Ever wandered around a crowded shopping mall futilely searching for the perfect gift, a great sale or your favorite store? Crown American Realty Trust is betting that you, and other shoppers as well, have and has come up with an innovative solution. The company developed online software that brings the mall to shoppers’ desktops in an attempt to enhance the customer experience, increase sales and improve loyalty. The Internet shopping system, which debuted in August 2000, is available at all of Crown American’s 26 malls and is licensed to another 20 malls, including 18 owned by JP Realty, Inc.
“The site is extremely user friendly from a customer standpoint and has also been wonderful to work with from a management standpoint. It is very easy to go in and customize and add the sales and event information on a local level,” says Ramona Bigger, director of corporate marketing at JP Realty. (In March, General Growth Properties, Inc. reached an agreement to acquire JP Realty.) The software acts as another advertising medium, allowing a mall owner to personalize the content and offer interactive features. Shoppers can register for weekly e-mail notifications containing sales, events and special offers that fit specified preferences. Crown American has 40,000 customers registered on its e-mail list.
Although a particular mall’s site offers links to many of the individual store’s web sites allowing customers to shop from home, the site is intended more as a resource to bring consumers into the brick-and-mortar stores. After conducting a series of focus groups, Crown American found that because consumers are busier than ever they have become more strategic in planning their shopping trips. “Our Internet system really serves as a tool to help consumers plan when to go to the mall and also provides specific reasons shoppers should go to the mall,” says Christine Menna, vice president of corporate communications and marketing at Crown American.
According to Menna, the day the company e-mails shoppers is when the malls have the most traffic during the course of the week. “That tells us that people are going to the web site before they go shopping or planning their trip in conjunction with what’s going on,” Menna says.
