Make your data count for marketing success
Published: 03 November, 2011
Data capture and e-marketing can be an invaluable tool but for small marketing teams, keeping databases up to date can be a struggle. With competition high and budgets tight, ensuring marketing campaigns are effective is key, but how can you measure success?
“Shopping centres can’t ignore feedback,” says Melbry Events managing director, Melanie Hurley. “I’ve been to shopping centres where they have boxes full of data – customer names, email addresses and postcodes - but the small marketing team don’t have time to collate the information and transfer it into databases. It’s so important to get data. If you put on an event, go and talk to the customers and get feedback - find out where they went afterwards and how much they spent.”
Although, Claire Johnson, marketing manager at Savills’ marketing, commercialisation & research division, admits that data capture is both time consuming and expensive, as it may be that extra staff are needed to collate it.
“A lot of people are opting out of giving their email addresses now, so you can’t always use data. With sites like Groupon and LivingSocial people are getting discount codes emailed through to them daily anyway, so it’s about getting in touch with the customers who want to hear from you.”
Even a simple task can result in a huge amount of feedback.
At Christmas, Melbry Events sold 500,000 tickets to various events at shopping centres and other destinations across the country via its Wish 4 Ticket website. In the New Year it sent emails out to everyone who had bought a ticket, asking them for feedback on how they could improve their website - and got 3,000 replies within one hour.
Johnson has also seen a “phenomenal” response to recent online competitions.
At Whitefriars in Canterbury, a six-week summer campaign giving shoppers the chance to win an iPad 2, and supported by advertorial content in the local press, secured 41,848 online entries. And a further 23,525 people entered a competition to win £200 worth of vouchers with approximately 30 per cent of the total 65,373 entrants agreeing to be added to the Whitefriars database.
If resources are tight, commissioning an independent report on marketing performance could help to highlight the most successful campaigns.
Marketing Analytix, which has clients including Land Securities, Henderson Global Investors and ING, carries out an independent evaluation of a centre’s marketing activity and expenditure to determine which activities contribute to achieving marketing objectives, which reach the target customer, which produce additional spend, and which don’t.
The average report takes two to three weeks to produce but can stretch to five or six weeks depending on the size of the centre and the marketing budget.
Director Tony Longstaff suspects that the old adage “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” is accurate.
And with UK shopping centres spending £200m on marketing each year, the wastage could be huge.
“I felt there was a gap in this section of the industry,” says Longstaff, who was centre manager at thecentre:mk between 1994 and 2004. “There has been a scrutiny of service charges and transparency in the last 10-15 years - people want good value for money and they need services that are appropriate. In these credit-crunch times, it’s important to get more for less.
“You have to ask yourself: is it working? Are you imparting a message? And is that attracting improved performance?”
Longstaff and his team go through every element of a centre’s marketing plan and performance data in order to highlight where the centre’s getting a return, so that the marketing team can focus their efforts – and spend more of the budget – on the types of campaign that work best based on centre size, location and catchment.
He gives The Brewery in Romford as an example.
“The Brewery was trying to attract shoppers from outside Romford and Essex, aiming for a catchment up to 20-30 miles away,” he says. “But it was their community events that were paying dividends.
“They changed their strategy based on what we told them and now they’re doing a lot more with things like school engagement, helping to develop fresh ties with the community and helping to protect against the impact of the economy.”
The most effective campaigns aren’t always the most expensive.
“The world is moving away from pretty little creatives and towards returns, footfall delivery and spend,” explains Longstaff. “There doesn’t seem to be an embracing of media like newsletters and email shots but they are really measurable and low cost and we’ve seen some really great results.
“If brands advertise on a billboard, 1bn people might walk past in a month but do people actually see it?” he adds. “With a newsletter, people are already engaged because they’ve given out their email address and have chosen not to unsubscribe. Pound for pound you get a much better response.”
Finding the right incentives that encourage people to give up their data could reap rewards.
Manchester Arndale worked in conjunction with marketing specialists Maynineteen to come up with its ‘student discount night’.
The centre struck a partnership with bus company Stagecoach, allowing promotional teams - wearing branded hoodies and purple wigs - to approach students using the buses, as well as in the streets, and offering them free ‘I love Mcr’ T-shirts as well as a £5 gift voucher and a McDonalds meal for the first 100 students to sign up with their email addresses and other information.
Moving away from data capture, sales data, of course, is a sturdy measure of marketing successes.
With a focus on landlord/tenant relations and an increase in performance-based rents bringing communication to the fore, retailers are having to be more forthcoming in providing owners with sales data.
When Maynineteen works on campaigns with a shopping centre client it sets up a meeting with retailers to explain why they’re there, how they’re going to work with them and that the aim is to provide them with year-on-year sales increases.
During fashion events where there might be stylists on hand to advise shoppers, Maynineteen will ensure there are people available to direct customers to the stores after their consultation. And it can even encourage staff to take people on a longer route through the centre so they walk past more of the retailers than they might have done otherwise.
Using competition prizes and other incentives to encourage data capture, keeping databases up to date and using newsletters and email shots to communicate with your shoppers will help to squeeze as much as possible from marketing activity, proving that preaching to the converted can be a good thing.
