Engagement Agents - Insights

Innovator Profile: Engagement Agents Optimizes Marketing Campaigns

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 01:36:00 +0000

WHAT'S INSIDE

This report forms part of our Innovator Profile series, which focuses on emerging technologies that are disrupting traditional retail and fueling innovation across the retail value chain. In this free report, we profile Engagement Agents, a software platform provider that enables retailers to optimize the marketing that they pay for within store leases—thus helping retailers to drive traffic and sales in-store and online, and potentially save time and resources in the creation and implementation of marketing campaigns. Coresight Research collaborated with Engagement Agents to offer insights into the platform provider’s business models and offerings.

KEY POINTS

Retailers currently struggle to optimize and improve the engagement rates of the marketing that they pay for through leases, costing retailers and shopping centers worldwide hundreds of billions of dollars in sales annually, according to Engagement Agents.
Engagement Agents automates the setup of these marketing opportunities, helping retailers reduce operational costs while improving advertisement engagement rates.
Through the Covid-19 pandemic, Engagement Agents has doubled its number of clients as retailers look for any competitive edge they can get to save costs and optimize marketing.

What’s the Story?

This report forms part of our Innovator Profile series, which focuses on emerging technologies that are disrupting traditional retail and fueling innovation across the retail value chain. Coresight Research collaborated with each covered company to offer insights into their business models and offerings. In this report, we profile Engagement Agents, a software platform provider that enables retailers to optimize the marketing that they pay for within store leases. According to the company, this helps retailers to drive traffic and sales (in-store and online) and potentially save time and resources in the creation and implementation of marketing campaigns.

Why It Matters

Engagement Agents estimates that worldwide, retailers and shopping centers are losing hundreds of billions of dollars in sales annually due to unoptimized marketing campaigns. The company’s solutions can save retailers significant costs on marketing while optimizing the quality of their outreach, driving traffic in-store and online.

Engagement Agents: In Detail

What Problem Is the Company Solving?

Retailers in shopping centers pay significant amounts for marketing opportunities each month through their leases, via gross rent, common area maintenance charges, marketing, promotion or ad funds, merchant association fees and percentage rent. Shopping centers promote their retailers’ marketing campaigns to millions of consumers to drive traffic and sales—via their mobile site, website, app, social media, email list, physical marketing opportunities, events or onsite digital signage. However, Engagement Agents research suggests that only 10% of retailers engage the full benefits of their investments/expenses. The company has identified several problems that its platform helps retailers to solve:

Efficiency issues with the current fragmented model of retailer and shopping center collaboration
Retailers paying for, but not reaping the full benefits of, marketing opportunities within their leases
Retailers struggling to handle the manual process of distributing and managing their marketing campaigns across shopping centers, given that each center operates in its own silo and has its own content and image requirements, rules and processes.
Shopping centers having difficulty handling the time-consuming process of collecting and managing various retailer marketing campaigns, since each retailer has differing methods of management that may not be consistent with the shopping centers’ requirements

How the Covid-19 Pandemic Has Impacted Business

The coronavirus pandemic has placed pressure on retailers to drive traffic and sales, both in-store and online, by optimizing their existing investments. With retailers searching for efficiency and cost savings, Engagement Agents saw a 100% year-over-year increase in its customer base in 2020.

Case Studies

Below, we outline some of the key benefits recently realized by retailers through their partnership with Engagement Agents:

$26 million per year in lease optimizations Engagement Agents helped a 1,000-store retailer identify and optimize the $26 million of annual marketing costs built within their leases to increase traffic and sales.
29% Increase in traffic The company helped generate 29% more in-store and online traffic for a 30-store retailer via their shopping centers’ marketing channels.

Source: Engagement Agents

5% Increase in sales Engagement Agents enabled a 100-store retailer to achieve a 5% increase in sales by engaging their already-paid-for shopping centers’ marketing channels.
$150,000 per year in savings The company generated $150,000 per year in savings for a 140-store retailer, by optimizing time, salaries and resources spent on shopping center marketing efforts.

