In business author Martin Lindstrom’s words, word-of-mouth is powerful, trusted, and cheap. Since consumers can instantly connect across continents and easily access information, word of mouth holds more sway in purchasing decisions than any catchy tagline or campaign slogan. The reviews, ratings, referrals, or social mentions your brand receives from customers are referred to as UGC. Yotpo user generated content platform and others like it can help you use positive word of mouth to increase conversions and improve sales.

In this article, you’ll learn the importance of user-generated content, strategies to leverage it to improve your store’s performance, and the best alternative to Yotpo.

Why User Generated Content Marketing Matters for Growing Brands

Enhancing Brand Credibility and Trust

More often than not, the content generated by “real” people isn’t sugarcoated with marketing messages and is, thus, a more reliable indicator of a brand’s reputation. Popular brands often use UGC as a marketing strategy. For example, Molekule used customer reviews as headlines on its page, while Soylent turned its reviews into images. Therefore, a merchant’s customer reviews, whether positive or negative, enhance their store’s credibility.

While every merchant should strive to get positive reviews, you should not overlook the benefits of a negative review. After all, human is to err. A significant percentage of shoppers always search for negative reviews before purchasing. Negative reviews and ratings can make your positive reviews feel more genuine.

Increasing Conversion Rates

Since UGC lets shoppers see how your product fits into the lives of people like them, it plays an important role in shaping your customers’ shopping behavior. As such, UGC considerably impacts your customers’ purchasing decisions. According to Statista, approximately 34% of surveyed US adults rely on customer reviews to make a purchasing decision.

If you can engage customers and provide them with great products, customer-generated marketing can be an effective tool for boosting conversion rates. Yotpo user-generated content can help you create a cycle where UGC is used to drive conversions, which in turn results in more UGC in your store.

Improving SEO and Online Visibility

Search engines tend to rank sites with UGC higher because it’s an indicator that customers trust your business. Additionally, search engines will view every UGC as fresh content, and since these engines favor sites that regularly update their content, UGC will improve your chances of ranking higher. For these reasons, many e-commerce stores integrate UGC into their SEO strategies using various techniques.

These techniques include:

• Long tail keywords – UGC naturally contains long tail keywords and key phrases that show consumers’ pain points, needs, and wants
• UGC in blog posts – Add review snippets into blog posts adds more variety to the post and engages the reader more.
• Invite UGC creators to contribute guest posts – You can incentivize them with shopping perks like loyalty points, discounts, or free shipping.

Collecting and Utilizing Customer Feedback

Who better to give you genuine feedback about your products and services than a customer?

One of the best ways to utilize the negative UGC Yotpo helps you collect is by analyzing it and acting accordingly to improve customer experience. Simply responding to reviews isn’t enough. You need to show your customers that you care by using their feedback to improve product or service quality.

Enhancing Customer Engagement and Loyalty

According to a survey by Luisa Zhou, 89% of internet users occasionally read online reviews before buying a product online. Furthermore, Statista shows that a customer reads, on average, 10 reviews before trusting a business. If you crunch the numbers, you’ll find that this is a lot of time that customers can spend on your site solely due to reviews.

Leveraging Yotpo UGC in your store can go a long way in enhancing customer engagement and reducing bounce rates. Additionally, UGC can help you generate ideas for relevant content, which further improves engagement rates.

Marketing and Social Media Promotion

When it comes to marketing, user-generated marketing is one of the most effective strategies. Integrating Yotpo reviews into your marketing campaign can help you benefit from authentic user-generated content.

Furthermore, you can leverage consumers’ willingness to create and share content about their experience with your products to improve your brand’s visibility on social media. Going back to Adobe’s example, the company encouraged designers to use #AdobePerspective when sharing their work on social media.

