Leveraging UGC: 9 Ways to Turn Your Customers into Salespeople
In our previous article, we covered how to generate UGC. This time, we'll summarize how to put UGC to work for your business.
Leveraging UGC is, in other words, "turning your customers into salespeople."
UGC can be used in a wide variety of ways: product reviews, emails, social media accounts, blogs, ad creatives, interviews, infographics, hashtag contests, DMs, and more.
This article introduces 9 representative methods, but with a little creativity, there are even more ways to turn your customers into salespeople.
Use this article as a reference and try to discover the UGC strategy that works best for your own business.
StoreHero leverages its proprietary growth platform to support business growth through highly detailed operations that manual management cannot achieve, as well as the large-scale execution of growth initiatives.
If you're struggling to increase sales on Shopify, feel free to reach out. =>Download our free service introduction materials here
Product Reviews
The most widely used form of UGC in e-commerce is undoubtedly product reviews.
Reviews that include photos or videos are more credible and more effective at driving conversions. There are also Shopify Apps available for photo and video reviews.
Well-known photo review apps include Instafeed and Loox.
Loox sample store
I'll also mention our own — we built a photo review Shopify App called PhotoHero as an experiment. It's an app that links Instagram posts to products and uses them as reviews.
In addition, the app CC ‑ Video & Photo Reviews also supports video reviews.
Whether positive or negative, reviews have a strong impact on purchase rates, so it's worth offering coupons to collect them.
Reviews Also Help Reduce Returns
Having a rich set of reviews can also help reduce the rate of returns caused by products not matching customers' expectations.
Rent the Runway, an apparel e-commerce site, includes reviewers' age, body type, and photos in their reviews.
With reviews this thorough, it's unlikely customers will be surprised by what they receive.
Email is a high-converting channel, and UGC can be used to push purchase rates even higher.
Klaviyo's article User-generated content (UGC) in ecommerce email marketing: the why and how features several examples of UGC used in email marketing.
One of the examples featured in the Klaviyo article is Dollar Shave Club, which tells customers who have cancelled: "Don't take my word for it — trust our satisfied customers," as shown below.
Social Media Accounts
Of course, UGC can also be leveraged through social media accounts.
GoPro reposts customers' Instagram posts. Customers are excited to be featured on GoPro's official account, which motivates them to upload even more GoPro photos to Instagram.
GoPro also features those photos on its awards page. If a photo gains popularity, it can win an award — providing even greater motivation for customers.
Selling a product that inspires content creation makes UGC campaigns much easier to run — GoPro is the ultimate example of that. It almost makes you want to sell GoPros yourself.
Blog
If creating an awards site like GoPro's feels too ambitious, simply rounding up standout UGC in a blog post can work just as well.
Customers are happy to be featured in a blog post, and they'll often share it on social media.
Slightly outside the UGC context, but as a clever trick: if you set up a system using the Pinterest API to automatically post blog images to Pinterest, every new blog article you publish will also add a new Pinterest post — and those Pinterest posts can drive traffic back to your blog.
With Instagram, it's hard to drive traffic to your own store, but Pinterest can actually work as an acquisition channel.
Ad Creatives
UGC is also used as material for advertising.
You can leverage product reviews in Google PLA (Product Listing Ads / Shopping Ads) and Facebook/Instagram ads. Using reviews tends to improve CTR (Click-Through Rate).
If you've collected some great reviews, try using them as ad creatives.
Shopify Apps like Stamped.io and Yotpo allow you to integrate with Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads to use reviews as ad creatives.
Interview Articles
For ideal customers who are a great fit for your products, consider interviewing them and publishing the conversation as an article.
Personally, I think the key to a great interview is making the interviewee's fans — not just the product's fans.
If the customer is satisfied with your product, they'll naturally speak well of it in the interview. But if readers haven't become fans of the interviewee themselves, those words won't carry as much weight.
The important thing is to conduct an interview that draws out the appeal of the person you're interviewing.
Surveys & Infographics
Surveys about how customers choose products, their budgets, or their best and worst purchases are a legitimate form of UGC. Survey results, like reviews, help other shoppers make purchase decisions.
For survey forms, Google Forms works fine if you don't have design requirements, but if you want something more polished, Typeform is recommended. It supports conditional branching and lets you use images as answer options, among other advanced features.
Turning survey results into infographics makes them more shareable and likely to spread on social media.
An infographic is a visually compelling representation of data and information. Shopify's blog also makes use of infographics like the one below.
Hiring a designer for infographics can get expensive, but you can create them yourself using tools like Canva or infogram. The free plans are quite capable.
Hashtag Contests
Hashtag contests were also mentioned in our article on how to generate UGC, and they are an excellent strategy for putting UGC to use as well.
A hashtag contest is a promotion where customers post on social media using a specific hashtag, and a winner is selected from those posts to receive a prize. There's also a variation where customers tag friends instead of using a hashtag.
Cellucor, which sells energy drinks on Shopify, runs contests regularly. The rules require following the Cellucor account, tagging three friends, and posting about your favorite Cellucor product flavor.
In Cellucor's case, running contests on a regular schedule helps prevent follower drop-off after each contest ends.
DM Immediately After a Comment
Sometimes customers comment on your Facebook posts, and there's a clever trick of sending them a DM immediately after they comment.
For example, you could thank a customer who compliments your product or brand and use the opportunity to promote your referral program.
ManyChat can automate this entire communication flow. Select Facebook Comments from ManyChat's Growth Tools,
Then configure it to send or not send a DM based on whether a comment contains specific keywords.
Engagement is highest right after someone posts — especially right after they leave a positive comment — so targeting that moment to make a request is highly effective.
Driving UGC Execution with StoreHero
StoreHero supports merchants on Shopify who want to grow their sales by helping them execute growth initiatives thoroughly and consistently.
For UGC operations as well, we leverage the StoreHero growth platform to help merchants collect reviews for the products they most want to prioritize — based on product- and SKU-level performance and inventory data — and to streamline gifting operations. We enable the kind of detailed execution and large-scale implementation of initiatives that manual operations simply cannot achieve, supporting continuous growth.
We are currently offering free store diagnostics. If you have challenges with UGC or growth initiatives in general, please get in touch. Learn more about our free store diagnostic here
Summary
Following our previous article on how to generate UGC, we've now covered how to put UGC to use.
Generating UGC and leveraging UGC are two sides of the same coin, and many initiatives are inseparable — but we've divided them into two articles for clarity.
We recommend focusing first on initiatives that generate a lot of UGC, then transitioning to activation strategies once your UGC volume grows.
There are plenty of UGC activation methods beyond the ones introduced here — find the approach that fits your business. Think about it through the lens of "turning your customers into salespeople" and explore how UGC can work for you.