Source: Engagement Agents

Competitive Advantages

Typically, retailers rely on individual store managers or district managers to engage marketing opportunities manually, which can be costly, time consuming and complex. They may experience difficulties knowing whether their store managers have engaged in marketing opportunities or not, or whether the shopping center executed what the store manager provided, according to Engagement Agents. Additionally, retailers can suffer from the opportunity costs of store managers spending time engaging with marketing manually, rather than selling on the store floor. In light of these current inefficiencies, the Engagement Agents platform aims to help retailers and shopping centers achieve three goals:

Simplify the process, automate the distribution and track the success of retailers’ marketing campaigns within their shopping centers’ digital and physical marketing channels.
Ensure retailers’ campaigns and branding are current, consistent, correct and compliant across all of their shopping centers’ marketing channels.
Increase their engagement rates by maximizing and monetizing their already-paid-for marketing channels to drive traffic and sales, both in-store and online.
Significantly reduce operational costs, while saving time and resources.

Upcoming Developments

With retailer and shopping center collaboration becoming more important than ever due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Engagement Agents has planned four areas of focus for 2021:

Grow retailer-shopping center relationships further.
Further optimize retailers’ existing investments and expenses.
Enable partner retailers to gain a competitive edge.
Drive more traffic and sales, both in-store and online.

What We Think

In an increasingly competitive retail environment, maximizing return on investment on marketing budgets should be a major consideration for retailers, whether in the physical retail space or online. Retailers can leverage third-party solutions providers such as Engagement Agents to improve their consumer engagement efficiency by working smarter, not harder.

Making Mall Marketing More Effective

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 18:55:00 +0000

Engagement Agents help retailers across North America fully leverage their already-paid-for shopping centre marketing dollars

When retailers make investments to bolster their business – whether the investment involves acquiring the latest technological gadget, employee training, sustainable practices, or anything else – they generally want to make sure they squeeze the most value out of every penny spent. The same is true when it comes to their marketing dollars.

It’s the reason most retailers are stunned when they find out that they are not seizing all of the opportunities available to them to optimize the marketing dollars they are allocated as part of their lease agreements with landlords and shopping mall developers.

“Every retailer located in a shopping centre pays significantly for marketing opportunities through their leases; whether built into total lease dollars, CAM fees, marketing/promo/ad funds, merchant association fees and/or percentage rent agreements,” explains Sean Snyder, President of Engagement Agents. “However, 90% of retailers never take advantage of the benefits of these investments.”

The fact that benefits are not taken advantage of is, of course, not intentional on the part of the landlord or retailer. These missed opportunities occur due to the fact that they are often deep within the lease agreements. And, because the retailer’s real estate team and the retailer’s marketing team are not effectively communicating, the opportunities are often not realized. As one of many examples, by pointing out these marketing dollars within the lease agreement, Engagement Agents was able to help a 1,000-store retailer identify $26 million which they were incurring every year within their leases, but not effectively utilizing.

The next challenge is an inherent executional gap that exists between the shopping centre landlords and the retail marketing teams. It’s a gap Snyder experienced for himself while working as Sales and Marketing Director at Stitch It, which has 85 shopping centre-based locations across the country.

“One of the hurdles that needs to be overcome with respect to marketing and promoting the store through the shopping centre’s marketing channels is the fact that each shopping centre uniquely manages and executes its own marketing.

Additionally, they all have different opportunities to promote retailer marketing campaigns; whether it be their mobile site, website, app, social media, email lists, events and/or onsite digital signage. On top of that, retailers may task their store managers with the responsibility of supplying the individual shopping centre that its operating in with their marketing and promotional materials. But the store managers are already busy enough as it is. If you’re a retailer with 50 locations, do you really want 50 store managers doing the same thing every week? That becomes very expensive in terms of the salary costs as well as the opportunity costs concerning the missed sales that the store manager can’t generate because of time spent in the backroom.”

Snyder, who has over twenty years of retail experience, recognized these challenges when he tried to take on the responsibility of managing all of Stich It’s shopping mall advertising. What he found was the need to engage 85 different malls, many with multiple marketing contacts, provide each of them with more than 85 packages of marketing and promotional collateral, of which many required multiple images of varying sizes and formats. He’d then be required to follow up with each one of the 85 shopping centres to ensure the marketing and promotions were posted properly and in time.

“It was a nightmare for me to manage,” says Snyder of the ordeal. “I soon realized there’s no way any one person or team could effectively accomplish it all without technology. Not only was it very time-consuming, it was not within the skill sets of most store managers who were already very busy with their core responsibilities. Furthermore, the shopping centres want the retailers’ content and campaigns, as they all have marketing channels to promote what is new and exciting at their retailers! The challenge for shopping centres is that it’s “like pulling teeth” to try and get the content from the retailers.

