Ten years ago email marketing was touted as the holy grail of Direct Marketing and it has, on the whole, delivered on its promise. It’s an incredibly cheap and effective way to communicate news or an offer to millions in just a few seconds. And with most responsible practitioners only mailing to legitimate opt-in addresses it targets people that actually want communication from a particular business. Permission based, cost-effective and targeted - the marketeer’s dream weapon in the online war for eyeballs and click-throughs.
Now of course we can all get carried away; signing up for numerous trade newsletters, email bulletins and consumer communiqués which we gradually edit down with a quick click on the ‘unsubscribe’ link as their genuine value becomes clearer. However, one email alert I have stayed loyal to for nearly a year - despite me anticipating that 99.9% of its content would be of no interest to me whatsoever - is Aldi’s special buys. The reason? Cycle clothing.
Yes folks - it’s just over a year since I packed in my 20-a-day Marlborough habit, bought a second hand bike (for a mere £60.00) and took on a 4-mile (each way) daily commute from Prestwich to SKV in a combined cardio/credit crunch change of lifestyle.
Now they say you never forget how to ride a bike - and after about 20 years this adage proved to be true. But what has changed is the apparent obligation to spend about £1,000 on a variety of breathable hi-vis jackets, padded tights and shorts, arm and leg warmers, wicking base-layers, special shoes, sun-glasses, gloves and garish cycling tops featuring little zips and pouch pockets round the back. Bearing in mind the modest investment I made in the actual bike which I take into battle on Bury Old Road every morning, I was obviously loathed to spend ten times as much on a set of Gore-Tex gear from Evans.
But other cyclists did manage to convince me that I should try and get a couple of bits of specialist gear to make my arduous daily pedal a tad more comfortable - so naturally I turned to the web and signed up to a couple of bicycle chat-forums. Apparently I was not alone in trying to track down some practical cycling kit at sensible prices - with Decathlon being the preferred retailer. But there were also quite a few posts recommending Aldi’s own brand of sports clothing Crane.
Now I’m not a shopping snob - but up until that point Aldi had never really appealed despite the obvious value it offers across a variety of product categories. I could also never work out how all the random cages of goods in the middle of the stores ‘worked’. But these recommendations for its sports kit was intriguing and, after a bit more research, I garnered that many of Aldi’s special buys (including the Crane bike clothes) were stock that only went into stores on a particular week of the year, sometimes not returning for a full 12 months, and that what was put out on display was ‘it’ and once it was gone it was gone.
This is what goes in the cages and on the clothing racks. I now understood. I had got an insight into how Aldi ticked.
Well this was last summer and it turned out I had missed the 08 Crane Bike collection, resulting in Decathlon getting my business. Aldi on the other hand got my email address and permission to contact me - because their twice-weekly email alerts were going to tip me off when certain things were due in store, things like bike clothing.
Every time one dropped into my inbox I would take the time to scroll through numerous offers on everything from pickles to power-drills, laptops to loo rolls, sat navs to sausages, tea-towels to telescopes.
The motorbike clothing came and went, as did the running gear, the skiwear and the walking boots. Every week for nine months I checked - but alas no cycle clothing. But despite this I did start to enthuse about Aldi’s prices and diversity of seasonal stock. I even started shopping there on occassion.
Then two weeks ago a work colleague asked if I’d got any Aldi bike gear from the 09 range that they noticed was “on its last legs” in their local branch with only men’s XXL and ladies s sizes still on the hangers. A quick google revealed that yes the cycle clothing had arrived in store some ten days before - but trawling through all my Aldi emails I realised I had not been sent a special buy alert for that week’s particular offers. Word had got around the cycle community and the most popular sizes had flown off the shelves. But for me - with nine months of waiting and over 100 emails received, opened and read - and I had missed the opportunity to buy the only Aldi products I really, really wanted.
Where social media and peer-to-peer networks had helped build reputation (and changed my perception and eventually my consumer behaviour) so it was corporate comms that in the end failed to capitalise. It also left me feeling somewhat let down and disappointed by a retailer that I had began to evangelise about. Plus I’ve now unsubscribed from the alerts.
Now I’m sure Aldi won’t sweat a few cheapskate cyclists like me bemoaning an apparent communication cock-up - but I think somewhere buried in this lengthy semi-biographical rant there’s some PR and marketing lessons to be learnt about how to engage with social networks and how direct marketing via email can still be a negative experience despite being 100% opt-in.
In the meantime I’m off to google Decathlon’s latest cycle range, and see what the forums are saying about it. There’s a branch in Stockport by the way and it’s really very good value - something I might post online in fact, especially if any beginner or born-again biker (like me a year ago) is asking about good value bike clothing. That is the true cost of Aldi’s slip-up, not a measly few quid from me.
Tags: Aldi, cycling, Decathlon, direct marketing, email marketing, public relations, SKV, social media