The Impact of User Generated Content

Reviews are Powerful for New and Returning Customers

The effectiveness of reviews in attracting customers lies in their ability to tap into the psychology of social proof. People are heavily influenced by the opinions and behaviors of others. Customers who see others enjoy your product are more likely to purchase it themselves. Therefore, customers are more likely to trust your store’s UGC than any other traditional advertising or marketing strategy.

Yotpo social reviews also boost brand discovery on social media, which can help you attract new customers.

Photos and Video Reviews Inspire More Trust

Yotpo visual marketing allows merchants to use visual user-generated content (VUGC) to boost the effect of their UGC marketing strategies. VUGC are the visual elements in customer-generated content, such as images or videos accompanying the customer’s review. VUGC are effective not just because they’re more engaging than text but also because they instill more confidence in the customer’s purchasing decision.

Many brands run contests and giveaways to generate VUGC. For example, Travelex launched a campaign in which they encouraged their followers to take their best shots and share them on social media or send them directly to the Travelex website.

Positive and Negative Reviews Help to Showcase Authenticity

Positive reviews are basically endorsements for your products and, as such, do a great job of attracting new customers. Negative reviews, however, can help you bring customers back to your store when you reply to them. Having both of these reviews on your store will go a long way in showing customers your brand’s authenticity.

User Generated Content Helps Build Stronger Relationships with Customers

Yotpo’s user-generated content lets shoppers see their experiences mirrored by other people and the brand. Since shared experiences are great at fostering deep emotional connections, UGC can inspire more engagement and loyalty in the customer. Witnessing others share their experience and having reliable support demystifies the purchasing journey for customers, thus making it easier for them to trust your brand.

How User Generated Content Helps You Convert Social Shoppers

Here’s how to use social selling with your Yotpo UGC to broaden your reach and improve sales.

Enrich your shoppable content with User Generated Content

The rise of social shopping gives merchants the opportunity to combine shoppable content with textual and visual UGC to accelerate discovery and conversions across channels. You can do this by adding product tags to your user-generated content, curating them into shoppable galleries, and posting them on your store or on social media.

Foster stronger relationships with your customers on socials

There are many ways you can engage with your customers after they complete a purchase. One great way is to create social media groups or pages for your most loyal customers and keep them updated on your latest releases, campaigns, and shopping perks. Then use their feedback as social proof with Yotpo Social push.

Strengthen your social ads with Yotpo User Generated Content

Yotpo visual marketing can prove an effective tool for improving the performance of your social ads. Adding positive textual reviews and captivating VUGC to your social ads can significantly increase the click-through rate and reduce the cost-per-click rate.

Take advantage of giveaway campaigns and social influencers

Partnering with influencers with credibility and a strong following of your targeted customers can help you drastically increase sales and get more UGC. On the other hand, giveaway campaigns will enable you to add more content to your UGC database. These two strategies will endow your brand with social proof interpreted differently.

Examples of Brands Using UGC on Social Media

1. IKEA – The Swedish furniture store launched a campaign asking fans to share their own visual content featuring IKEA products. The “IKEA At Mine” campaign succeeded because it allowed customers to showcase their creativity.

2. Mark Jacobs – This high-end fashion house encouraged everyday folks to share selfies with a branded hashtag for a chance to become the company’s next model.

3. Dove – This self-care beauty brand decided to go the influencer way with several campaigns like, #PassTheCrown and #OneRealPressure. As a result, the company earned over one billion impressions and a 20% increase in engagement rate.

Tips to Leverage Yotpo User Generated Content

Optimize Your Review Widget

Simply adding reviews to your store will only take you so far, even if they’re positive. To maximize your Yotpo UGC impact on customers’ purchasing decisions, you will need to tweak the review widget a little.

Research shows that over 50% of customers consider the recency of a review. So, regularly posting your most recent reviews can help nudge customers to complete the checkout process. Other elements, such as review volume and star ratings, can help improve conversion rate.