This left a lasting impression on Snyder. He reached out to other retailers and shopping centres and soon realized the extent of the challenge and opportunity for a far more efficient, centralized approach. Engagement Agents was born out of this insight with a clever solution that’s centred around a Software as a Service platform which standardizes, manages, automates and tracks the marketing and promotional efforts for retailers operating in shopping centres.

By working with Engagement Agents, retail marketing teams simply upload their marketing and promotional materials to Engagement Agents’ marketing platform, which manages the complex distribution of campaign content and image assets to each shopping centre.

Today, a number of the world’s most recognizable retailers partner with Engagement Agents to maximize and monetize their already-paid-for shopping centres’ marketing channels to drive traffic and sales, while saving tremendous amounts of time, money and resources.

“By using Engagement Agents, we can quickly distribute our marketing and promotional information across multiple locations with consistency, for all our stores at once,” says James Connell, Chief Ecommerce & Customer Experience Officer at Roots Canada. “By providing updates more often, we ensure each property has current and relevant Roots content, which is more impactful to shopping centre visitors and therefore drives more traffic to our stores.”

In a hyper-competitive retail environment, optimizing every opportunity to get in front of customers and bring them into your store is paramount. Engagement Agents removes the guesswork and effectively execute retailers’ mall marketing campaigns for them.

“Retail frontline staff can be a competitive advantage when they are able to focus on creating exceptional in-store shopping experiences,” says Snyder. “Engagement Agents helps retailers drive these invaluable customers into their stores through their already paid for marketing investments.”

For more information about the ways Engagement Agents can help your business maximize its marketing dollars and drive more traffic to your shopping centre locations, Book a Demo today!

Engagement Agents named among 50 global tech start-ups powering the new retail world

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 19:13:00 +0000

The Discovery 50 report, published today by RWRC, showcases the world’s top tech start-ups and shines a light on innovative solutions that can support the retail sector – both during the pandemic and in the future.

April 28, 2020 London, UK: Engagement Agents has been crowned one of the top 50 retail tech start-ups operating globally, according to a new report published today by RWRC – home of Retail Week and World Retail Congress.

The report is available here or by requesting a copy via engage@engagementagents.com

Retailers worldwide are scrutinizing their business models more closely than ever, as they grapple with the impact of the coronavirus crisis and seek to deliver sales and maintain relevance among consumers.

There is a growing realization in boardrooms that collaboration with start-ups and third parties is crucial to achieve these aims and to better position businesses within the new post-Covid-19 world of commerce.

Profiling the top 50 global retail tech start-ups, the Discovery 50 report analyses the influential role start-ups including Engagement Agents play in this new world.

“We are honoured to be one of two North American companies, and the only Canadian company in the top 50.” says Sean Snyder, President of Engagement Agents. “This was made possible thanks to our dedicated team and our loyal customers!”

Start-ups were judged and shortlisted by a panel of retail and business experts including retail consultant Ian Shephard, retail analyst Natalie Berg, former Morrisons CTO Anna Barsby, Co:Cubed chief executive Jeremy Basset, Retail Week head of insight Lisa Byfield-Green and more.

The Discovery 50 all started trading in the last seven years and have worked with a breadth of retailers and brands to help transform their businesses, either through a pilot or full-scale solution.

“Every retailer is paying significantly for marketing within their leases, but a whopping 90% are not taking advantage of the benefits of these investments. Now is the time for retailers to innovate, optimize their leases, become more efficient and, more importantly drive traffic and sales whether it be in-store or online” says Snyder. “We are working with our existing retail partners and onboarding new retail partners ahead of their ‘grand re-openings’ to ensure they maximize all the opportunities available!”

The report also offers advice on how leaders can open themselves up to new and different ways of thinking and the benefits this can have on the bottom line.

For instance, a 2018 report from professional services company Accenture found only 6% of corporate businesses were generating a significant proportion of their income from new activities and investments. However, this same 6% reported the strongest financial performance of all 1,440 companies Accenture surveyed.

Retail Week commercial content editor Megan Dunsby commented: “The Discovery 50 shows how start-ups, such as Engagement Agents, can offer a lifeline for retailers.

“Now is the time for businesses to think about how they could work differently with the start-up community and build synergies; from creating a fast-track, light-touch process for forming contractual relationships to pre-allocating some funding that can be used for trials.

“Many start-ups in the Discovery 50 have implemented pilots within weeks of starting conversations with a retailer, while others have been able to integrate full-scale solutions in a matter of months that have delivered major return on investment.

