Introduction

It is no news for shopping malls that they need to be present online to create to traffic to their brick-and-mortar retail stores in the mall. For many malls the continuous fight for attention online is unintentionally expensive and in-efficient, largely due to the heavy competition from online retailers.

Most shopping malls have a great potential of increasing the return on investment they get from their marketing budget by thinking carefully about how they can increase the Life Time Value of the customers they target with their online advertisement.

In herningCentret, a Danish shopping mall with 80 stores and 3.5 mil. annual visits they managed to increase the value of their Facebook marketing with 8700% by increasing the Life Time Value (LTV) of their customers.

Here is how herningCentret did it

To increase the LTV and the value of their Facebook marketing herningCentret decided to enhance their marketing mix by launching an app.

With 33.700 likes on their Facebook page herningCentret started to use their Facebook marketing to inform their followers of the benefits of downloading the app.

The followers where shown different posts with special offers and competitions available in the app. A few other posts briefly explaining how the app works.

All posts ended with a call to action-button linking the user to the app in App Store or Google Play. More than 15.000 of herningCentret’s customers decided to download the app within the first year since the app launched.

Using Facebook marketing, herningCentret has paid as little as €0.22 (DKK 1.68) for a new download and the average cost per download across all Facebook posts during the first year was €0.80 (DKK 6.00).

The calculation of increased value

herningCentret used to pay Facebook per view and per click according to the pricing at that specific moment. In their current setup herningCentret is able to pay a one-time-fee of €0.80 to get a new user to download their app.

When the follower becomes an app user the mall can use the Emplate Management System to continuously follow the user. This is how we are proving the significant increase in Life Time Value.

Our data proves that during a year, an average app user sees 358 different campaigns from the stores in the mall, opens or favorites 87 different campaigns, visits the mall 17 times and opens the app 41 times which is the equivalent of visiting the mall online almost once a week.

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It is worth noting that herningCentret is placed in an area outside the main city and is not usually visited frequently by their customers.

This means that every time a user interacts with one of herningCentret’s Facebook posts they interact with 87 additional posts during the following year. We consider this boosting the value of the Facebook marketing budget with 8700%.

Our data also shows us that when a user interacts with 87 campaigns, 14 of the interactions result directly in the user visiting the shop that provided the campaign.

With 15.000 downloads the 80 stores in herningCentret achieves 210.000 store visits per year from the app.

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