Helping the South West’s leading shopping centre embrace digital

Based on the outskirts of Bristol, The Mall at Cribbs Causeway is the South West’s leading out-of-town shopping destination.

We combined our retail and digital expertise to create a brand new website for The Mall to increase footfall to the centre and engagement with consumers.

The task

We were asked to generate visits from big spending shoppers. We were also asked to make sure these shoppers make regular visits to The Mall.

Key considerations included:

Creating a mobile experience designed around specific shopping behaviour. Including a platform to promote The Mall’s annual calendar of events, such as Bristol Fashion Week. Including a content hub – allowing The Mall to curate content and then amplify it on social media. Helping shoppers plan their visit to Cribbs Causeway and navigate the centre more effectively.

It was important that the website was launched before the Christmas 2014 peak trading period. This meant a strict scope of work, a tight and well-managed project schedule, and a strong understanding of our client’s needs.

Increased competition

The Mall has recently seen increased competition, including a £500m development in Bristol city centre, plus an increase in online shopping.

The Mall’s digital activity was still in its infancy. We are working with the client on a long-term digital strategy, the first step of which was a new website. This website not only needed to reflect the changing shopping patterns of consumers, it also needed to provide the client with a user-friendly CMS, allowing the numerous stakeholders to update the site quickly and easily.

The new website

The new website reflects The Mall’s consumer campaign, which features the iconic work of fashion illustrator Malika Favre.

We built the site on Kentico CMS 8.1, giving the client total control of the site’s content, as well as giving visitors a fully responsive and tailored experience on all devices.

As usual, we took a mobile-first approach to the site’s front-end development, ensuring the user is given the best possible experience.

Surfacing promotional content across the site was a key part of the build – the client can easily select a number of articles and place them in the order they would like them displayed on the site.

We built the site with scalability and optimisation in mind. By hosting it in the Amazon cloud, we can increase hardware capacity as site traffic grows. We can also cost-effectively scale the infrastructure up during peak periods.

Extensive tracking means we can optimise the site going forward, based on genuine user interaction.

Brilliant results

Although the website only launched last December, we have already seen some great results:

Initial customer feedback has been very positive. Duration of site visits has increased by 25% year-on-year, and bounce rate has improved considerably. We have seen a 14% increase year-on-year in mobile usage, demonstrating the importance of a mobile first approach. The Mall recorded a 6% increase year-on-year in footfall during the peak Christmas period, bucking recent trends.

As a result of the work we’ve done with The Mall, we’ve been appointed as the digital agency for one of the largest shopping centres in the UK. Later this year, we’ll be launching their new website – stay tuned.