“Retailers should look to the Discovery 50 as a directory of the best start-ups to work with.”

For more information, please visit https://www.EngagementAgents.com call 1.416.577.7326 or email engage@engagementagents.com

About Engagement Agents

A number of the world’s most recognizable retailers rely on Engagement Agents. Engagement Agents is an award-winning platform which helps retailers optimize their leases, drive traffic & sales, enjoy savings and ensure compliance by making it easy to engage their already-paid-for and under-utilized shopping centers’ marketing channels which every retailer pays significantly for via their leases.

Retailer and Shopping Center Collaboration is Key

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 20:37:00 +0000

Retailers and developers need to work together to utilize their available

marketing channels for a win-win scenario for everyone.

The Retailer Engagement Report, conducted in 2018, shows a massive disconnect between what is featured on the shopping centers’ physical and digital marketing channels and what is actually happening at the stores. The report indicated a shocking 90 percent of retailers are not utilizing marketing channels provided by the malls and in which retailers have already invested.

That means North American retailers are missing out on billions of impressions and huge opportunities for additional traffic and sales by not taking advantage of existing marketing programs that are already paid for by shopping center leases. Both the centers and the stores see less traffic and lighter sales as a result.

“Retailers have access to incredible paid-for marketing opportunities through numerous platforms presented by shopping centers — mobile marketing that reaches consumers on their smartphones, website updates, social media blasts, in-mall physical and digital signage, apps, email subscription lists and events,” says renowned author and technology futurist Dr. Tom Keenan, a board member on the Information & Communications Technology Council. “It is a lot of work to manage all of these programs effectively, but it simply doesn’t make sense to leave all of these opportunities to drive traffic and sales, and, ultimately, money on the table.”

Shopping centers’ marketing channels are typically reaching enormous consumer audiences. Many malls are getting more than 250,000 visitors each month to their mobile and websites alone. This represents an untapped opportunity for retailers to reach people with timely, targeted messaging, thereby boosting traffic and revenue. The numbers paint a compelling picture:

83 percent of shoppers own a smartphone, enabling them to seek out promotions through shopping centers’ marketing channels before they visit.
79 percent of consumers surveyed said they would be influenced regarding what stores to visit based on a website, yet on average only 10 percent of retailers have their campaigns promoted via their shopping centers’ physical and digital marketing channels.
89 percent of shoppers said that promotions are the key determinant of what stores they will visit.

“The key is collaboration,” says Keenan. “If communication improves between retailers and the centers regarding co-operative marketing channels, both sides win. Individual retailers have important promotional material that can be disseminated by the centers in their high-powered marketing platforms. The shopping centers benefit by having much more compelling and relevant content, which translates to more traffic for the landlord and e-commerce sites of the centers and stores, and increased sales for the retailers.”

Store managers are often already running at full capacity, which explains why mall management typically finds getting timely promotional material out of the stores akin to pulling teeth.

“If retailers don’t have the capacity to fully leverage existing marketing channels, they should consider looking for outside help,” says Keenan. “The return on investment from maximizing and monetizing these marketing platforms — channels that, again, are already paid for — could be tremendous.”

Each retailer pays into the shopping center marketing and has at least one campaign to promote at any given time. The centers want content from the stores, and the more relevant and rich the content, the better it is for all parties. It’s about romancing a brand and engaging consumers by showcasing all a store has to offer, including:

Featured products and services
New arrivals
Seasonal campaigns
Sales and discounts
Shopping and brand-specific events
Loyalty and reward programs
Contests, giveaways, etc.

“When mall management and retailers work together to ensure a steady stream of rich content, the results will always be increased impressions with consumers, more traffic and increased sales,” says Rob Driscoll, president of Business Edge Media, which has been covering retail and marketing trends for 18 years. “Taking advantage of these opportunities takes dedicated resources and potentially outside support, but the payoff is huge.”

In utilizing existing marketing channels, retailers will need to place an emphasis on the fast-growing mobile realm. In its report The State of Mobile 2019, App Annie highlights the obvious: that shopping centers and retailers must stay on top of developing mobile tools in order to maximize sales.

According to the study:

Global time spent in shopping apps grew to 18 billion hours in 2018, up 45 percent from 2016.
November 2018 marked the biggest mobile shopping month of all time by total time spent globally.
Sessions, akin to foot traffic, grew 65 percent globally over two years.
In the U.S., mobile shopping sessions grew 70 percent over two years.