Automatic and Manual Review Requests

There are many ways to get customers to review your products and services. One of the most popular and effective ways is sending review requests by email. Once the purchasing process is complete, you can craft a compelling review request email. Ideally, the request should contain visuals, such as images of the product bought or videos. You can also tap into your customers’ shopping data for a more personalized request. Yotpo UGC tools allow you to create customizable automatic review requests, making the process less tedious.

Another great way to request UGC from customers is by incentivizing them to leave a review or rating. You can use Loloyal to reward customers with loyalty points after they leave a review.

Smart Prompts

Smart prompts are great if you’re looking to get detailed and topic-specific reviews. Yotpo UGC comes with a smart prompt feature that allows merchants to persuade customers to leave high-converting reviews. The feature extracts frequently mentioned topics from already collected reviews and encourage customers to leave reviews on those topics. The topics can include product quality, shipping, and support, among others.

Photo and Video Review Requests

It’s no secret that reviews with photos and videos are more impactful than textual blocks. Incentivizing customers with discounts and loyalty points is one of the best ways to get such reviews. Yotpo’s visual marketing tools make it convenient for customers to include photos and videos in their reviews. The review widget comes with options for adding visual elements to the site.

Review Carousels

Review carousels provide a fun and appealing way to display reviews. User-generated content on a revolving display increases the likelihood of a customer purchasing your products. You can increase the impact of review carousels by adding VUGC and/or displaying them on product detail pages or checkout.

Yotpo UGC allows you to create stunning review carousels and display them on your homepage, product page, or at checkout. 

Review Syndication

If you have a budding store with no reviews and need social proof to boost brand discovery, review syndication can help you get started. Review syndication is republishing reviews from another brand where customers get the same products you’re selling. Yotpo reviews syndication enables you to get high-converting reviews from third-party marketplaces like Facebook and Instagram shops. Syndicating

Yotpo User Generated Content Alternatives: Channelwill Reviews

Channelwill is an all-in-one e-commerce platform that provides powerful connected apps to increase every key metric in the customer’s purchasing journey. One such app is Trustoo.io, a popular and highly-rated Shopify review app that is a great alternative to Yotpo UGC.

Trustoo.io gives you a smarter way to collect and display UGC using various features and tools.

Review Collection

The app makes collecting product reviews convenient and builds social proof with auto-custom requests. With review push invitations via email, SMS, or even WhatsApp, you can reach your customers wherever they are.

The app is also compatible with popular e-commerce platforms like AliExpress, Amazon, and Unicom. This makes it possible to synchronize reviews. This feature allows importing over 50 of your site reviews with just one click.

Review Display

Trustoo.io has attractive review widgets that you can customize to match your brand theme. The drag-and-drop customization interface allows editing and integrating your review widgets with no coding knowledge required. You can also leverage VUGC wherever you want on widgets.

Review Sharing

Once your reviews are ready, you can broadcast them to your customers on multiple platforms. Trustoo.io lets you share UGC on Facebook, X, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok with just a few clicks. Additionally, the app’s multi-language capabilities, which support 20 languages, can broaden your reach, allowing you to influence customers across regions. You can further enhance this feature with another great Channelwill app: Langwill.

Trustoo.io offers many options and features for generating, utilizing, and managing UGC in your store. The automation, localization, campaign, and widget customization tools make it easy to maximize the leverage of UGC. All these features are more affordable, too. Since Yotpo pricing can be one of the limiting factors for budding stores, Trustoo.io’s cost-effective plans are a great fit for new merchants.

Conclusion

User-generated content is a game changer for the ecommerce industry. It lets your customers become your brand’s ambassadors. Leveraging UGC lets you play at people’s intrinsic desires for belongingness and self-expression, thus making it a powerful force that drives engagement and improves conversion. Use UGC in your store to turn passive consumers into active contributors that humanize your brand and help you show credibility and trust to new customers.

The strategies and tools discussed in this article can help you fully leverage UGC. So, why not go for it?