Great Idea, Poor Communication – Clothing at Tesco Causes Friday Frenzy

ANNOUNCEMENT – Friday Frenzy Flash Sale – to celebrate the six month anniversary of the Clothing at Tesco website, 6000 customers will receive 50% off all orders in a Flash Sale on Friday 7th May.

TERMS:
Register on Tesco Clothing website
Become a fan of their Facebook page
The first 6000 customers will receive 50% off their online purchases

What a great idea – right? Utilising social media to promote their clothing website, obtaining customer details for future marketing purposes by stipulating that you must be registered to receive the offer, attracting visitors to their site by posting updates on their blog, increase in orders and online sales revenues, lots of happy customers getting some good bargains – all clever stuff.

I’m sure (but don’t quote me on this) there were around 6000 fans on the Facebook page when I joined two days prior to the promotion. The mood of fans was very excited – “bring on Friday”, “can’t wait ‘til Friday”, “Tesco clothes are the best” etc. There was a real buzz starting to generate and it definitely seemed like the promotion was working.

People had lots of questions about the terms of the promotion, how to become a fan, how did they know if they were registered etc etc. Tesco themselves were pretty poor when it came to responding, but as other fans were keen to provide answers to their questions, it didn’t matter too much.

Come Friday morning however, now with over 41,000 fans of the Facebook page, it was really interesting to see that what started as a celebration of six months online trading, to generate goodwill and positive PR, began to backfire as fans became more and more frustrated at waiting for the discount code to be released.

Comments such as the below started to surface on the Facebook fanpage:






Lots of angry customers also who had previously selected and bookmarked items to purchase, and then found that they were mysteriously no longer available on the site come Friday morning (Big black mark, Tesco). 


Let’s face it, as a promotion, overall it worked a treat - over 40,000 new fans of the Clothing at Tesco Facebook page and undoubtedly a similarly large number of new registrations on their website. And when the code was finally released shortly after 12 noon, the site was so busy, they had to display a holding page message. Obviously there were lots of patient people placing orders through the site.

But Tesco really should have managed this better. The whole point of social media marketing is that it is real time; it gives brands and retailers a voice to respond to their customers, and to those who are making negative comments about them. Unfortunately Tesco failed quite miserably in this respect and left customers waiting with few updates and little information.

The moral of the story is that social media is an excellent platform to distribute and offer promotions, but if you are going to use the likes of Twitter, Facebook and a company blog, make sure you maximise on the real time status of these tools by monitoring and responding to the comments of your customers.