Aldi taps Taggstar social proof messaging tech

Aldi has had a selective e-commerce venture in the UK since the beginning of 2016. Its dedicated website team members are in charge of optimising its online experience.

Initially focused on selling wine by the case, the retailer continues to offer a varied range of non-food Specialbuys which have been added to its online offer.

The solution

The e-commerce team knew that social proof messaging could engage customers and encourage sales conversions.

Taggstar works by aggregating anonymised behaviour from other online shoppers’ sessions. The software’s Trend Algorithm pulls real-time trends about the number of people who've bought, viewed, or added a product to their basket. These social proof trends are displayed as messages throughout the sales funnel, or, in Aldi’s case, on specific product detail pages and the basket page.

Taggstar can also collect and display top-trending products, stock inventory, third-party reviews and product trends since a customer last visited a page. In all, retailers can choose from an enterprise-level portfolio of 13 social proof message types.

Aldi’s Specialbuys category sees regular new product ranges released every Thursday and Sunday. Each range has limited inventory that is available until it sells out, giving the brand a limited period to market each range before the next range drops. The e-commerce team was keen to make the most of that time window, using social proof messaging to optimise performance.

Aldi chose to use all Taggstar’s core message types including ‘trending’, ‘add to basket’, ‘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 ‘best-seller’ message type to tell customers which items are the most popular in a specific range.

Integration

The e-commerce 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 basket pages.

Message selection and third party software integrations

As an existing Bazaarvoice user, Aldi has been able to take advantage of Taggstar’s ability to integrate product reviews and ratings, where over 90% of contributors had given the product five-star feedback. This works by pulling data about the percentage of people who had recommended (or highly-rated) a product into the Taggstar message.

Customer success team support and message customisation

With years of expert experience, working with some of the largest online retailers, Taggstar’s customer success (CSM) team supplied Aldi with a wide portfolio of messaging examples, to help understand and refine what would suit the brand’s house style.

The teams worked together to design messages based on brand guidelines until it reached 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 optimisation

Using Google tracking to allow Aldi’s e-commerce team to see website page analytics, Taggstar’s message performance is tracked and recorded through its dashboard. The company’s CSM team works with Aldi to review these results and optimise messaging as part of its quarterly business reviews (QBRs).

Results

Taggstar is showing significant positive results across the board for Aldi with a 9.27% conversion rate uplift (data accurate to 20th June 2019), and is now an ongoing e-commerce optimisation tool on the retailer’s site.

James Kinnear, E-commerce Retail Director at Aldi UK, says: “Our customers are looking for more guidance and product information when choosing from our online wine and Specialbuys ranges. 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.”