How To Leverage User Generated Content To Boost Ecommerce Sales

User-generated content, or UGC, is an invaluable asset for boosting e-commerce sales for two reasons. Firstly, it creates a bank of social proof that showcases authentic customer experiences, helping to build trust in your brand and encourage conversions. And secondly, it creates a portfolio of free content you can share on social media, and sometimes on your website and through emails, adding greater depth to your content portfolio.

In this article, we’ll look at how to encourage your customers to create UGC, and how to implement a strategic UGC programme through incentives, social campaigns and measured integration into your marketing efforts, to help you unlock the full potential of user-generated content.

What types of UGC can you use in ecommerce?

User-generated content is a broad and varied category. By definition, UGC can include any content created by one of your customers rather than your business or its supply partners (e.g. a marketing agency) and thus covers text, images, videos, reviews, and social media posts. Each type of UGC can contribute uniquely to your marketing strategy, such as:

Customer reviews and ratings

Written or star-based reviews and feedback help potential customers quickly assess the quality of your services and products. Many customers trust the opinion of their peers over promotional claims so a bank of positive reviews can contribute directly to increased e-commerce sales.

Testimonials

While reviews are often brief and product-focused, testimonials are detailed stories that describe a customer’s overall experience with your business. These are gold dust in ecommerce marketing because they can often inspire greater customer confidence, especially when featured prominently on high-traffic product pages, your website home page, or campaign-specific landing pages.

Social media posts and tags

Customers frequently use social media to share photos, videos, and stories about the products and experiences they love with family and friends, especially on Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter). These organic endorsements can create a ripple effect, promoting your products and services to a wider audience.

Product demonstration videos and un-boxing

Video content on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook from customers showcasing how your products look, work, or are packaged provides an unfiltered view of your products that many potential buyers appreciate and enjoy. These unscripted videos often feel more authentic than business-created video content, encouraging greater interest in your products and more sales.

So, how do you encourage customers to produce and share their content?

Encourage UGC and thank people for it publicly

Perhaps the best way of encouraging UGC is to showcase and publicly thank the people who create content for you. If a customer sees their content displayed or shared on your social platforms, published on your website, or publicly praised, it can often incentivise others to follow suit, while also building stronger customer relationships with the people who take the time to create UGC for you.

Develop UGC-focused social media campaigns

Develop branded hashtags and encourage your social media supporters to use them while sharing images, videos, or reviews of your products and services. This can increase your search visibility on social media and generate substantial user engagement, especially if coupled with incentives…

Offer incentives!

Discounts, exclusive offers, prize giveaways and other deals can often motivate customers to share their pictures, leave reviews, or recommend your business to their family and friends.

Don’t be afraid to ask

Many people actively enjoy creating UGC, so following up with each customer through email after a sale and asking them to leave a review, or upload an image to social media, can often increase the volume of UGC you receive. Be sure to include a link that leads directly to a review submission page or social media channel, to make it as easy for your customers as possible.

Best practices for incorporating UGC and your marketing strategy

For all its value, user-generated content can be a marketing wildcard. Everything you’ve probably been taught about marketing emphasises consistency, quality, and control, and these are three things that you have no say over when it comes to UGC.

It is, therefore, essential to prioritise quality over quantity in the UGC you promote. While a steady stream of UGC is useful, cherry-picking only the highest quality contributions for publication on your website and for social shares ensures that the content positively represents your business. It’s not advisable to ‘take down’ UGC you don’t like, unless it’s offensive in some way, but you can choose which pieces you promote and those that you don’t, and this sets the tone for what other people produce for you.

Once you’ve curated UGC for quality, showcase it across multiple marketing channels, featuring the content not only on social media but also in your product pages, within your email campaigns, and even in paid adverts to increase engagement on multiple fronts. And finally, like any content asset, it’s important to monitor and analyse the performance of your UGC. Use social media or other analytics tools to track the impact of UGC-based campaigns on your website traffic, ecommerce sales, total revenues, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and other factors. By integrating UGC into your digital marketing strategy, you can drive greater online sales and build more meaningful and lasting connections with your customers.

Find out more

Get in touch with one of the B2C marketing team at JDR today to find out more about ecommerce marketing and how to use user-generated content to increase sales.

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