The Company
General Growth Properties (GGP) owns 185 regional shopping centers in 43 states. The company’s portfolio totals approximately 200 million square feet of retail space and includes more than 24,000 retail stores nationwide.
The Challenge
On behalf of its 185 shopping centers, GGP’s Consumer Relationship Marketing department is responsible for sending monthly newsletters and promotional emails to millions of mall-specific shoppers that have signed up to get exclusive promotions, the best discounts and mall event alerts sent by email or text.
“We were spending 600 production hours per month trying to figure out which piece of content should go into which mall’s newsletter because there are different retailers located in each shopping center,” says Jeff Cloud, Director, Customer Relationship and Mobile Marketing, at GGP. “We also wanted to improve relevance of the content by individual recipient.”
The Solution
GGP selected Silverpop Engage to help solve its challenge of delivering hundreds of unique, relevance-driven newsletters and promotional emails to its affinity program members. It initially worked with Silverpop’s Strategy and Account Management teams to take a careful look at how to optimize its email format and content strategy. “We decided to take advantage of the services Silverpop’s Strategy team offers to help take our program to the next level,” says Cloud. “Its high-level, consultative approach helped us achieve that in a short period of time.”
Today, GGP uses Silverpop Engage to send monthly newsletters, as well as exclusive promotions, discounts and mall event announcements to its affinity program members on behalf of its 185 malls.
GGP taps into Silverpop Engage’s Relational Table functionality to deliver personalized newsletter content based upon unique mall, promotion value, and gender. And it employs Silverpop’s Share-to-Social feature in an effort to increase the message reach of its promotions.
GGP also uses Silverpop’s Send Time Optimization feature within all of its mailings to ensure that its emails are appearing in subscribers’ inboxes at the optimal time. “By enabling Send Time Optimization, we now know we’re delivering the right message at the time when our recipients can give these messages their fullest attention,” says Cloud.
The Results
“The top benefit of using Silverpop Engage has been reducing the labor-intensive process we’d go through in creating 185 monthly newsletters,” says Cloud. “Using relational tables, we’ve decreased the number of newsletter templates by 90 percent and production hours by 60 percent. We’ve also increased deliverability 12 percent. But overall, the biggest benefit has been moving from a reactionary production-oriented group to a more strategic organization within the marketing department.”
With the help of Share-to-Social, GGP also experienced a massive uptick in consumer awareness about its events and promotions. ”Thousands of our subscribers shared a recent $10 off coupon email on social networks such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook,” says Cloud. “With Facebook alone, we’ve been able to extend our reach to at least 500,000 people we may not have reached otherwise.”
In the near future, GGP plans to integrate Silverpop Engage with AccuWeather to send triggered emails based upon local weather conditions. “We plan to use emails to drive traffic into the shopping centers with weather-based promotions,” says Cloud. “For example, if the temperature goes below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, we’ll trigger an email for a free hot chocolate to entice subscribers to come to the shopping center that day.”
Download the PDF to learn how General Growth Properties has reduced production hours by 60% and the number of newsletter templates by 92%.
