A new gift card scheme is breathing life into trading at Mall of Engomi and Mall of Cyprus. General manager Julian Smith shares the latest marketing initiatives.

How was trading over the festive season in both Mall of Engomi and Mall of Cyprus? Any particular issues you care to share?

During Christmas 2020, the malls were forced to close due to governmental restrictions around COVID-19 and so a direct comparison cannot be made with last year. At the same time, were we to try and compare Christmas 2021 with Christmas 2019 (a record year for the Mall of Cyprus) we would see visitor traffic down considerably due to the restrictive measures currently in place, but sales results reasonably buoyant. For Mall of Engomi, it was our first Christmas season since re-development and a completely different tenant mix, so it is also difficult to make comparisons, though the same indicators are there – generally suppressed footfall, but an encouraging sales performance.

But for a new year you are bringing in new ideas, and you are introducing a gift-card system in both malls. What is the objective with this?

Reduced customer traffic means increased competition between both the malls and the high street. In 2021, two additional retail destinations – a new mall and an outlet centre – opened in Cyprus along with the facelift of the central retail area of Nicosia, Makarios Avenue, adding to the overall retail offer.

Gift cards are prevalent in other European markets and very successful in keeping retail spend within the specific venue’s own ecosystem – in our case, Mall of Cyprus and Mall of Engomi. With visitor traffic down, it is a way of securing retail spend. Additionally, with increased competition comes the need to differentiate our proposition from the other malls and this is the first scheme of its type to be introduced in Cyprus. These schemes are not inexpensive to implement, so being able to spread the cost across multiple malls gives us a commercial advantage as well.

Exactly how will the system work?

We launched the scheme shortly before Christmas as the gift card is an ideal gifting solution and the majority of sales would normally be at this time of year. Very simply, a customer buys a gift card which is then loaded with the specified amount of between €25 to €250, placed in a seasonally designed card wallet and gifted to another person who can then spend the card across the mall and in multiple, participating retail outlets. This means an improved choice for the recipient – hence “The Gift of Everything” in our tag line.

Anyone can buy using a valid credit card. There is no additional cost or discount associated with this purchase. The benefit to the shopper (the card recipient) is that, unlike store gift cards, the mall gift card allows redemption in multiple retail outlets – even the cinema and food and beverage outlets across the scheme. I know with my own family, everyone likes getting a mall gift card as a Christmas present, and it is an easy solution for the time-strapped person buying the gift too!

Will you be printing physical cards or are they a digital app on your phone?

Right now we are printing “one-time load” cards since we believe that there is an added value to both giving and receiving a physical card. It also has the benefit of driving traffic into the mall for those who both buy the card and those who might receive it and spend using it. In due course we have the option to add a digital version of the card as both an upgrade to the scheme and as a further development alongside other digital platforms we intend implementing in 2022.

What other marketing plans do you have up your sleeve for 2022?

Like the whole world, we hope that the current situation with COVID-19 and the restrictions we have locally will abate in 2022. The mall gift card allows us to have an additional marketing campaign based around key dates – name days (a popular celebration in Cyprus), birthdays, Valentine’s Day (where we are producing a specially themed “limited edition” card wallet), Easter, summer holidays and Christmas. It also allows us to target B2B markets in encouraging other companies to use our gift card scheme for bonus and incentive payments throughout the year. This would mean incremental business and would be in addition to our more traditional B2C retail-led activities that we would normally undertake as a mall.