Today, Engagement Agents released their first Retailer Engagement Report based on Black Friday 2016. The results are concerning:
The Engagement Agents Retailer Engagement Report shows a considerable disconnect between what is featured on the shopping centres’ physical and digital marketing channels compared to what is actually happening at the stores. The result collectively adds up annually to billions in lost impressions, traffic and sales to retailers & shopping centres!
As indicated, 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, only 10% of retailers, on average, do engage their centres’ physical & digital marketing channels. The average slightly improved for Black Friday.
What can a retailer do today to capitalize on the rest of the 2016 shopping season and beyond?
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 does not engage any of their shopping centres’ marketing channels. Why? Because communicating and distributing their marketing campaigns to each shopping centre is a complex, time-consuming and fragmented process. You can read more about the process, problem AND the solution here.
The good news is that it’s not too late and you can still engage your shopping centres this holiday shopping season – see point 5 below!
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 & 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 percent 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 about the same marketing campaign. 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, and ways of accepting retailer marketing campaign content, etc. The Engagement Agents platform solves these challenges 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. All of which leads to driving more impressions, traffic and sales to your stores, website and social channels.
With the Engagement Agents platform you can be up and running in as little as 24 hours! Visit www.EngagementAgents.com for more information.
To receive future copies of the Retailer Engagement Report please visit www.EngagementAgents.com.