How to Increase Email Revenue With User-Generated Content

You’ve worked hard to attract browsers to your site, collect email addresses and write catchy subject lines. Now you just need to convince your subscriber to revisit your website and make a purchase. In order to persuade him or her to click through to your website and convert, you’ll want to have relevant, engaging content on hand.

User-generated content (UGC) has an applicable use case for many different types of email campaigns, ranging from action-triggered autoresponders to broadcast marketing campaigns.

Why You Need UGC in Your Email Campaigns 

Displaying real customer photos and reviews in email campaigns can help to drive engagement rates, including increased clickthrough, conversions and even average order value.

For example, the impact of displaying UGC in an abandoned cart email campaign for a business doing $100 million in online sales would yield roughly $7.2 million in recovered shopping cart revenue a year — or a 7.2 percent increase in annual revenue.

UGC is trusted and sought out by consumers. By including it in your email campaigns you’ll create social proof for your products while giving subscribers, who may not be able to touch or see a product as they would in-store, greater confidence to make a purchase.

Below are three ways to enhance your email engagement with UGC to increase your top-line revenue from the channel:

1. Include multiple forms of UGC.

There are multiple types of UGC (visual reviews, fit reviews, star reviews, etc.); for the biggest uptick in email engagement, you’ll want to use a combination of each. This could mean adding star reviews to customer-written reviews or supplementing text reviews with visual reviews of your products and more.

Many brands display multiple forms of UGC on product landing pages, yet marketers that confine UGC to a website aren't leveraging it to its fullest extent.

2. Link to social media channels.

Even if a subscriber isn’t ready to purchase, he or she may be ready to check out your social media profiles — especially if you give a sneak peak of how other real customers are using your products post-purchase. Your social media channels can become review sites to help build brand familiarity and trust if you take the time to re-post, re-gram and re-tweet positive feedback from your customers.

To entice subscribers to visit your social pages, consider displaying galleries of interactive UGC images that allow users to click through to the respective channel. This will give the subscriber a preview of the engaging content that he or she will find on your brand-owned channels.

3. Ask for product reviews.

You’ll need a pool of fresh and relevant content to maintain your email marketing. Luckily, you can also use email to collect UGC to supply your other marketing campaigns. For example, once a customer makes a purchase, consider asking him or her to submit a review in a post-purchase email.

Make sure to ask subscribers to include your brand hashtag if they choose to share about your brand on social, and also offer a way for subscribers to upload their reviews directly to your website.

Conclusion

Placing UGC in email campaigns is proven to increase clickthroughs and conversion. Consider using real customer photos and videos throughout your email campaigns to entice interest and build trust around your brand.

Juliet Carnoy is a senior marketing manager at Pixlee, a visual marketing platform for brands leveraging user-generated content from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and more.