Featured Products & Services
- New Arrivals
- Seasonal Campaigns
- Sales & Discounts
- Shopping & Brand-Specific Events
- Loyalty & Reward Programs
- Contests, etc.
3. Keeping Up with the Trends: Some quick and important stats as to why your shopping centres’ should be a key part of your marketing strategy:
– They account for a huge channel. Some shopping centres are getting upwards of 250,000+ visitors to their mobile/websites every month, that doesn’t include their in-mall digital signage, email subscribers and social media channels which feature retailer campaigns. This represents an untapped opportunity for retailers to maximize their selling abilities and gain a competitive advantage.
– 83% of shoppers own a smartphone, enabling them to seek out promotions through a shopping centres’ marketing channels (mobile/web, social and email) before they visit.
– 79% of consumers surveyed said they would be influenced on what stores to visit based on a website, yet on average only 10% of retailers have their campaigns promoted via their shopping centres’ physical & digital marketing channels.
– 89% of shoppers said that promotions are the key determinant of what stores they will visit for holiday shopping this year
4. Take the Workload off Your Individual Store Managers: Your store managers are already busy enough doing what they do best – managing their stores, their teams and making sure the customer experience is top notch! This is one less ‘to do’ they need to worry about, plus it’s a huge time and cost saver for your company. Imagine 100 store managers all having the same conversation 100 times with 100 shopping centre marketing managers. That’s a lot of inefficient use of time and money that is better spent elsewhere.
5. Automate AND Simplify the Manual Process: The more locations you have, the harder it is and the more potential sales that are being lost. Why? Because each shopping centre has their own requirements, image sizes, ways of accepting retailer marketing campaign content, etc. The Engagement Agents platform solves all of these problems for both the retailer AND shopping centres, along with creating many additional opportunities & benefits.
Engagement Agents enables you to publish once and promote to many malls; simplifying the process, automating the distribution & tracking the success of your campaigns within your malls’ physical & digital marketing channels all while ensuring they are current, consistent, correct and compliant with your brand.
With the Engagement Agency platform you can be up and running in as little as 24 hours. To receive future copies of the Retailer Engagement Report and for more informaton on the company, please visit www.EngagementAgents.com.
If you would like the Retailer & Shopping Centre Engagement Report based on the Top 10 shopping centres in the USA please email sean@engagementagents.com.
