Aldi UK is a major discount retailer, that has successfully challenged established grocery retailers in recent years and is now one of Britain’s leading supermarkets, with more than 800 stores. Its value proposition is delivering high quality products at the lowest-possible prices.
Aldi has had a selective eCommerce venture in the UK since the beginning of 2016. Its dedicated website team members are in charge of optimizing its online experience.
Initially focused on selling wine by the case, Aldi continues to offer a varied range of non-food Specialbuys which have been added to its online offer.
Key KPIs delivered by Taggstar
The Challenge
Aldi’s Specialbuys category releases new product ranges every Thursday and Sunday. Each range has limited inventory, available until it sells out; there’s only a short period to market each range before the next range drops.
The eCommerce team was keen to make the most of that window, using social proof messaging to optimize performance.
The Solution
The Aldi eCommerce team knew that social proof messaging could engage customers and encourage sales conversions.
Taggstar trend algorithm pulls real-time trends about how many people have bought, viewed, or added a product to their cart. These social proof trends are displayed as messages on specific product detail pages and the cart page.
Aldi chose to use all Taggstar’s core message types including ‘trending’, ‘add to cart’, ‘selling quickly’ and audience views, plus third-party Bazaarvoice product review messaging.
Given the granular Specialbuys categories, Aldi has also chosen to display Taggstar’s ‘bestseller’ message type to tell customers which items are the most popular in a specific range.
The Solution
Integration and Experimentation
The eCommerce team quickly integrated the software using Google Tag Manager, and the first experiments began in late 2018. Initial tests were run in the UK on its PDP and cart pages.
Optimization
As an existing Bazaarvoice user, Aldi was able to take advantage of Taggstar’s ability to integrate product reviews and ratings, where over 90% of contributors had given the product 5-star feedback. This works by pulling data about the percentage of people who had recommended (or highly-rated) a product into the Taggstar message.
The Solution
Customer Success Team Support and Message Customization
Taggstar’s customer success (CSM) team initially supplied Aldi with a wide portfolio of messaging examples, to help understand and refine what would suit the brand’s house style.
The teams then worked together to create messages based on brand guidelines, until they found an image style, size, opacity and product page positioning that met both Aldi’s expectations and Taggstar’s social proof best practice.
With product categories and messages agreed, Aldi launched Taggstar onto the site in November 2018 for the initial experiment period, allowing it to take advantage of the pre-Christmas retail peak.
Testing and Optimization
Using Google tracking to allow Aldi’s eCommerce team to see website page analytics, Taggstar’s message performance is tracked and recorded through its dashboard. The Taggstar CSM team works with Aldi to review these results and optimize messaging as part of its quarterly business reviews (QBRs).
“Taggstar acts like an online virtual assistant, helping to make purchasing decisions easier for our millions of customers, and supports the growth of our online sales.”
James Kinnear, eCommerce Retail Director
The Results
Taggstar has delivered significant positive results across the board for Aldi with a 9.27% conversion rate uplift (data accurate to 20 June 2019). Social proof messaging is now an ongoing eCommerce optimization tool on Aldi’s site.