Keeping a finger on the pulse at Trafford Centre

The Challenge

At Trafford Centre in Manchester, the 3rd largest shopping centre in the UK, there was a lack of data to support strategically important decisions for marketing campaigns, leasing, commercialisation, tenant negotiations and customer deals. Essentially, there was a lack of insight around customer behaviour. Who were they, what were their needs and visiting habits, we're they utilising all of the centre's facilities etc. To support the tenant and brand performances, there was a need to influence customer behaviour, creating loyalty and increase repeat visitation.

The Solution

In 2021, we launched our destination crowd engagement solution at Trafford Centre branded as 'Pulse' and positioned as a rewards programme for Trafford Centre’s visitors. Over 200 WiFi access points located inside the centre allows us to collect customers’ data and overtime, understand shoppers’ behaviour and provides shoppers with free and unlimited WiFi. We can now track customers behaviour via their mobile devices with our WiFi access points, and reward them with exclusive offers provided by tenants.

Better Understanding

By promoting Pulse to Trafford Centre’s customers with POS and digital marketing we've encouraged sign-ups, reaching some impressive database growth numbers and visitors engagement levels. Utilising our owned channels we've also drawn new audiences to the centre, providing incentives through our reward scheme.

The new data captured from visitors, has provided a better understanding of who visitors are and what they care about. This information has then allowed us to tailor Trafford Centre’s marketing campaigns to guarantee success. This thriving new customer engagement and loyalty reward programme combines email communications with the customer data to create the perfect marketing tool.

Engagement

Retailer engagement has played a big part in how we’ve been able to gain such an impressive database for Trafford Centre in such a small amount of time. We created a bespoke brochure for Trafford Centre to entice retailers to be part of the scheme and share exclusive offers with us to reward visitors. Pulse has provided an effective tool for those retailers taking part, to increase their sales and in-store footfall, gain visibility and deliver specific messages to their customers targeting by age, gender, visits frequency and many other data points collected. 

Actionable insight

Pulse at Trafford Centre is a great example how our engagement tool can be used to benefit tenants and shoppers alike. In less than eight months, we’ve significantly grown an impressive database, which now provides some valuable data., such as:

• Average dwell time in the centre and in specific zones 
• Footfall by zones at specific times (helpful to find the busiest time of day) 
• Visit frequency  
• Most popular areas of the centre (heatmap) 

Pulse points

As well as targeting our loyal shoppers, attracting new visitors and benefiting tenants, all the data is also being used for strategic leasing and commercialisation purposes via internal dashboards, which all stakeholders have access to. Just see the results so far, below.