Expertise, customer obsession, and… email: The mechanics of Alltricks’ success

One step at a time: Since its inception in 2008, Alltricks, a pure player in outdoor sports, has been climbing steadily. The ingredients of its hyper-growth? Advanced market expertise, attentive customer relations, and increasingly personalized communications, notably thanks to a true mastery of automated emails.

With a revenue of €65 million in 2018, €80 million in 2019, and €132 million in 2020, Alltricks, a loyal customer of Dartagnan’s email builder for three years, is one of the most impressive success stories in French e-commerce. A key player in niche sports markets (running, triathlon, hiking, climbing, and all cycling sub-categories from BMX to mountain biking and road cycling), the company relies on an expert customer service and an ultra-sophisticated use of email marketing and CRM.

Trigger Emails: how Alltricks boosts repeat business

Passionate markets mean high-value baskets, higher-than-average purchase frequency… but also a demanding target in terms of quality advice and service! How to balance the relevance (and aesthetics) of communications with a high production rhythm across various niches? The answer: by automating what can be automated. On this front, Alltricks has developed some impressive tactics.

Triggers: from behavioral logic…

Welcoming a new subscriber, following up on an abandoned cart, sending a gesture for a customer’s birthday… trigger emails are classic tools in CRM teams’ arsenals. When well executed, these automated emails achieve much higher performance (open rates, response rates, and conversion rates) than typical newsletters.

Like most e-commerce players, Alltricks has implemented these emails, but it has pushed the logic further by stepping out of the traditional approaches.

… to predictive logic

How? By not only focusing on customer behavior-triggered communications but also addressing a sector-specific issue: sports equipment wears out and requires regular maintenance or replacement. Thus, there is an opportunity to maintain profitable interactions with customers.

“The general idea is to intelligently model customer journeys, with messages that reach the right proposition at the right time, to achieve our repeat business goals without overloading the teams,” summarizes Benoît Garnero, CRM Manager at Alltricks.

Data-Driven orchestration

But how to determine this right proposition at the right time? To find out, Alltricks engaged a data analyst. His task? To determine the average replacement frequency of bike parts. Benoît Garnero and his team then designed and configured the appropriate trigger emails:

• For bike chain replacement (10 months after purchasing a mountain bike, for example),
• For tire replacement (at 8 months, personalized based on the previously purchased brand),
• For suspensions (13 months after purchase).

Triggers: aiming for sales, advice, and customer satisfaction!

Beyond timing, which helps remind the customer when it’s time to renew their equipment, these trigger emails provide valuable and useful content:

• Tips and advice on assessing equipment wear,
• Instructions for extending the equipment’s life and performing replacements if needed.

Personalized based on the purchased brand or customer practice (mountain biking, road cycling, etc.), these campaigns also smartly include cross-selling of complementary items and services, such as a suspension maintenance service provided by a partner. This reflects a significant development focus for the startup: its evolution into a marketplace for outdoor sports practices.

The result? “By providing real advice and service to our customers, these ‘predictive’ emails convert very effectively,” appreciates Yohan Michel, Marketing Director at Alltricks. So much so that the e-merchant has extended this logic to other product types, such as sports nutrition (a “departure” campaign three months after a first purchase on the site).

Carefully crafted transactional emails

With Dartagnan, Benoît Garnero and his team have redesigned all these triggers to ensure they perfectly align with the brand’s identity. They even went further by defining:

• Their transactional emails (post-purchase, delivery information, password reset, returns, etc.),
• Relational emails such as those sent via BazaarVoice for managing customer reviews.

These emails are now perfectly consistent with Alltricks’ brand image, with the main images changing according to the seasons to better match current events.

This major overhaul, made possible by Dartagnan’s user-friendly email builder, was not just a CRM team’s whim. It made perfect sense for Alltricks’ teams, focused on customer experience. “A company whose transactional emails are of low or poor quality misses the opportunity to send a good image to its customers,” points out Benoît Garnero. “Thanks to Dartagnan, we can meet the high standard of experience we want to deliver in every message to our customers.”