Specialty Retailer increases…in-store foot traffic by 32%
Summary
This client is known around the world for bringing the magic to life for people of all ages within their incredible theme parks & resorts. They also have a brick & mortar presence of over 200 stores across North America where they wanted to bring some of that magic to life through live entertainment events as a way to enhance the guest experience. As a result, not only did their foot traffic grow but so did their same-store sales and customer satisfaction scores YoY.
The Challenge
The client faced three key challenges:
- Drive awareness about where and when these events are held.
- Encourage guests to sign-up and reserve a spot to participate in the event in order to forecast required in-store labor.
- Collect feedback on whether these events were hitting the mark.
The objective was to develop a marketing strategy that was scalable to all participating stores across the country and ensure there was a loopback of customer feedback.
Creating the magic was the easy part for this client. They leveraged the many years of experience doing this for millions of people around the world coupled with technology they developed in-house to turn a traditional retail space at your local mall into a wonderland for young children and those young at heart.
The Approach
1. The first thing that needed to happen was to put a strategy and process in place that would build awareness ahead of time for each event.
Leverage Facebook Events for each planned event backed by a Paid Media budget to reach new prospects. This helped drive a significant amount of pre-awareness & a 15% growth in followers.
Geo-Target within a 10.5-mile radius of each store with a dedicated email campaign. Additionally, we developed creative assets that were attached to scheduled marketing emails. This helped drive pre-awareness & encouraged users to register to attend the event.
2. In addition to having a drum beat cadence building awareness for the events starting 1 month prior, we needed to create urgency and drive registration.
We planned out each phase of pre-awareness with creative refreshes that had a slightly higher sense of urgency as the event date got closer. The primary objective within each of these phases was to ensure we provided clear details regarding;
- Event time & date and details around the event itself.
- Specific value propositions that made registering early more appealing. i.e. Free gift to first 50 registrants.
- Clear Call-to-Action on how to register to attend the event with secondary messaging highlighting “Limited Availability”
In addition to layering custom audiences and retargeting segmentation within email and social media campaigns, we were also careful to avoid overwhelming the guest with too much info. As a result, we tested custom landing pages that provided further details and the ability to easily convert. This resulted in a 26% increase in registration conversion rate after each iteration.
3. In order to collect valuable feedback from attendees about the event, we implemented an automated email sent to each attendee 1 day after attending the event.
The event producers and coordinators were able to mine this data to enhance and gain ideas that were implemented in future events. As a result, CSAT scores rose each month paving the way for the store experience team to build a case to leadership and secure additional funding to produce larger scaled events.
Results
Through strategic marketing automation, we were able to put awareness generation on auto-pilot for each event. Paid Media audiences were now being dynamically created based on different user behaviors and retargeting criteria. Email campaigns were templatized to allow for efficient operational execution.
By creating excitement and exclusivity guests were eager to register early in order to secure a ticket, which in turn allowed the client to properly staff each event based on forecasted attendance dramatically smoothing out labor costs.
The success in driving guests into their stores to attend a magical event resulted in a lift in same-store sales, but more important to the client was the positive feedback every guest left after each event.
IN-STORE FOOT TRAFFIC
32% YOY LIFT
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