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Industry

  • Retail & Consumer Goods

Offering

  • Marketing Creativity & Performance

Get to Know Ivanhoé Cambridge

About

Ivanhoé Cambridge Inc. is a Canadian real estate company with assets around the globe. Its areas of activity are investment, development, asset management, operations and leasing. The company's real estate portfolio consists primarily of multi-residential properties, industrial/logistics real estate, shopping centres and office properties. It also has ownership interests in real estate investment funds and hotels.

Headquartered in Montreal, Ivanhoé Cambridge has more than 1,000 employees worldwide and is now among the 10 largest real estate companies in the world. When they were looking for a digital partner to help improve their digital offering and to meet changing standards in accessability, Valtech was happy to help. 

Accessibility No Longer an Afterthought

Ivanhoé Cambridge

For a long time, brands have created their websites without much throught being paid to the accessibility of the site. Now, with SEO rankings and even laws being passed in countries establishing the minimum standards for accessibility, we're seeing more and more companies make the crucial shift into a more accessible practices in their web design. In order to meet the requirements set by the AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act), Ivanhoé Cambridge embarked on a project with Valtech as their digital partner to help improve the site's accessibility rating. 

The project touched on multiple aspects of the site, but four of the top-of-mind concerns were:

  • Code formatting
  • Standardize visual focus indication
  • Adjust color contrasts
  • Standardize keyboard navigation

This is not an exhastive list, but it shows elements of the site that Ivanhoé Cambridge was focused on. Over the time of our involvement, we addressed all of these issue and more in an effort to improve the company's accessibility, but that's not all we were able to help with. 

Improving Events and Getting People in the Door

With multiple holdings in the retail space, one problem Ivanhoé Cambridge faced was the fact that each individual mall owns its own events and manages attendance. So even for an event that is recurring and similar across malls, like Santa appearances during the holidays, each individual location had to manage and market it's own event and load up its own related content. Valtech worked with Ivanhoé Cambridge to come up with a visibility, acquisition and drive to store conversion campaign on a variety of digital channels that could be used by each property and could be repurposed easily for any future or recurring events. Together, we developed a responsive and user-friendly site that reflects the information needs of shoppers. In addition to designing the website, Valtech created an email acquisition strategy to build a rich database and encourage consumers to attend. And to make attending even easier ...

A PWA Booking Solution

... We also created a special Booking solution to help customers reserve time and attend the event. Ivanhoé Cambridge originally wanted us to create a stand alone app that would help users book a visit with Santa. Instead of moving in that direction, we explained the benefits of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and created a booking solution that better met Ivanhoé Cambridge's needs. With the PWA, we were able to create a booking app that was immediately integrated into functionality of the site, didn't require users to download another app to their phones, and loaded faster through a decoupled front and backend, leading to a better user experience. And because the front and backend was decoupled in the PWA, Ivanhoé Cambridge was capable of making edits to the content of the booksing page without sacrificing functionality on the front end. Another way the PWA is superior to an app is maintainability is facilitated by a delivery system similar to that of a website.

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The Results

ivanhoé cambridge

The campaign, which ran for almost two months leading up to the opening and the first few weeks after the opening, reached over 26,000 consumers by email and brought 11,000 consumers to the shopping centre to enter the contest. Additionally, 10,781 personalized coupons were created specifically for this event. 

Additionally, due to our involvement, Ivanhoé Cambridge has improved its sites' accessability rankings and brought their digital presence more firmly into compliance with AODA. And each of their commercial properties has access to a new booking PWA they can use for more than just Santa visits. 

For more information about how PWAs might help your business, or if you have concerns about your site's accessability, contact us today for a free consulation with our experts. 

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