What is user-generated content?

User-generated content (UGC) refers to any form of content—whether it’s text, images, videos, reviews, or testimonials—that is created and shared by a brand or organization’s users or customers rather than by the brand itself.

It represents authentic, real-life experiences and opinions expressed by individuals who have interacted with a product or service. From social media posts and product reviews to blog comments and forum discussions, UGC is a powerful tool for building community engagement and fostering brand advocacy.

Why is user-generated content important for ecommerce strategy?

User-generated content injects a human element into marketing efforts, allowing brands to connect with their audience on a deeper level. By showcasing genuine user experiences and sentiments, businesses can build credibility and foster trust among potential customers. 

Moreover, UGC serves as valuable social proof, influencing purchase decisions and driving conversions. When shoppers see their peers endorsing a product or sharing positive experiences, they are more inclined to follow suit, leading to increased sales and revenue.

How can your brand harness UGC?

To leverage the full potential of UGC, businesses must actively encourage and facilitate user contributions across various touchpoints. A few examples of strategies to stimulate content creation are: 

1. Implementing user-friendly review systems
2. Creating branded hashtags for social media campaigns
3. Hosting user-generated contests

Additionally, fostering a sense of community and reciprocity among customers can incentivize them to share their experiences organically. By incorporating UGC into their marketing strategies, ecommerce brands can amplify their reach, drive engagement, and cultivate lasting relationships with their audience. 

What is ecommerce personalization and why is it important?

Ecommerce personalization is the practice of delivering shopping experiences that cater to individual customers’ needs, preferences, and statuses throughout the user journey. It bridges the physical gap between online retailers and individual customers through features like targeted discounts and personalized recommendations. 

This creates a seamless shopping experience, akin to asking the floor sales associate for help finding what you’re looking for. This can improve both your conversion rates and customer satisfaction, and is useful for engaging customers and building trust in your brand.    

What are the benefits of ecommerce personalization for brands?

The benefits of ecommerce personalization span many key business metrics, and can improve overall sentiment toward your brand. Many businesses who implement a strong ecommerce personalization strategy will see a direct impact on their KPIs.

Increased conversion: tailored online shopping experiences can generate higher conversion by putting the most desirable products directly in front of customers.

Increased average order value (AOV): related to increasing conversion, personalization can also increase AOV with tactics like strategically-placed upsells and cross-sells that customers are likely to add on to orders.

Increased retention & customer lifetime value (CLTV): by listening to customer preferences you build and deepen the relationship between the brand and the consumer, making personalization an excellent strategy to build customer loyalty and retain customers.

Increased customer satisfaction: a personalized experience provides a better experience for customers, encouraging them to increase their engagement with and loyalty to your brand. 

The advantage of customer loyalty

Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, resulting in higher lifetime value. They’re also more likely to act as advocates for your brand to others, helping offset customer acquisition costs through word of mouth, affiliate marketing, and social proof like customer testimonials for your website. 

Within a saturated market, your personalization efforts can also improve the overall share of voice (SOV) of your brand and provide a competitive advantage.

How do I implement commerce personalization on my website?

You can implement commerce personalization on your website through a variety of features like quizzes and promotions. Below are some ecommerce personalization examples:

1. Targeted discounts
2. Personalized product recommendations 
3. Flexible order options, such as dynamic pricing 
4. Targeted promotional campaigns through marketing automation
5. User-generated content
6. Personalized customer service
7. Targeted email campaigns

Verve Coffee Roasters is an example of a business offering personalized product recommendations. They use a quiz format to guide a customer through questions that inform which specific products might suit their taste, engaging the customer before they even encounter your products. 

Tip: have multiple touchpoints for personalized content throughout the customer journey

The best way to optimize personalization is to curate a personalized shopping experience at every step of the customer journey:

1. Before the customer gets to your online store, through personalized marketing like targeted ad campaigns
2. The first interaction with your ecommerce website
3. The pathway to the products through site navigation experience and page flow
4. The product description page
5. Adding the product to the cart, through upsell and cross-sell recommendations
6. Within the cart
7. At checkout
8. Post-purchase, via the customer portal 
9. Post-purchase, via email marketing & retargeting

How to leverage the data to deliver personalized experiences

To improve online shopping experiences, businesses can use customer data in two key ways:

1. Segmentation
2. Predictive forecasting 

Customer segments

First, they can group customers based on factors like age, buying history, and browsing behavior. This helps tailor marketing messages and product suggestions, such as analyzing a customer’s past purchases and offering an upsell opportunity to add products that similar customers have purchased before. For example, considering a customer’s location can inform promotions for seasonal products—such as suggesting products for warmer weather during the summer of that particular geographic region.

