Why are customer reviews important to collect?
When collecting customer reviews, there are many benefits to your eCommerce business that come along with it. To start off, showcasing customer product reviews will increase the trust between your brand and your customers. This will cause your customers to be more likely to buy your products. So, the more reviews you collect -> the more trust you build -> the more sales you generate.
What is User-Generated Content?
User-generated content (UGC) is a form of words, photos, and/or videos that have been created by users and that are submitted or posted online. The most common place user-generated content is posted is on social media. Customers love posting the new products they have purchased and showing them off to their followers! Customers also submit UGC in the form of a review on a business' website. You can use UGC for marketing purposes and to validate your business. Keep reading to see how.How to Use Customer Reviews in Marketing
As an eCommerce store owner, using customer reviews and UGC in your marketing can do wonders for your brand. When you showcase UGC, it will inspire people to become your loyal customers and your existing customers. They will be honored to support your brand by submitting their own UGC. A monumental example of brands using UGC in marketing is Apple's Shot-on-iPhone Campaign. Their campaign consisted of photos that were taken by Apple's customers on the iPhone and it was very successful. This UGC campaign even inspired photographers to start shooting on the iPhone instead of cameras to get the chance to be featured in the next Apple campaign like this.
Using UGC in different marketing platforms
Depending on the platform you are posting UGC to, there are different ways to make your marketing efforts the most effective.Customer Reviews In Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing techniques use all types of UGC in their marketing efforts. Brands like Spotify have used UGC in multiple campaigns to stand out and gain a lot of attention from their audience by using humour. The possibilities are endless on how you can market UGC in traditional marketing, the main focus is to do something unique to grab the attention of your customers
Customer Reviews on Facebook
Facebook is a great platform to incorporate customer reviews and ratings into your marketing efforts. For example, Blenders Eyewear uses customer reviews right in their Facebook ads to help to validate the product right away. This really helps to show Facebook users that this product is from a highly rated, reputable brand.P.S. Fera has functionality coming out to help you post your customer reviews directly to Facebook!
Customer Reviews on Instagram
Instagram is the platform for visual content, both photos, and videos. This is the platform that your customers are most likely to share a photo of your product in a post or Instagram story. These customer photos have a lot of value to your brand! Make sure you see them, encourage customers to tag you in photos or tell customers to use your brand's hashtag for a chance to be reposted. By doing this, you will have a collection of customer photos to use on your website and for marketing purposes.
Customer Reviews on Twitter
In contrast to Instagram, Twitter is the platform for written content. As a business, the best way to use Twitter is by retweeting and sharing reviews from your customers and responding to them. This is an excellent marketing technique as not only are you showcasing what your customers think of your brand, you also can show off your excellent customer service.
How to encourage your customers to submit UGC
- Create a company hashtag that customers can tag their product photos with on social media.
- Offer a contest that customers can enter by sharing their product photos on their social media account.
- Give customers the opportunity to have their photos shared on your company’s social media by tagging you.
- Automate review requests and offer incentives to customers for submitting a product review with Fera.
Tools to make UGC posts for social media
Now that you have some customer reviews and user-generated content, it's time to create fun and engaging social media posts with them! Here are a few tools that you can use to make your content cute for your social media channels:Canva
Canva has many different social media post templates to choose from that make it easy to create beautifully designed posts. You can customize the colours to match your brand and adjust the templates to your liking. Use Canva to display customer written reviews and customer photos.
PicMonkey
PicMonkey also has social media templates to customize as well as a photo editing tool. You can create engaging social media posts to boost your engagement on all channels. This tool is best for creating posts that display customer photos.
Figma
Figma allows for you to have a full range of design to create social media post templates from scratch. This tool is best for those who have design experience and skills to create their very own designs to showcase user-generated content. There also is a collaboration feature, so you can have multiple people editing and working on the designs at the same time.
Adobe CC
Adobe CC provides you with many tools that you can use to edit and create social media posts to display your customer reviews and UGC. You might find that Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop are the two that will be the most useful for your business. Adobe CC is the best tool for those who have strong design skills and experience as you will be able to customize everything and design your posts from the ground up.
How to Gather More Customer Reviews with Fera
1. Set up automatic review requests.
Using Fera you can set up an automatic review request to be sent out after a customer purchases a product. You are also able to offer incentives, set conditions, and customize the message all within the Fera app.
2. Showcase your customer reviews with the product review widget.
Once you have collected more customer reviews, display them beautifully on your eCommerce website. By displaying your reviews it will help to validate your brand so visitors can trust your products and make their buying decisions.
3. Ask for photo and video reviews.
To take your reviews to the next level, ask for photos and videos along with a written review! This will allow customers to see your products in a new light and supplement the content already on the product page.