Shopping Mall Analytics: Boosting Mall Revenues through AI

The digital transformation provided new thoughts on mall analytics by addressing the reason why people still visit malls.  After the significant growth in e-commerce, people moved far from traditional shopping. Today’s 90% of consumers are sensualists and are looking for an overall fun-filled shopping experience. The malls which can’t address the changing purchase dynamics of people are turning into ancillary malls. Shuttering stores, thinning crowds, empty parking lots, and left-out stocks are signs of ancillary malls. And malls using advanced analytics to map consumer footprints are renovating to raise the proximity rate of traffic and increase footfalls in a mall.

How Mall analytics can help mall owners and in-mall merchandisers?

Why mall analytics? Mall analytics measures the quality of the relationship between malls and retailers. The advanced analytical tools help in tracking consumer experiences on the mall premises. Mall owners can track the actions of retailers and consumers to understand the in-mall dynamics. With driven insights, the mall owners can build strategies in tenant mix, tenant location, tenant performance, digital signage placements, and advertising boardings for optimizing revenues. In the mall, merchandisers can use a set of analytics for addressing their unique challenges to drive valuable insights.

How can malls increase their traffic?

As discussed earlier, to address consumer needs, the malls should consider various dynamics that create high satisfaction parameters to meet consumer demands. These chosen parameters for measuring consumer satisfaction can indirectly affect the traffic inflow.  According to a Google study, the promising parameters that every mall should consider to drive more traffic inflow include- 

– Organizing different events. 

– Creating entertainment hubs.

– Providing free WIFI. 

– Displaying distinct consumable goods. 

– Food fests. 

– Special events during holiday seasons, etc.

Mall analytics an advantage of owners and in-mall merchandisers

The strategies that mall owners can build to leverage the insights driven by analytics for optimizing revenues.

• 1. Tenant mix:

Developing and implementing a tenant mix strategy is one key factor that drives mall business revenues. Improper store placements, store mix, and store locations may affect overall mall sales, traffic inflow, and sale conversations. Identifying and building an appropriate tenant mix strategy has been a long-term concern for mall management. That is where mall analytics can provide statistical and reliable real-time data analysis models for better decision-making and help mall managers in building strategies for better revenues.  

• 2. Tenant location:

Tenant positing not only affects overall mall operations and sales but the sales of adjacent tenants and opposite merchandise centers too as internal tenant merchandise sales and revenues are concerned with various internal and external factors. Mall analytics helps in identifying the various obstacles in the sales conversion funnel by identifying the proximity rate, traffic inflow, outflow, no.of conversions, and reasons behind unsuccessful conversions. Based on real-time insights, the retailers and mall management can make strategies for better store locations which helps in better acquisition.

• 3. Tenant performance evaluation:

Tenant performance evaluation and identifying the right merchandisers to fulfill the demands and expectations of consumers is a complex task. Using mall analytics integrated with advanced technologies for recording, analyzing, and driving insights, the mall management can collect data from sensor devices to identify the proximity conversation ratio and the traffic conversion rate as defined pathways. Based on tenant performance, the mall management can make decisions regarding individual sales of every tenant. And how they are helping malls in acquiring better revenues and strategies for designing, acquiring, and developing new merchandisers, tenant recoveries, and mall infrastructure development.

• 4. Prioritized advertising boardings and digital signages:

Mall analytics provides new fuel to old practices by identifying various insights from In-mall tenant advertising data, attracting new sponsors, and optimizing digital signages during festive & seasonal sales. This helps in developing better strategies for revenue generation.  Mall analytics helps in identifying the most visited stores and mall premises. With these insights, mall management can plan strategies to advertise sponsored products through defined pathways in that consumers are more likely to be engaged.  

• 5. Developing in-mall infrastructure:

The mall infrastructure plays a vital role in acquiring, engaging, and the time spent by the consumer inside a mall. As we discussed earlier, malls are acting as social community halls for consumers, especially teenagers. Offering a distinct range of products and services based on the interests and demands of consumers help in optimizing revenues. Mall analytics helps in understanding concerns and suggestions from the information collected through in-mall events, consumer service points, and digitally sophisticated surveys. It also helps in identifying the traffic inflow rate during festivals and various seasons for the recreation of old infrastructure for better consumer in-mall interaction.

The traditional shopping mall owners had a rough ride. Due to unaddressed customer demands, many malls led to the closure or turned into ancillary malls. Integrating fact-based data-driven systems is helping traditional malls from this endangerment. The malls that implemented mall analytics are turning into successful hybrid malls that generate maximum ROI. And the concept of hybrid malls expands beyond traditional shopping. The strategies described in this article explain and provide a clear understanding of how to increase mall revenues by converting traditional malls into hybrid malls. The data-driven insights from mall analytics provide advantages at various levels of business operations and maximize revenue in the end.

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