“Mobile has taken over share of wallet for U.S. consumers,” says the report. “Retailers leveraged mobile to drive both in-store and digital traffic. Digital sales, in particular, saw strong correlation with growing mobile engagement. Brick-and-mortar retailers like Target, Walmart and Nordstrom are leveraging mobile for accessible loyalty programs, point-of-sale payments, in-store efficiencies, product information, in-store mapping and purchase fulfillment.”

Engagement also grew for bricks and-clicks retailers in 2018. The study says:

“Digital-first retail apps saw 1.5 to 3 times more average sessions per user than apps from bricks-and-clicks retailers. However, bricks-and-clicks retailers made strides to close this gap in 2018. Retailers like Nike leveraged mobile for innovative and engaging in-store experiences such as reserving sizes in-store, accessing rewards and receiving assistance from an employee in-store when desired. The bottom line is digital-first retailers have so far, on average, done a better job catering to mobile shoppers than bricks and-clicks retailers. However, bricks and-clicks retailers are beginning to embrace mobile’s transformative power — through m-commerce and enhanced in-store experiences — to grow their top line.”

While mobile technology in theory could save time, working to optimize marketing opportunities takes time and resources. Each shopping center has its own requirements in accepting retailer marketing campaign content. Delivering rich content to the centers’ marketing team can be a complex and time-consuming process. It is therefore imperative that retailers simplify and automate marketing procedures, particularly in the case of larger chains.

The secret is to publish once and promote to many locations. Key objectives for retailers should include:

simplifying the internal process of gathering the content and the external process of communicating content out to their shopping centers.
automating the distribution of content to their shopping centers, alleviating the time-consuming, complex process of doing so manually, or being reliant on individual store managers to distribute.
tracking the success of campaigns within the shopping centers’ physical and digital marketing channels in order to help make better business and marketing decisions.
ensuring their brand and campaigns are current, consistent, correct and compliant across all of their shopping centers’ marketing channels.

Success on these fronts leads to driving more impressions, traffic and sales to the retailer and shopping center.

Roots Provides Shopping Centers With Consistent Yet Localized Marketing Campaigns

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 03:37:00 +0000

Shopping centers often promote their retailers’ marketing campaigns via various digital and physical channels to drive traffic and sales. While retailers generally pay for shopping center marketing as part of their lease agreements, they often don’t take advantage of these offerings due to the difficulties of communicating with representatives at every complex.

James Connell, VP of E-Commerce and Customer Experience at Roots, a Canada-based outdoor lifestyle retailer, noted that while his company recognized the value of advertising correct promotions, hours and store details at every location, it was getting cumbersome to communicate campaign directives to each individual store.

“For one person to reach out to more than 100 locations is a challenge logistically,” Connell said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “We farmed out the task to our district managers and our store managers, but we found out there wasn’t necessarily the consistency and follow-up that we needed to make sure the results were on par with what we would expect. We recognized that we needed a tool that would help us operationalize our relationship with multiple locations to make it easier for both parties, from a content and information distribution perspective and a follow-up perspective.”Roots, which began by selling leatherwear out of a Toronto boutique in 1973, now has 120 locations across Canada, six in the U.S., and sells its products in 138 partner stores in Taiwan and China. The company is targeting 10 to 14 new U.S. retail locations by the end of 2019, so there is lot of ground to cover to ensure that the retailer’s marketing presence is maximized across all stores and is consistent and accurate in multiple marketplaces.

Since turning to Engagement Agents in 2017, the retailer only has to upload its marketing campaigns and job postings once to the platform to give all shopping centers the same information to promote — rather than having 100 different conversations with reps of each shopping center. With more consistent conversations in place and with a third party to monitor them, Roots can afford to be more creative in their marketing campaigns.

Not Just Local But Hyperlocal

“Never underestimate the power of hyperlocalized marketing content,” Connell said. “As platforms like CarPlay or Google search start to integrate information, this type of hyperlocal content becomes more valuable, and you’re just losing out on opportunities if you’re not listed, or not listed correctly.”

Roots often builds out hyperlocal content for geotargeted social campaigns and leverages Google My Business to localize each store location. The content that is delivered often depends entirely on the type of promotion they’re using to reach consumers, and where the company feels the shopper is in the buying lifecycle.

