Unless you’ve been living under a rock, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen user-generated content featured on your favourite online shop. Another customer wearing the shirt you are thinking to buy, perhaps?
And if you are a marketer and have participated in social media marketing events lately, you must have heard stories about how displaying social proof from peers on a product page increases the conversion rates.
Those stories are true. In fact, our clients have seen an increase of 20-30 % in conversion rates when user-generated content is displayed at the moment of purchase.
Most companies already have engaged customers sharing content mentioning a branded hashtag or the brand’s username but, if you don’t, here’s how you should get started:
- Ask your customers to give feedback and share product ideas and experiences with a specific hashtag. Add a call-to-action to your website, but also to all marketing materials such as posters, leaflets, emails, etc.
- Use a UGC platform to gather hashtag mentions in one place.
- Reward the best ones with an add-on to your current product or provide them with a coupon to purchase your services at a discount.
- Amplify the most popular content by sharing, commenting, and liking it.
- Finally, embed social media feeds on your webshop.
How webshops who user-generated content
Okay, now that you have user-generated content flowing from social channels the next step is to display them on your e-commerce site. Here we’ll take a look at four practical examples on how to add social content to your e-commerce site:
- An inspirational social wall on your homepage
- A user-generated content campaign
- Social proof with influencer content
- Shoppable Instagram feeds for the homepage and product pages
1) An inspirational social wall on your homepage
When you enter a destination hashtag in Instagram’s search, you’ll come across not only posts from local tourism boards but also genuine experiences shared by fellow travelers. These inspiring posts help you plan and get ideas for your upcoming journey.
When you visit Hapag-Lloyd Cruises’ homepage, you’ll be greeted with a beautiful grid of Instagram images - plenty of smiley faces and stunning landscapes.
An inspirational social wall on your website helps potential customers to view the products in a real-life context and discover how others like them use your services.
2) A user-generated content campaign
Do you have an active community of customers making repeated purchases? If yes, creating a user-generated campaign helps to increase sales.
Opus Art Supplies’ UGC campaign asks customers to use their products and answer questions like what they love about Canada. The submissions are gathered with Flockler, and after moderation, displayed on the website in beautiful galleries.
With user-generated content campaigns, brands can increase their reach and engagement on social media channels and strengthen relationships with the most loyal customers. Product feedback and reviews from peers inspire customers and increase conversion rates on your e-commerce site.
3) Social proof with influencer content
GoPro is one of the best-known brands for snowboarders, skateboarders, surfers, cyclists, and others who love to be active and capture the moments as videos and photos.
GoPro Awards page highlights the most popular influencer content mentioning GoPro’s products. The images and videos are gathered with Flockler and displayed as a beautiful wall on GoPro’s website.
For e-commerce sites, influencer marketing campaigns are an efficient way of increasing the reach and awareness of the brand.
4) Shoppable Instagram feeds for the homepage and product pages
Your team might be tagging Instagram images with products as we speak. But wouldn’t be great to tag products to UGC and display customer-generated content on your webshop?
With Flockler, online stores make Instagram feeds shoppable and show social proof on the homepage and product pages.
Sohome’s webshop has an inspirational example for you to check. On their homepage, the 'Shop the look' element shows their favourite customer-generated content.
When you click one of the images and videos, a popup opens with a tagged product.
What would be a better way to use UGC and drive sales?
