One of the country’s largest mall operators is trying out a new promotion designed to drive offline mall shoppers to its web site, but it’s not necessarily just to sell merchandise; it’s to build traffic and ultimately monetize that traffic through advertising and other marketing efforts. Because of the size of the audience that passes through their doors, malls aren’t just malls anymore, says Drew Sheinman, president of Simon Brand Ventures, the new business development arm of Indianapolis-based mall owner Simon Property Group, they’re media, too.
Simon Brand Ventures last week launched an online Halloween sweepstakes involving more than 100 of its 200 malls with digital marketer RealTime Media, Wynnewood, Penn. The promotion coordinates both in-mall events and online opportunities for customers to win autographed copies of author R. L. Stine’s popular “Nightmare Room” collection of children’s books, mall gift certificates and discounts on holiday portraits. Some malls are distributing cards on online sweepstakes to shoppers attending the Halloween events, in others, signs make shoppers aware of the online promotion at Shopsimon.com.
Collectively, Simon Properties Group malls have 2 billion customer visits per year, representing about 100 million unique visitors, says Sheinman. The web site gets about 2 million visitors per month. A key goal of the online promotion is to build a database of permission-based e-mail addresses of customers that the Simon Group can eventually use to segment marketing efforts on behalf of itself and its mall merchants. While Shopsimon.com doesn’t offer merchandise for sale on its site, “We operate online much as we do in the offline world--as an aggregator of shopping opportunities and services,” says Sheinman. However, the site does include links to the web sites of some of its merchant mall tenants. Over time, Sheinman says, Simon Group will develop a revenue sharing program for sales that originate through those links.
“We are a form of media and it’s a logical progression of how we evolve the mall into a medium. The online component is another platform we use to communicate with our consumers. We'll use it to drive shopping activity and commerce in our malls and in conjunction with promotional sponsor partners and our retailers, whether they are coming to the malls or they are at home,” says Sheinman.
If the online Halloween promotion is successful, he adds, Shopsimon.com may run other online promotions with RealTime that are linked to mall events and grouped around other holidays or special promotions.
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