eCom UGC Guide For Merchants

Hey there 👋

Getting (the right) eyes on your brand & products isn’t easy — it’d either cost you a fortune on ad spend, require constant partnerships, or you’d have to create content yourself 😭

But what if your customers did the marketing for you? 🤔

In today’s post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about user-generated content, the best practices, a simple strategy to grow your brand with UGC, and a few Shopify apps to make it simple.

Grab something to drink, and let’s get into it 🔥

1. What Even Is “UGC”? 📱 

Put simply, UGC is any form of original content created by your customers, directly or indirectly promoting your brand.

Fans & loyal customers showing off your products does 4 very beneficial things:

1️⃣ Builds Trust — content made by fans feels real, and people trust others’ opinions more than “salesy” ads.

2️⃣ Social Proof — potential buyers are more likely to trust a product when they see others are enjoying it.

3️⃣ Free Marketing — customers promote your brand, and you don’t spend a dime on professional content creation.

4️⃣ Brand Awareness — helps people enter your sales funnel, making them aware of your brand & products, even at masse if your UGC goes viral.

Here’s a perfect example of user-generated content (on TikTok) promoting Stanley:

As you can see, it’s just fans showing off their Stanley cups or promoting them through meme-like content 😂 

By the way, they pretty much went viral thanks to UGC, you can learn about their $750M strategy in our post on Stanley’s success.

Now that we know what UGC is, let’s cover some of the best examples so you have a better idea of what it looks like in different formats.

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2. The Best Examples of Fan-Made Content in Use 🔥

We’ll take a look at three of the most popular mediums for UGC — product pages, emails & social media posts.

1️⃣ Product Pages

Having your customer’s happiness as the face of your product can boost CR% since it shows trust & social proof. Let’s look at these two examples from Briogeo & Cupshe.

In the top image, you can see the fan’s IG tag, showing that it’s a real human loving the product.

You can also use UGC in product reviews, just like in the bottom image. Anyone just browsing for swimsuits would be sold if they saw 4.8* reviews AND hundreds of fans showing them off with smiles.

2️⃣ Emails

Pretty much everyone does email marketing, but you can add multiple UGC pieces & stack many other elements of highly converting copy. This example from Dormify shows it all:

First off, the 25% discount code is constantly reiterated, and then there are two images of creators (with IG tags attached) that show off their lovely beds decorated with Dormify products.

And if you noticed, there’s an invitation to join the UGC loop right before the CTA with an element of urgency below — it really doesn’t get better than this 🤯 

3️⃣ Social Media

Another great way to utilize UGC is to create a feedback loop inviting your fans to show your products in use. This can be done with or without an incentive, but promising something in return shows better results.

An extreme but very well-received example is Starbucks’ #RedCupContest:

Customers were asked to share photos of their red cups for a chance at winning $500, and you can see for yourself how successful this campaign was — it generated over 35K posts & hundreds of thousands of likes, and a lot of UGC Starbucks could use to keep the loop going.

This type of UGC is better known as “contests”, but you get the idea — give any incentive or just start a trend with a product of yours, and your fans can spread the love & brand awareness for you 😄 

And if you want to learn on a more advanced level how to take your potential customers from being aware of your products to advocating for them, check out our eCom Sales Funnel Guide!

In our next newsletter, we’ll show you how to use AI to automate UGC content, so you don’t even have to hire anyone to edit! (it’s not as spooky as it sounds) 👻 

3. How To Create an Effective UGC Strategy ✍️ 

Everything starts with collecting UGC that you can use. A simple, yet effective strategy to do this would be

1️⃣ Create a Hashtag — this would be a hashtag your brand will be known for, so that whenever users search for it, UGC with your products will appear on social media.

2️⃣ Run UGC Contests & Challenges — encourage fans to post photos & videos with your products, you can offer a prize for the best entry and feature the winner on your official social media accounts, just like how Starbucks ran #RedCupContest with a modest $500 prize pool.

3️⃣ Start Using UGC in Email Flows — this includes both post-purchase & abandoned cart emails. After buying one of your products, seeing fan-made tips & tricks and “how to use” styled videos is really welcoming.

As for those who didn’t go through with a purchase, seeing someone enjoying a product they left abandoned in their cart can tip the scale really fast.

4️⃣ Add UGC To Your Store — start fleshing out your online store by adding UGC to product reviews, the store front & create shoppable galleries, just like in this visual:

5️⃣ Partner with Micro-influencers — send them a free product to record an honest review, this can invite new audiences & increase brand awareness for both parties.

P.S. — We actually went into great detail on how to find micro-influencers to partner up with for UGC in our TikTok Shop Guide, check it out if you want!

❗ Note: Always show content creators’ tags in their UGC, this both gives them credit & builds more trust since anyone who sees the content knows it’s a real person you can find on social media.

BONUS — UGC Apps for Shopify

Many apps already exist on the Shopify store that can make collecting UGC & partnering with micro-influencers easy. Here are our top picks:

Grin — helps you nurture brand relationships, connect with influencers & content creators who can represent your brand.

Archive — auto-request rights for using UGC, save tagged content, search by keywords & download saved UGC at any time.

Loox — collects product reviews, offers customers customers next-purchase discounts for submitting video reviews, syncs reviews to & from Shop App, Google Shop & more.

Try the free plan on each of these & see what suits your brand’s needs most 😄 

That’s that! We covered everything you need to know about UGC, from the best examples to the strategy & apps for Shopify!

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Daniil from ECORN