Modern, real-time marketing increases customer loyalty and revenue for property management company and its retail tenants

Esas Properties uses SAS^® Customer Intelligence 360 and SAS^® Viya^® 4 to digitize its loyalty program, personalize customer interactions and boost average purchase amounts

Shopping malls are ideal places to find all your favorite brands and purchase various items in a single location. However, with such diversity, mall owners can find it challenging to identify a universal element to build a following. One property management firm has found the key.

Esas Properties, one of Turkey’s leading asset management companies, oversees 14 shopping malls that are home to hundreds of stores and restaurants. While Esas had a successful loyalty program with 350,000 members, it estimated that number only accounted for about 30% of its malls’ visitors. Additionally, the program relied on members to bring shopping receipts to a mall information desk to receive credit and earn rewards. Employees then had to manually enter the receipts into the loyalty program database.

“Our data wasn’t available in real-time, and it was prone to data entry errors,” says Yasemin Uzelli, Marketing Partner for Esas Properties. “There also were missing customer behavior data points, such as how long a customer’s visit lasted, which stores they visited without purchasing and how much time was spent in each store.”

To address those challenges, Esas teamed up with SAS and Partner Republic, a consultancy specializing in data-driven customer experiences, to re-imagine its marketing approach and better connect with shoppers.

Realizing the benefits of digitization

Esas wanted to digitize its customer loyalty program with SAS solutions to obtain a 360-degree view of mall visitors – including their behavior in the mall, on the website and on mobile devices. The company wanted to collect, analyze and act on data that was traditionally offline (i.e., where the customer was spending time in the mall, how long the customer was in each location and where the customer browsed but did not purchase) alongside online data (i.e., data collected at the point of sale, mall Wi-Fi usage, points in the customer’s membership account and interactions with email). All in real-time.

With SAS technology at the heart of the endeavor, Esas established a customer loyalty mobile app called Shopla.

“By using SAS Customer Intelligence 360 and SAS Viya, Esas can provide personalized, real-time campaigns to its visitors,” Uzelli says. “The Shopla loyalty app collects customer data from different touchpoints like websites and social media and helps us understand where our visitors are – inside or outside a mall – through beacon technology and Wi-Fi geolocation. This helps us establish real-time communications according to data in the system and deliver targeted offers.”

For instance, let’s say that a loyalty member is approaching a location beacon for Kronotrop Coffee, where she has points accrued for a free pastry with the purchase of a beverage. The app immediately sends her a push notification encouraging her to use her points for an afternoon treat.

“The 360-degree view of the customer also allows us to create rich campaigns based on segments and even microsegments, such as a member’s anniversary, when she reaches a points threshold, redeems or earns certain points, or has times of inactivity,” Uzelli says. “In the first 11 months of using SAS and the Shopla app, our personalized interactions have earned us 205,000 active users and increased the average purchase amount by 84%.”

With SAS Viya, Esas marketers get real-time advanced analytics capabilities behind the scenes. Three cluster models use machine learning to analyze numerous data sources.

“Our marketers can track their KPIs in real-time on visual, drag-and-drop dashboards they create themselves,” Uzelli says. “They can track individual store revenue and plan campaigns based on the segment analysis trending in their accounts.”

Esas marketers can now determine the:

• Ratio of users who upload their receipts to the app.
• Average incremental spending based on the points gained by the user.
• Monthly revenue per member based on location.
• Projected number of visitors per shopping mall and store.
• Duration of time that a member spends in a shopping mall.
• Average time a member spends per store.
• Average points spent and earned.
• Average amount spent per store.
• Most effective discount or content for a campaign.

“The Shopla app allows us to reward our loyalty members for specific shopping behaviors while collecting data for our merchants and Esas marketers to use in marketing campaigns,” Uzelli explains. “We can send personalized incentives in real time to get members to shop at the mall more often and purchase more during each visit. This increases revenue for our tenants and improves tenant retention.”

Since the Shopla app launched, participation in the loyalty program has resulted in an 82% increase in monthly mall revenue. Esas also saw a dramatic leap in member acquisition. With its previous offline loyalty program, it took three years to acquire 270,000 members. With the Shopla app, Esas added 144,000 new members in one year, allowing Esas to quickly provide value to its loyalty members and boost profits for its tenants. 

What's next?

At a time when some shopping malls and brick-and-mortar retail stores are struggling, Esas’ loyalty program is engaging shoppers and bringing them back for more.

By the end of 2023, Esas aims to reach 500,000 downloads of the Shopla app. The company anticipates this will lead to a 10% increase in average rental income.

Additionally, Esas has opened the Shopla platform to all malls in the region, and it plans to add three more shopping malls to its portfolio of properties by the end of the year.

“We want Shopla to become a ‘super app’ in the cities and shopping malls we’re in,” Uzelli says.