“If there’s a consumer that we feel is very close to purchasing and they’re actively searching at a location for us, then the content that we serve up to the consumer in that situation is much more targeted around converting, services provided in that store and what’s actually available within inventory,” Connell said. “Compare that to an overall brand message that you might find on a less targeted channel like an Instagram post that doesn’t have any geotargeting on it.”

Providing A Menu Of Creative Assets For Shopping Centers

Previously, the Roots team had to manually create a list of names and email addresses of contacts that the retailer needed to reach out to on a biweekly basis. With the new process, Roots provides Engagement Agents with current information about the campaigns they plan on running and the specific creative assets their shopping centers can use. Engagement Agents then automates and manages the complex distribution to all of Roots’ shopping centers, ensuring their campaigns and brand are consistent across all of their shopping centers’ marketing channels in order to drive traffic and sales. As a result, Roots also saves money, time and resources.

“Some malls have different restrictions or requirements or even pixel dimensions of creative projects,” Connell said. “We’re now able to list a number of different options that fit all the different criteria for the various properties, all in one location. The person who is in charge of the mall’s marketing channels has their selection of a lot of different sizes, so it allows them to give themselves more flexibility if they’re building an email versus updating a web site. They don’t have to reach out to us to get an additional asset, they can go to the same web page and download the image that they need.”

Omni Talk Spotlight Series | Engagement Agents

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 20:00:28 +0000

As part of our ongoing Omni Talk Spotlight Series, this week Chris and Anne sit down with Sean Snyder, Founder and President of

Engagement Agents. Engagement Agents is a cool, new startup out of Toronto with a brilliant and simple solution. A long-time friend of Omni

 Talk, Sean is doing some really interesting stuff.

For example, did you know that nearly every retailer pays for marketing opportunities at shopping centers within their leases, but 90% of retailers do not engage or actively manage these already paid for channels?

We know — crazy, right? But it is true.

Burdened by organizational complications, retailers struggle to figure out how to manage these opportunities. Engagement Agents solves these problems by managing this coordination on behalf of retailers through its proprietary platform.

It is a cool listen about a cool idea.

You can find our podcast interview with Sean on SoundCloud and iTunes or by clicking on the links below:

Engagement Agents Featured in Innovation Lab at 2019 NRF: Retail’s Big Show

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 03:40:00 +0000

When the world’s largest retail trade association hosts its annual mega-show, a rising power in the retail-based service arena will make its big expo debut. Meet Engagement Agents - a unique Software as a Service (SaaS) business that launched in 2016 to help retailers maximize the significant marketing benefits within their leasing agreements.

The company was hand-selected by the National Retail Federation (NRF) as a participant (Booth #7121) in its popular Innovation Lab at the uber-popular 2019 NRF: Retail’s Big Show at New York City’s Javitz Center, January 13 - 15.

Although Engagement Agents counts some of the world’s most recognizable brands – including Adidas and Levi’s - as customers and has won technology awards, it plans to take advantage of its presence at the event to spread its message to retailers of all sizes to help them boost their revenue potential.

Engagement Agents’ founder and president, Sean Snyder, says the company’s platform solves an “age-old industry challenge”: how to maximize the valuable digital and physical marketing benefits that are part of lease agreements with shopping centers. In fact, statistics show that 90 percent of retailers regularly leave these opportunities on the table in-part or in their entirety because of the complexity and time required to manage them.

And Snyder speaks from experience. As a 20-year veteran of the retail and commerce industry and former sales & marketing director at Stitch It – with its 85 shopping-center-based locations – he saw firsthand how challenging it was to take full advantage of the marketing opportunities which were a substantial part of the cost of each shopping center lease agreement.

“Every time Stitch It wanted to launch a marketing campaign, I was having 85 conversations with 85 shopping centers because each property had a different way of managing their retailers’ marketing. Also, it just did not make sense to have 85 store managers have the same conversation with 85 shopping center marketing managers about each marketing campaign,” said Snyder. “Even with all my efforts there, I knew that Stitch It was missing so many opportunities to drive traffic and sales because of the time, logistics and effort it took – not to mention the added labor costs. I knew there had to be a better way.

Snyder consulted with retailers and shopping centers to understand how significant the problem is and discovering the problem was universal, decided to do something about it. He assembled a team with 45+ years of retail, e-commerce, tech and leasing experience, and Engagement Agents was born - with Stitch It as its first customer.

“Retail is already an incredibly challenging and competitive industry. Our team wants to provide retailers a means of accessing the invaluable marketing opportunities they are paying for,” he added.