Predictive forecasting

Second, businesses can use data on customer behavior to predict what customers might buy next. This helps suggest products that match their interests, making the shopping process smoother and boosting sales. For example, brands offering prenatal vitamins might then offer multivitamins specifically formulated for pregnancy. 

What is cash back?

Cash back is an incentive used commonly with credit cards and online retail purchases in which customers earn a percentage of money back after making eligible purchases. These cash rewards can then be used on future sales, or this bonus cash can be deposited into the customer’s bank account or sent via a check or statement credit.  

Cash-back rewards became popular with cash-back cards. These credit card rewards allowed customers to earn cash back at grocery stores, restaurants, retail stores, and on other purchases. As customers discovered they could earn cash rewards for everyday purchases, they became motivated to use their credit cards and spend more. Now, online retailers have the opportunity to offer cash back as a reward for shopping with their brand, and as a powerful way to encourage higher retention.

Cash-back card categories

Cash-back credit cards typically fall under two different models. The first, flat-rate cash-back cards, offers a fixed percentage of cash back toward every purchase made. The second category, bonus cash-back cards, offers cash back for rotating bonus categories, which typically change at different points of the year. For example, customers might earn extra cash back on entertainment purchases made at movie theaters and other similar venues in a certain period of the year.

Offering cash rewards for purchases

Like the best cash-back credit cards, retailers who offer bonus cash rewards to their customers can have higher loyalty. This occurs because as customers discover they can earn money back with purchases, they’re more inclined to continue shopping with your store, so they can use their cash back and redeem rewards for their continued business. Many retailers have minimum spending amounts to redeem the cash back, meaning customers will return and be encouraged to spend even more when they make their next purchase.

What is ROAS (return on advertising spend)?

ROAS (return on advertising spend, or return on ad spend) measures the amount of revenue generated by a company for each dollar spent on marketing and advertising efforts. It can be used to assess whether or not the overall digital marketing strategy of an ecommerce business is yielding results, or can be used on a micro level to measure effectiveness of a particular ad campaign. To calculate ROAS for your business, divide the revenue generated from your ads by your total advertising costs.

Why is it important to track return on ad spend?

A high ROAS can be an indicator that a particular advertising campaign or marketing campaign is yielding positive results for a company. However, this marketing metric alone is not enough to assess a company’s profitability. Rather, ROAS should be considered in combination with other factors, such as profit margins and average customer lifetime value, for a holistic understanding of a company’s financial health. This means that every business is different when it comes to target ROAS goals. Also crucial is that businesses track their ROAS for different ad campaigns over time so they can measure trends in data, identify outliers, and continually hone their strategy for future advertising campaigns.

What is direct-to-consumer advertising?

Direct-to-consumer advertising (also referred to as DTC advertising) is the marketing of products or services directly to potential customers. Typically, direct-to-consumer advertising refers to marketing efforts made in industries where a middleman is involved. However, with the growing direct-to-consumer ecommerce movement, this term is sometimes used more broadly to describe the marketing and advertising efforts of any brand that is directly enticing consumers to purchase.

Examples of DTC advertising

In the traditional sense of the term, one of the most common examples of direct-to-consumer advertising is in the pharmaceutical industry, where drug manufacturers try to reach consumers with prescription drug advertising. With these prescription drug ads, the goal for pharmaceutical companies is to use their direct-to-consumer ads to educate consumers about their products and start a conversation between patients and their physicians, since a prescription from a physician is required to make the sale. Other examples of DTC advertising include diagnostic tests and financial services, or ads that aim to target consumers directly, rather than big-box retailers who purchase, then sell the products themselves.

What is conversational commerce?

Conversational commerce (also referred to as conversational marketing or chat commerce) is a practice in ecommerce where brands use social interaction and social touchpoints to sell products or services. This can be done through technologies such as chat apps/messaging apps (i.e. Facebook Messenger or Apple Business Chat), voice assistants (i.e. Google Assistant), conversational commerce chatbots on an ecommerce website, SMS messages with ecommerce stores, and more. When done effectively, a conversational commerce strategy has the power to move customers through the sales funnel by delivering convenience, a positive customer experience with online shopping, and decision support. 

