People love to receive free things and malls are a fantastic place to offer free prizes, sign ups and information when consumers are neck deep in the purchasing mindset. Mall tours are a great way for brands and agencies to interact with consumers. In this 1st instalment of a two-part series, you will learn how to improve mall tours, results and engagements during your next mall tour activation.
Our data showed that, in addition to enticing consumer entries with prizing, the most successful mall tours reduced entry barriers for contest offers. This involves deploying a variety of entry methods that include brand ambassadors, standalone kiosks as well as online registration. One of the most successful options for contest entries was allowing consumers to engage digitally through a standalone mobile app or mobile responsive website. Furthermore, onsite experiences can be extended to personal mobile devices with scannable QR codes that direct consumers to a registration microsite. In the automotive industry, our indicators show that an increase in the number and diversity of entry options resulted in up to 15x more entries over tours which used only a single entry option, such as brand ambassadors, or had a limited number of standalone kiosks.
These are the entry options other brands are using to improve mall tours:
The most successful mall tours included a ‘give to get.’ This can include content, a first peek, an exclusive offer or a contest. The best approach for improving results is to provide a “give” that incentivizes consumers to input their valuable information and insights. Our indicators show that mall tours with contesting elements and product demonstrations have garnered 86% more entries than similar activations without an offer component. One great example of prizing during mall activations is the Angry Birds activation at East Coast Mall in Kuantan, Malaysia. For a solid month the activation set up shop at the main entrance of the mall with three separate contesting opportunities that ranged from exclusive merchandise to free movie tickets. The contests themselves were staggered across age categories with some challenging consumers to make a purchase onsite while others had younger demographics competing in a colouring contest. With the heavy inflow of traffic at the main entrance and prizing for all ages, the activation was extremely successful and Angry Birds was able to improve mall tours to come. (Source: TheStar.com)
In most cases, data showed that consumers were most receptive to an offer right after they engaged with staff— particularly for items sold in the mall or financial products. Sending consumers an offer, invitation, or a piece of content to their mobile device in real time so they could interact with it right away made a major difference in the success of the mall tours. The indicators showed an open rate of 84% for communications that utilized instantly triggered and relevant communications during mall tours.
Mall tours that provided consumers with relevant and contextual content based on demographics, psychographics or how a consumer interacted with a staff member were more successful than those that only provided a single version of content. As seen in “CMO Spend Survey 2015-2016: Digital Marketing Comes of Age” report, 98% of marketers say that online and offline marketing are merging. (Source: Convince and Convert Study) 68% of post mall tour email clicks were related to social
sharing of content.
Results showed that the more versions of content, the higher the tick-up rates. On average our indicators showed that 68% of post event clicks on mall tour content were related to sharing branded content socially across twitter. Giving consumers the ability to further amplify content or an offer drastically increased engagement.