Snyder says his company is excited to be included in the NRF show’s Innovation Lab – which comprises a curated group of 50 innovators displaying the latest applications in artificial intelligence, augmented reality, machine learning, facial recognition, robotics, and more. The immersive exhibit gives retailers access to the latest developments in retail’s tech transformation.

“We can’t wait to showcase Engagement Agents to retailers worldwide at the NRF Big Show and are so grateful for being chosen,” said Snyder. “We anticipate Booth #7121 will be filled with great conversations,” he said.

Engagement Agents will hold one-on-one meetings with retailers and reporters on a time-available basis at Booth #7121. To schedule a time, call 1.416.577.7326 or email engage@engagementagents.com

For more information go to https://www.EngagementAgents.com

About Engagement Agents

A number of the world’s most recognizable retailers rely on Engagement Agents. Engagement Agents is a Software as a Service platform which helps retailers maximize and monetize their already-paid-for shopping centers' digital and physical marketing channels to drive impressions, traffic and sales while saving money, time and resources.

Engagement Agents releases 3rd Annual Black Friday Retailer Engagement Report

Sun, 16 Dec 2018 01:36:00 +0000

Black Friday 2018 was one of the busiest shopping days of the year. By all accounts, a resounding success for both in-store and online sales.
How busy was Black Friday for you?
Busy enough?
Can it ever be busy enough?
And, what can you take away from the Engagement Agents 2018 Black Friday Retailer Engagement Report to improve?

What About the $Millions Left on the Table?
The good news is Black Friday 2018 was a success. The not-so-good news? It could have been an even BIGGER success for you!

You were busy, but you could have been busier. And you could have had your fair share of the $Millions in sales left on the table.

How you ask?
You, like all retailers, pay into your shopping centers’ marketing as part of your lease agreement. And, your shopping centers are reaching millions of consumers through their marketing channels in efforts to drive traffic and sales. But, if you are like most retailers, you are not taking full advantage of the tremendous amounts of already-paid-for marketing opportunities. By engaging your shopping centers’ physical and digital marketing channels, you can drive more impressions and traffic to your brick & mortar stores and ecommerce channels.

And we all know more traffic = MORE SALES!

In addition, you have already invested A LOT into your marketing campaign; time, effort, and costs, including:

Your team coming up with a creative campaign
The design of your digital & physical marketing assets for the campaign
The costs associated with printing & shipping the marketing assets to your stores
Potentially paid advertising (Google ads, social media ‘sponsored posts’, print ads, radio commercials etc) to further promote the campaign
Your team to change signage, window displays and hang up your marketing assets in-store to reflect the campaign

Every retailer wants every campaign to be an outstanding success! Yet, most retailers have not engaged their already-paid-for marketing channels with their shopping centers in order to drive more awareness about their campaign, which ultimately leads to more traffic and sales!

Wait a minute! Is it really that simple?
Well, yes and no. In short, it is typically a time-consuming, complex, cumbersome and fragmented process.
Below is the Retailer Engagement Report, prepared by Engagement Agents, which summarizes retailer engagement on Black Friday 2018 and 2017 at the top 10 shopping centers in the United States and Canada based on annual sales per square foot. You will see that most retailers continue to NOT take full advantage of their shopping centers’ physical and digital marketing channels, despite already paying significantly for these opportunities via their lease agreements. In a previous article we outlined how to overcome some of the challenges with retailer engagement.

Safe to say, almost every retailer had at least one campaign happening on Black Friday. Thus, more traffic and sales opportunities for those retailers actively engaged.

The report, speaks for itself. It indicates a significant disconnect between what is being promoted throughout the shopping centers’ physical and digital marketing channels and what is actually happening at the stores within the shopping center. Again, when you consider that this marketing opportunity is already paid for by you, the retailer, via your lease agreement, you’ll have to agree that this is one BIG missed opportunity.

Given more and more consumers are seeking out what is happening in-store through the shopping centers’ marketing channels (mobile/web, app, social and email) BEFORE they visit the shopping center or your store. And, given what retailers actually have happening in-store is not consistent with what the shopping center shows is happening within their stores, the negative short and long-term effects to retailers are significant, including:

A poor customer experience
Decreases in customer engagement
Lost traffic and sales

The result? Millions in lost impressions, traffic and sales to your stores, ecommerce & social channels. If you would like to learn more about how Engagement Agents solves this challenge for retailers world-wide and how we can solve this for you, visit https://www.EngagementAgents.com

Did retailers flourish or flounder on Father's Day?