How conversational commerce works

Utilizing conversational commerce platforms allows businesses to create personalized touchpoints with their shoppers at every stage of the customer journey. By enabling consumers to interact with the brand in a variety of different ways, conversational tools help brands guide their customers through the purchasing process. This could come in the form of personalized recommendations for products, voice commands to purchase a product via a voice assistant, instant messages on a chat platform for customer service questions, options to place an order via a messaging app, SMS marketing messages alerting shoppers to new products, and more. 

Conversational commerce strategies not only hold the potential to increase sales—they also have the opportunity to improve customer satisfaction. Conversational commerce provides a deeper level of personalization, enabling businesses to better meet customers where they are. Ultimately, this ecommerce strategy gives consumers greater control and flexibility over the shopping experience while automating certain support needs for businesses.

What is click to open rate (CTOR)?

Click to open rate (CTOR) is an email marketing metric used to assess the effectiveness of email content. It compares the number of people who clicked on an email link (click through rate, or CTR) to the total number of people who opened that email (email open rate). Generally speaking, the higher an email’s CTOR is, the more engaging and appealing the content is perceived to be for subscribers. These insights can be used to assess the health of a company’s email campaigns and its email marketing strategy. 

CTOR vs CTR: What’s the difference?

Both click to open rate and click through rate are important email marketing benchmarks for assessing the success of a campaign—but the two shouldn’t be confused. While CTR measures the number of people who clicked on an email link out of all sent emails, CTOR compares clicks only to the people who opened the email. This makes CTOR an excellent tool for assessing the relevance of your email links among your more engaged subscribers. 

Strategies for improving CTOR

There are several strategies businesses can use to optimize their email content and boost their subscribers’ engagement. First, deliver clear, conversion-driven CTAs that tie back to your subject line. Answer the question that got them to open your email, and make links easy and enticing to click. Ensure the rest of your email copy is concise, scannable, and easy to digest to bring those CTAs to the forefront, being sure to place any more critical information earlier in the email. Finally, interesting visuals can help keep the content and layout dynamic and communicate your message beyond just the copy.

What is text message marketing?

Text message marketing (also referred to as SMS marketing, mobile marketing, or text message marketing) is an ecommerce marketing method that involves delivering promotional messages to customers via text message (SMS, or short message service). Before businesses can contact their audiences via text messaging, customers must opt-in or subscribe to give their permission to receive promotional SMS messages. On the business side, SMS marketing campaigns allow for increased customer engagement and conversion rates, and are a powerful tool for increasing customer retention, freeing up customer service resources, and increasing retention and MRR. 

SMS marketing: best practices 

Businesses can utilize text message marketing software to monitor the effectiveness of their text marketing strategies, as well as customer purchase history and other customer data. This also allows marketers to track which text messages are most productive at generating engagement and/or conversions, and enables them to personalize their messaging and more effectively tailor product recommendations to their users. Businesses can grow their text messaging subscriber base by providing opt-in opportunities across a variety of channels, including social media, email newsletters, and their website.

What is SMS marketing?

SMS marketing (short message service marketing; also referred to as mobile marketing or text message marketing) is an ecommerce strategy that involves businesses sending text messages (SMS) to customers surrounding campaigns and transactions. This allows businesses to reach customers on their mobile phones and other mobile devices. In order to communicate with customers via SMS, businesses must receive permission from those customers, who must opt in to the service as well as provide their phone numbers. 

Text message marketing benefits

Text marketing is a highly effective strategy, yielding high open rates, customer engagement, and conversion rates. Subscription businesses can use SMS marketing messages to empower their customers to manage their own subscriptions without having to log on, increasing customer satisfaction and customer retention while freeing up valuable customer service resources. Through SMS, subscribers can skip orders, swap products, add one-time products, receive order reminders and order confirmations, increasing retention and MRR on the business side. Marketers can also decrease customer churn and cancellations with SMS win-back strategies.  

Text messaging strategies for marketers

To optimize their SMS offerings, merchants can track and analyze customer data and purchase history via SMS marketing software. This not only allows for tracking which SMS strategies are most effective at generating engagement and conversions, but also for personalization of messaging, enabling marketers to meet users where they are with relevant SMS marketing campaigns and product recommendations. Promoting SMS opt-in across a variety of channels, including your website, email newsletters, social media, and paper mail can also increase the visibility of this service.