Mitsui Real Estate

Location Based Marketing Case Study: Realistic User Analysis at a Store Leads to Improvements in Measures and Sales Promotions (Mitsui Fudosan Commercial Management Co., Ltd.)

Cinarra was used to measure the number of store visits at Mitsui Shopping Park LaLaport, which is operated by Mitsui Fudosan Commercial Management. Ms. Yamazaki and Mr. Goto, who are in charge of property management in the commercial facility business of the Mitsui Fudosan Group, were in charge of the implementation. We asked them about the challenges they faced and their impressions of using Cinarra.

We were looking for a way to obtain the information necessary for policy planning.

Could you tell us again about the nature of your company’s business?

Goto: I am in charge of the commercial facility management division of the Mitsui real estate Group. Currently, we are managing about 70 facilities. We are expanding our business not only in Japan but also overseas, including Taiwan and Malaysia. We operate commercial facilities of various types, including large regional shopping centers such as Lalaport, lifestyle parks such as Mitsui Outlet Park and Lala Garden, and urban commercial facilities such as COREDO Muromachi.

Yamazaki and I work in the Operations Division 1, which is in charge of common sales promotion for large commercial facilities such as LaLaport and Lazona. We work as a team to manage and revamp the website, formulate SNS-linked campaign measures, and conduct digital promotions that are finely segmented.

Could you tell us about the challenges your company has faced so far in the area of sales promotion?

Yamazaki: The problem was that we couldn’t check the conversions of customers visiting our stores, and we couldn’t tell how many customers who viewed our website actually visited our stores. We were able to analyze the level of interest based on the click rate, but we were not able to measure how effective the sales promotion was for the customers who visited the store. There were some aspects that we could not understand from the existing figures alone.

There was also the issue of how to attract new customers to Lalaport in the first place. We had not been able to properly visualize the frequency of visits to Lalaport by all customers, including those who had visited the store recently, those who had not visited the store in more than six months, and those who had left the store in between.

You introduced Cinarra at a time when you were faced with the challenge of visualizing the frequency of visits to your store. Could you tell us your impressions of the product?

Yamazaki: The first time we introduced Cinarra’s products was when we conducted the “90’s REVIVAL FASHION FES” digital promotion at Lalaport and Lazona Kawasaki Plaza across Japan. The purpose of the promotion was to attract new customers, but with conventional digital promotions, the effectiveness could only be measured by click indicators.

With the introduction of Cinarra’s products, we are now able to see how much digital measures such as advertisements and websites contributed to the store visits, and even identify the media that were effective in attracting customers.

This event will be held for one month starting from September 14, 2018. We were able to see not only the results of Cinarra’s ad delivery, but also the results of ad delivery provided by Google and Yahoo! Japan using the same store visit index, so we were able to make relative comparisons between media.

You have used Cinarra for a wide range of purposes from store visits to sales promotions.

Yamazaki: It gave us an opportunity to plan genre-specific measures. For example, we used Vital Sight to measure the effectiveness of the “90’s REVIVAL FASHION FES” special site. We compared the rate of visits to the site by users who viewed the top page, event details, fashion, and sweets pages, and found that the rate of visits to the event details page as well as the sweets page was high. This gave us a new perspective when planning subsequent measures.

Goto: I think that had an effect on the sales promotion as well. We used Venue Vitalics to quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of the flyers in the areas where we distributed newspaper inserts and postings. We were able to visualize the areas where we distributed flyers but the store visit rate was low, and the areas where we did not distribute flyers but the store visit rate was high, so we can review our budget allocation and distribution areas in the future.

We are now able to get a clearer picture of digital behavior. For example, if you want to distribute ads to users who visit a page about fashion. But not everyone who visits your site is doing so out of pure interest. With traditional measurement methods, it is impossible to identify users who could become customers. As an example of a case where a user does not become a customer, you could say, “I needed to gather information for work,” or “I just clicked on the wrong link. With Cinarra, we are able to deliver ads based on segments that combine location information and carrier subscriber information, so we feel that our targeting is highly accurate. This has been one of our challenges, but it has ultimately led to the acquisition of new customers and an increase in the rate of store visits, so it has been very helpful.

Analyzing users’ values and selecting appropriate sales promotion methods

What are your expectations for Cinarra in the future?

Yamazaki: What is called digital marketing is evolving day by day. Cinarra uses subscriber information and location information to create segments based on daily activities, and it can even deliver the segments. I am very excited about the future.

To be more specific, the current target carrier is only Softbank, but I hope that the range of carriers will be expanded to include docomo and au in the future. I think there is nothing to be afraid of if we can do this.

Thank you very much, can you tell us about the prospects for using Cinarra’s measurement tools?

Yamazaki: We want to deliver information and advertisements accurately to the customers who need them. There are various types of advertisements such as web, inserts, and hanging ads in trains. We would like to work with Cinarra to optimize our advertising methods, including which methods are most appropriate, efficient, and lead to visitors. As values and lifestyles become more diverse, I believe that marketing itself will become more interesting if we can segment not only by gender, age, and residence, but also by values.