Sat, 30 Jun 2018 01:36:00 +0000

According to the National Retail Federation, Father’s Day spending was expected to total a near-record $15.3 billion this year!

While not every retailer caters to Dad, it is safe to say every retailer had a campaign running on June 17th and the days or weeks leading up to it; whether it was a new collection, featured product, sale, gift with purchase, contest or event.

Every shopping center promotes their retailers’ marketing campaigns to millions of consumers via their mobile site, website, social media, email list, app, events and in-mall digital signage to drive impressions, traffic & sales back to its retailers. Every retailer pays significantly into the shopping centers’ marketing as part of their leases.

So did retailers did retailers flourish or flounder on Father’s Day?
As you will see in our Retailer Engagement Reports below, a significant percentage of retailers floundered and did NOT take full advantage of these already-paid-for marketing opportunities; costing both retailers and shopping centers significant amounts of lost traffic and sales.

The reports summarize retailer engagement within their shopping centers’ already-paid-for digital & physical marketing channels – comparing December 26, 2017, as a benchmark, to June 17, 2018 at the Top 10 Shopping Centers in the USA and Canada based on annual sales per square foot.

Why are retailers NOT taking advantage of these already-paid-for marketing opportunities?For retailers to have each individual store responsible is complex, time-consuming and fragmented process riddled with challenges. As an example, imagine the time, costs and resources required for a 25-store chain to have 25 store managers talking to 25 shopping center marketing managers every time there’s an in-store marketing campaign…every store has LOTS on their plate already and safe to say there will not be a consistent message delivered! Now, imagine a retailer with 250 stores or 2500 stores!

Furthermore, for a retailer to communicate, distribute and manage their marketing campaigns to each shopping center is also another complex, time-consuming and fragmented process. Every shopping center has their own policies, rules and requirements making it impossible for a retailer to easily manage.

The Retailer Engagement Reports re-enforce these challenges, showing the significant disconnect between what is featured on the shopping centers’ digital & physical marketing channels and what is actually happening at the retailers.

More Retailer Engagement = More Consumer Engagement = More Traffic and More Sales!

This is one of the many reasons why we built Engagement Agents – to help retailers promptly engaging their already-paid-for shopping centers’ digital and physical marketing channels in order to drive significant amounts of impressions, traffic and sales to their stores, ecommerce and social channels. As a result, we also save retailers tremendous amounts of money, time and resources.

Report: Retailers miss maximizing Mother’s Day mall marketing

Wed, 30 May 2018 01:36:00 +0000

According to research, Mother’s Day is the third largest retail holiday, behind the winter holidays and the back-to-school season.

Why did retailers miss maximizing Mother’s Day mall marketing?

While not every retailer caters to Mom, it is safe to say every retailer had a campaign running on May 13th and the days or weeks leading up to it; whether it was a new collection, featured product, sale, gift with purchase, contest or event.

Every shopping centre promotes their retailers’ marketing campaigns to millions of consumers via their mobile site, website, social media, email list, app, events and in-mall digital signage to drive impressions, traffic & sales to its retailers. Every retailer pays significantly into the shopping centres’ marketing as part of their leases.

However, as you will see in our Retailer Engagement Reports below, a significant percentage of retailers are NOT taking full advantage of these already-paid-for marketing opportunities; costing both retailers and shopping centres lost traffic and sales. The reports summarize retailer engagement comparing December 26, 2017, as a benchmark, to May 13, 2018 at the Top 10 Shopping Centres in the USA and Canada based on annual sales per square foot.

Why are retailers NOT taking advantage of these marketing opportunities?

For a retailer to communicate, distribute and manage their marketing campaigns to each shopping centre is a complex, time-consuming and fragmented process. Every shopping centre has their own policies, rules and requirements making it impossible for a retailer to easily manage. The Retailer Engagement Reports re-enforce this, showing the significant disconnect between what is featured on the shopping centres’ digital & physical marketing channels and what is actually happening at the retailers.

This is one of the many reasons why we built Engagement Agents – to help retailers promptly engaging their already-paid-for shopping centres’ digital and physical marketing channels in order to drive a tremendous amount of impressions, traffic and sales to their stores, ecommerce and social channels.

More Retailer Engagement = More Consumer Engagement = More Traffic and More Sales!