What’s the Story?

This report forms part of our Innovator Profile series, which focuses on emerging technologies that are disrupting traditional retail and fueling innovation across the retail value chain. Coresight Research collaborated with each covered company to offer insights into their business models and offerings.

In this report, we profile Engagement Agents, a software platform provider that enables retailers to optimize the marketing that they pay for within store leases. According to the company, this helps retailers to drive traffic and sales (in-store and online) and potentially save time and resources in the creation and implementation of marketing campaigns.

Why It Matters

Engagement Agents estimates that worldwide, retailers and shopping centers are losing hundreds of billions of dollars in sales annually due to unoptimized marketing campaigns. The company’s solutions can save retailers significant costs on marketing while optimizing the quality of their outreach, driving traffic in-store and online.

Engagement Agents: In Detail

 

What Problem Is the Company Solving?

Retailers in shopping centers pay significant amounts for marketing opportunities each month through their leases, via gross rent, common area maintenance charges, marketing, promotion or ad funds, merchant association fees and percentage rent. Shopping centers promote their retailers’ marketing campaigns to millions of consumers to drive traffic and sales—via their mobile site, website, app, social media, email list, physical marketing opportunities, events or onsite digital signage. However, Engagement Agents research suggests that only 10% of retailers engage the full benefits of their investments/expenses.

The company has identified several problems that its platform helps retailers to solve:

• Efficiency issues with the current fragmented model of retailer and shopping center collaboration
• Retailers paying for, but not reaping the full benefits of, marketing opportunities within their leases
• Retailers struggling to handle the manual process of distributing and managing their marketing campaigns across shopping centers, given that each center operates in its own silo and has its own content and image requirements, rules and processes.
• Shopping centers having difficulty handling the time-consuming process of collecting and managing various retailer marketing campaigns, since each retailer has differing methods of management that may not be consistent with the shopping centers’ requirements

How the Covid-19 Pandemic Has Impacted Business

The coronavirus pandemic has placed pressure on retailers to drive traffic and sales, both in-store and online, by optimizing their existing investments. With retailers searching for efficiency and cost savings, Engagement Agents saw a 100% year-over-year increase in its customer base in 2020.

Case Studies

Below, we outline some of the key benefits recently realized by retailers through their partnership with Engagement Agents:

• $26 million per year in lease optimizations Engagement Agents helped a 1,000-store retailer identify and optimize the $26 million of annual marketing costs built within their leases to increase traffic and sales.
• 29% Increase in traffic The company helped generate 29% more in-store and online traffic for a 30-store retailer via their shopping centers’ marketing channels.

[caption id="attachment_122086" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Source: Engagement Agents[/caption]

• 5% Increase in sales Engagement Agents enabled a 100-store retailer to achieve a 5% increase in sales by engaging their already-paid-for shopping centers’ marketing channels.
• $150,000 per year in savings The company generated $150,000 per year in savings for a 140-store retailer, by optimizing time, salaries and resources spent on shopping center marketing efforts.

[caption id="attachment_122087" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Source: Engagement Agents[/caption]  

Competitive Advantages

Typically, retailers rely on individual store managers or district managers to engage marketing opportunities manually, which can be costly, time consuming and complex. They may experience difficulties knowing whether their store managers have engaged in marketing opportunities or not, or whether the shopping center executed what the store manager provided, according to Engagement Agents. Additionally, retailers can suffer from the opportunity costs of store managers spending time engaging with marketing manually, rather than selling on the store floor.

In light of these current inefficiencies, the Engagement Agents platform aims to help retailers and shopping centers achieve three goals:

1. Simplify the process, automate the distribution and track the success of retailers’ marketing campaigns within their shopping centers’ digital and physical marketing channels.
2. Ensure retailers’ campaigns and branding are current, consistent, correct and compliant across all of their shopping centers’ marketing channels.
3. Increase their engagement rates by maximizing and monetizing their already-paid-for marketing channels to drive traffic and sales, both in-store and online.
4. Significantly reduce operational costs, while saving time and resources.

Upcoming Developments

With retailer and shopping center collaboration becoming more important than ever due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Engagement Agents has planned four areas of focus for 2021:

• Grow retailer-shopping center relationships further.
• Further optimize retailers’ existing investments and expenses.
• Enable partner retailers to gain a competitive edge.
• Drive more traffic and sales, both in-store and online.

What We Think

In an increasingly competitive retail environment, maximizing return on investment on marketing budgets should be a major consideration for retailers, whether in the physical retail space or online.

Retailers can leverage third-party solutions providers such as Engagement Agents to improve their consumer engagement efficiency by working smarter, not harder.