Bare bone agenda
To make an app draw crowds and keep the customers inside a shopping centre, as well as to increase the average check, the customers must be motivated. “You could give points for spending time in the shopping centre, for the visit frequency and the money spent. The app must be easy and interactive for the customer to understand the system of points, and where they can spend their points on the options interesting to them personally,” says Alexei Bazin, Managing Director of Arena Plaza shopping centre, Dinamo Management Company.
Let’s take a look at what a good app is about. A bare bone app shall have:
1. Good navigation (a map of the shopping centre, its brands, directions, a search button, etc.);
2. Current sales and discounts;
3. Useful services for the customers (to buy a ticket, to book a table);
4. Feedback (to email, to call the shopping centre, or to leave a feedback).
“Your customers are the ones who will help you decide on the right services for your shopping centre. Gather a focus-group before you start designing your app and you are bound to make a lot of discoveries during these interviews. Later on, do use the statistics gathered and analyze the search results in your app as well as carefully read the comments left by your customers as they all will give you a lot of useful information for your further development,” shares Anna Zagidullina, Head of Marketing, Lynks Property Management.
Watch your spending
These days, an app is a rarity and to design one costs and arm and a leg. There are companies which have rolled out several projects and have come up with a basic configuration to offer; these are slightly cheaper yet are likely to be less adapted to the reality of a particular shopping centre.
“To design a simple app adapted for a limited number of platforms and with a limited number of functions (the shop sorting, map, sales, in other words what is called an information platform about a shopping centre) would take one to three months and would cost 1.5-2 million rubles. Adding an administrator, chat, online payment modules and some other components would take three to six months and come to 3-3.5 million rubles,” shares her personal experience Anna Zagidullina. A more technically advanced project to match the criteria of your particular shopping centre could take up to six months and hit you with the bill exceeding five million rubles, yet the sky is the limit and it all depends on your imagination.
Speaking whether the game is worth the candle, Anna Petukhova suggests: “Before you start the design stage of such a product, make sure you define the tasks the app will help you to achieve and match it to the investments you will have to make. If the app is just a part of the website then the investments are not worth it. But when you consider it to be a unique service, which you are going to monetize in the future, then you may consider this a marketing tool.”
“A mobile app is not a must; it is an additional tool of a product portfolio in the commercial real estate market,” insists Oxana Nizhgorodova, Head of Regional Marketing, Ingka Centres in Russia. She believes that a management company should develop an app only if they are sure it will help them achieve better results.