Interview: How Alltricks adopted new email practices and increased sales of new and strategic categories  

Alltricks CRM Manager, Benoît Garnéro, sat down with us to discuss how this leading French bicycle retailer has adjusted their CRM strategy after collaborating with Tinyclues. 

12 min | 7 questions

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Industry: Retail | Sporting goods

A few words about you and Alltricks…

My name is Benoît Garnéro. I’m a CRM Manager at Alltricks and I’ve been working here for almost 4 years.

Alltricks is a 100% French e-commerce website created in 2008. Historically, we were specialized in mountain biking equipment, and we gradually opened up to other fields related to cycling (mountain bike, road, gravel, urban, triathlon, electric, BMX, etc.). We also expanded to related practices such as running in 2015 and trekking in 2017. As a French leader in these fields, Alltricks joined the Decathlon group, and is now focused on opening more stores across Europe, with a multi-channel approach.

Tell us a little about CRM at Alltricks and why you chose Tinyclues …

After expanding our offer catalog, new challenges have emerged. We realized that we could no longer treat our customers the same without segmentation. As a result, we improved our CRM practices by refining our targeting. We first based this on customer behavior and order history, and then used customer interest analysis—sports they play or brands they prefer. Naturally, the next step for us was to move towards AI solutions.

“We were already using the tools offered by Emarsys, our existing CRM solution, but we wanted to go even further. We’re now migrating toward the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and looking forward to taking our CRM to the next level, with the power of Tinyclues and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.”

When it comes to CRM challenges, maintaining sales margins has been a critical issue for us for the past few years. Although promotions and discounts are what works best in terms of responsiveness and conversions on email, we’re trying to move away from that by focusing on passion, sports, content, expertise, athletes, and sporting events. We want to become the place to go to for our category and build loyalty without slashing prices. This is our DNA on email.

We also have challenges related to our newly added categories. Outdoor, for example, is a category that we recently launched with big goals. We wanted to develop our customer base for these specific products and attract enthusiasts. We also wanted to identify who among our customers is interested in these new universes, even if they haven’t shown any interest yet. We aim to cater to their needs and provide them with the best experience possible. Increasing product visibility in our emails is key since most of our customers are not even aware of all our new products.

“Tinyclues has helped us / is helping us meet this challenge: when we launch a new category, the very next day Tinyclues allows us to identify prospective buyers and build audiences as large and successful as our historical segments. That’s where we can see the power of the technology behind it.”

How do you build your marketing plan?

Our category managers provide us with topics to promote. This depends on the season and the categories we want to push. 

For example, we have the most news with the mountain biking category, because it’s what we started our business with. It is managed by several category managers. We have enough suggestions to make two newsletters per week. For now, our goal is to do more campaigns, but for more targeted audiences. For other categories, topic sourcing depends on trends and the time of year, like road biking products, which are mainly promoted in the summer.

In a typical week, we send out between 5 and 7 campaigns: two mountain bike newsletters, two “road” newsletters, and targeted campaigns on running, outdoor, or other smaller categories, such as city or BMX.

Did you have any fears before starting the implementation?

We were part of a selection of companies that had the opportunity to test Tinyclues for 3 months through the “Customer Marketing Accelerator Program“. I’d already heard about Tinyclues, so I didn’t doubt their ability to successfully carry out this project. Our fears were more related to our own ability to gather the data and deliver it to Tinyclues on time to start the tests. We wanted to finish the setup as soon as possible, to get the most out of the solution and get a good idea of the ROI before deciding to continue our collaboration in the long term.

“In the end, even in the middle of a migration from Emarsys to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the setup went better than expected. In less than a month, we were able to reconcile data, automate flows, and launch our first campaigns. We didn’t even need to go through IT!”

I worked with a data analyst who was able to easily provide the Tinyclues teams with everything they needed.

How did you test the solution?

The test project lasted 3 months, setup included. Once the implementation was finalized, we had 2 months to test the solution in our own environment. At first, we didn’t know if it was enough to get a good idea of the impact of the solution and estimate the impact but after a month and a half, we had enough data to estimate the ROI. 

“Compared to a manual audience builder process in any CRM solution, creating a campaign from scratch takes very little time with Tinyclues. In order to test the solution to the fullest, we decided to use two methods simultaneously: we sent a Tinyclues campaign and also sent a campaign with our existing targeting methods, on the same topic, so we could compare the results.”

 For our big categories, such as mountain biking, road and running, we did A/B tests to compare our internal targeting to the audiences generated by Tinyclues. For smaller categories where we have less customer knowledge, all the campaigns were done via Tinyclues without A/B testing, to test the full predictive power of the algorithm.

If you had to describe Tinyclues and its impact in a few words, what would you say?

What struck me most about Tinyclues was how responsive and professional the teams are. The fact that they offer a test & learn model shows their confidence in the solution’s impact, which is confirmed by tangible results! 

“We have seen a 20% to 50% growth in email KPIs (opens, clicks, responsiveness, etc.) and business KPIs (orders, revenue). The biggest impact we’ve seen is on our new categories. For example, in the Outdoor category, customers are more responsive and buy more—results were 3x higher!”

It’s a very powerful solution and we can feel real intelligence behind it. Every promise about expected results was upheld and validated in tests!

How do you see the relationship evolving with Tinyclues?

We’ve had great results and we’d like to push even further by optimizing the email channel outside a test environment. Especially with our upcoming migration to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. I am confident that our collaboration will be even smoother and deliver more impact!

“In fact, the existence of connectors with Tinyclues was one of the factors we took into account when we chose the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. With these connectors, Tinyclues can automatically create an audience (data extension) in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, It can also automate the data import from the Marketing Cloud, with no additional effort on our side. This will strengthen our results even further.”

The power of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, coupled with the intelligence of Tinyclues, will allow us to maximize the potential of our marketing stack, increase revenue from email marketing, and increase sales in our strategic and new categories!