Remember the good old days of life B.C.: Before Corona? When we happily commuted to the office en masse, and even put on jeans and make-up to do so. Wild, right?

It sure is when you compare it to the so-called “new normal” we’re living in now. Offices turned into screens, “Hello!” became “I don’t hear you, you’re muted!” and we swapped cosy lunch breaks with colleagues for quick bites in between online meetings.

It’s in that last part where ALDI saw the perfect opportunity to brighten up people’s day. Because this new normal may have moved our lunch breaks from the office to our kitchen table, nobody said we couldn’t still fully enjoy them. So how do you make a delicious and healthy lunch in a short amount of time? And how do you inspire or encourage people to make it?

Enter the ALDI lunch box cashback campaign! An innovative social media campaign bringing sampling right to where people can be found nowadays: online. And when free samples of ALDI’s fresh & qualitative products find you online, how can you resist them? Spoiler alert: you can’t. As a matter of fact, our hungry audience claimed all 1.000 samples in less than 24 hours!

Want to check out more about the proven performance of digital sampling before you read on? Check out our AMMA-nominated case for Santa Maria here.

So, what actually is this tasty ALDI lunch box nobody can resist? Well, it’s a ready-to-use food kit that contains the necessary fresh ingredients to make one of the four following recipes: lasagna, couscous, yellow curry & chili con carne. Consumers just have to buy their meat, fish, chicken or vegan alternative and they’re set to get cooking! Healthy, fast and absolutely delicious.

To spread the message about our cashback action, we ran ads on Facebook & Instagram and made a clear mention of it on the ALDI website. On every platform, our approach was smooth and user-friendly. Clicking on the ad lead directly to the cashback platform where consumers could either send a reminder to their own email address with all the necessary info, or request their cashback immediately by uploading their receipt. A helpful counter on the platform showed how many refunds were still available and created some action-focussed FOMO.

So what if a specific ALDI store was in fact out of stock? How would we manage our ads then? The solution was a bulk upload of all regions into a saved audience. That way, if any location was out of stock, we could easily adapt our audience by excluding or removing that exact location and still give Facebook enough space to optimise on all other available locations.

However, we never had to actually implement this genius strategy, because all samples at all locations were sold out in less than a day!

The campaign was launched on a quiet Monday afternoon, but little did we know, it soon turned into an exciting roller-coaster! Before Tuesday afternoon, all 1000 samples were sold out.

Because of this success, we only had to spend a sixth of our total foreseen budget. With 123.000 impressions in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium and 120.000 impressions in the French speaking part, a staggering 2% CTR and a low CPC we reached our goal faster than ever. Yup, people sure were hungry for this cashback!

Did we get off the rollercoaster ride when ALDI’s samples sold out? Nope, we stayed on for round 2! This time focusing on boosting tasty recipes, to inspire people to create healthy lunches at home and keep teleworking fun, positive and delicious. Because good meals equals what? A good mood!

We kicked off this second part of our campaign with a fun and appealing video that showed different refreshing dishes. The right tone? Immediately set. In the first week of March we continued with daily snack hacks, by posting a new healthy dish every day of the week. Emoji votings created engagement with our community, and fun stop motions videos of our food boxes tied it all together.

So while we might not be able to have lunch breaks together at the office again, at least we’re back to enjoying them like before! You’re welcome!