How Carmila Is Turning Insight To Action with Cross-Channel Messaging

We sat down with Paul Guillon and Quentin Jonas to get the inside story on how the Carmila is building more meaningful relationships with its customers.

A Little Background

Carmila is one of Europe’s largest shopping centre companies with a portfolio of 215 locations serving the essential purpose of connecting retailers with customers. Boasting a mix of sweeping complexes comprising hundreds of stores, restaurants and movie theatres, to boutique arcades with fewer than 20 outlets, each Carmila shopping centre is tailored to the people that live in it’s locale.

These are not merely bricks-and-mortar structures, Carmila has a strategy rooted in combining the physical with the digital, blending opportunities to unite with footfall by connecting with them on all manner of digital channels, through points-of-sale, entertainment terminals, email, SMS and Wi-Fi.

We sat down with Paul Guillon, Digital Marketing Manager and Quentin Jonas, Customer, Digital and Innovation Director at Carmila to get the inside story on how the organization is harmonizing customer data gathered from numerous sources and putting it to work through cross-channel messaging to build more meaningful relationships with its customers.

€6BN+ portfolio value

2M visitors to its centers each day

The Challenge

“Carmila itself is not a brand, it’s not known to people.” This creates quite the headache for its marketing department – tasked with making that all-important connection between the organization and customer.

Furthermore, whilst Carmila has a head office and central database, with its promise of “proximity being at the heart of all the actions we take” it also has independent teams at each of its 215 locations tasked with solely supporting the customers in their particular catchment area. That’s a lot of data, a lot of disparate marketing campaigns, a lot of channels, and a lot of sub-organizations.

To truly deliver the retail experiences shoppers expect today, marketing teams need both insight and action.

That requires a single, accessible view of customer data, wherever it’s collected from, that identifies them and matches them with their shopping behaviors, backed-up by a cross-channel messaging solution to deliver contextually relevant communications on the right channel, at the right time.

Enter Cheetah Messaging.

215 locations in 3 countries, each with its own marketing team

The Brief

Carmila requires the ability to generate a single source of truth of all customer data, harmonizing it from whichever channel and location it’s collected from. This needs to be complemented by micro-databases for all 215 locations that seamlessly integrate with the primary database.

Using this data, Carmila wants to empower it’s regional teams to deliver email, SMS and push marketing campaigns to customers in real-time, to more closely align with shopper expectations, improve the relevancy of messaging, and make that all-important connection.

The Solution: Cheetah Messaging – SMS & Push

In today’s digital and interconnected world, the importance of being mobile-first cannot be overstated. A staggering eight out of every 10 digital minutes reside on a smartphone, and shoppers reach for their devices on average 96 times a day. As shoppers are on-the-go when visiting a Carmila center, Cheetah Messaging’s SMS functionality yields huge scope for engagement and conversion – from push geo-localized advertising campaigns or triggered offers.

Shoppers engage with several digital touchpoints when interacting with Carmila – whether that be using a selfie terminal on-site, opening an SMS, redeeming an offer through wallet, clicking an email, or connecting to Wi-Fi. Crucially, all this data is seamlessly integrated into Carmila’s database – and this is then used to action different triggers.

Cheetah Messaging’s SMS and Push functionality empowers Carmila to drive engagement with its shoppers through data-driven messaging. Defining shopper audiences and segments using the most up-to-date customer data, serving offers and content in real-time, as well as triggering campaigns based on online behavioral data and other real-time events.

All this data is also synchronized with Google and Facebook to create audiences and sub-audiences and in particular to identify consumers with very similar profiles present in the catchment areas, for additional targeting.

The Cheetah Messaging platform and its level of automation also allows teams to offload manual mailings in a simple and efficient way and to send the right communication at the right time and to the right person.

12.2M Cheetah Digital-powered SMS sent last year

The Results:

42% increase in one retailers turnover from a single Cheetah Messaging-powered marketing campaign