User-generated content, or UGC, is a great chance to establish your brand’s social proofs to illustrate value to both existing customers and potential prospects. 79% of surveyed customers have admitted that UGC has impacted their purchasing decision, mainly because they find content from real people, and not from brands, is more trustworthy.
Reviews are obviously the most common (and the most important) form of UGC at the moment, but there are also various forms of UGCs we can utilize in our marketing.
Below, we will discuss how to use UGC to improve eCommerce conversion rates, and without further ado, let us begin.
eCommerce Conversion Rate
What is the typical eCommerce conversion rate?
First things first, eCommerce conversion typically refers to a completed purchase transaction that is made on an eCommerce website. So, the eCommerce conversion rate is the percentage of people who purchased from your website compared to the total number of website visitors.
Although the ideal eCommerce rate can vary depending on the types of products being sold on the site, generally we can say the conversion rate is pretty good when it is above 3%, meaning, when 3 out of 100 total visitors make a purchase.
In eCommerce Environment
In eCommerce, UGC is any content that is created by existing customers about an eCommerce product without any kind of paid promotion involved.
When a customer posts a picture of your product after they’ve made a purchase to brag about it to their followers, it is UGC. On the other hand, when a customer posts a negative comment about your product, it is also UGC.
What does this mean?UGC can come in various forms like videos, testimonials, pictures, and even blog posts. So let’s learn a bit more about the nuances.
How UGCs can Help Increase Conversion Rate
In this day and age of saturated social media space and influencers, consumers are now more aware about paid promotions on social media. In fact, more and more people, and especially younger social media users, are now more resistant to promotions made by influencers.
However, it’s a different case when a friend, family member, or someone we really trust shared a product on social media. In such cases, we know that they are being genuine and they are not paid by the brand. So, we might end up asking them about the product.
UGCs can help improve your eCommerce conversion rate in the following manners:
1. UGCs as Social Proofs
92% of surveyed consumers said that they trust recommendations from people over branded content, even if they don’t know the people. This is huge.
While creating our own content is still important in educating our audience and establishing our credibility, when it comes to increasing conversion rate, UGCs are much more important.
This phenomenon is obviously not new. Ever since the dawn of newspaper ads and TV commercials, we know that anyone can claim to have the best product ever, so it’s often meaningless in the eyes of consumers. However, when a real, paying customer says something good about a product, especially if it’s content that takes any effort or time to write or create, it holds much more weight.
How To Integrate UGC into Our eCommerce Strategy
2. Encourage Positive Reviews
A very basic but effective way to improve a company’s content is to feature a review section on your product page. Doing this means you allow potential customers to get answers and recommendations from arguably their most trustworthy ‘experts’, a.k.a. your previous paying customers.
You can also answer any questions raised within this review section, and respond to all reviews (even negative ones). Your previous customers are given a platform to converse with each other and answer each other’s questions. Creating this space can:
- Improve the engagement of existing customers. They might enjoy being an expert at answering questions. This might improve their loyalty and encourage repeat purchases. Also, they might get exposed to other/new products on the site, opening up cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
- Customers who ask questions and check responses on reviews are more likely to make a purchase.
- These reviews can be indexed as authentic content and might help your site’s SEO, as we will discuss below.
Reviews can introduce various new keywords to your eCommerce website, so utilizing inline SEO in this review section can improve your site’s SEO performance and also generate more organic traffic. Make sure these reviews are properly indexed by Google and the other search engines.
3. Leverage UGC Photos
Obviously, in the age of social media, customers are now more attracted to visual content. According to Photoslurp, user-generated photos are 500% more likely to convert customers over branded photos. Customers like to see how your products look in a real situation.
Carrying out social listening is very important here so you can find good UGC photos shared on social media by your customers, and you can then use these photos on your product pages.
The idea here is to help your customers in envisioning themselves using (or wearing) the product you are selling by looking at photos or videos where other customers are using it. This can be extremely effective in convincing someone to make a purchase.
Encourage People To Post UGCs
One of the most powerful tricks to generate more UGCs is to create something fun that your audience can enjoy (and brag about). A few years back, Apple did this so brilliantly with their famous “Shot on iPhone” campaign where both amateur and pro photographers were commissioned to take photos with their iPhones (and Apple then displayed them on massive billboards.)
Observe your products, and see how you can do the same with your product and your audience. If you’re in the business of selling chocolates, you can run contests asking people to post their DIY recipes using your product. If you’re a specialty T-Shirt company, you can host a contest that encourages people to be as creative as possible in designing something for your product.
Be as creative as possible, and keep it fun.
End Words
Utilizing UGC effectively can significantly increase your eCommerce conversion rate since it can provide much more trustworthy information for your potential customers.
UGC can also help establish your brand’s credibility in the long-run, which means it can also help in your long-term success. If you haven’t yet incorporated UGC in your eCommerce marketing strategy, there’s no time like the present to start.