How User-Generated Content Can Boost Your Email Marketing Performance

Content creation is one of the highest priorities for any marketer, but it’s also very time-consuming. However, there are more effective ways to create content than starting from a blank page. 

User-generated content (UGC) is content produced by your audience. With the right permissions, brands can repurpose UGC in marketing activity.. It has become increasingly popular in recent years, with both B2C and B2B brands reaping the rewards of user-generated content in a world dominated by digital consumption.

The value of UGC is clear in an environment where brands need to produce content to engage audiences using SEO, email marketing, and social media. 

However, it also poses a problem – if everything a brand creates needs to be consistent and work towards achieving business goals, how does user-generated content align when it’s not created by the marketing team? 

In this guide, we’ll explore the strategic use of user-generated content (UGC) in email marketing campaigns and how it fits in with your overall marketing strategy. We’ll cover everything from the benefits of incorporating UGC to best practices and other key considerations, including usage rights and content collection methods. 

User-generated content marketing is a proven, effective method of increasing brand awareness and fostering loyalty. Research shows that UGC influences 79% of people’s buying decisions, and Instagram posts with UGC get 70% more engagement.

The success of UGC is down to buyer psychology, as audiences love to see their peers using products or services before they decide. This gives legitimacy to your offering and demonstrates that your audience is more than just a following—it’s a community—one that potential buyers will want to be a part of.

What does this mean for email marketers?

UGC is applicable across many marketing areas, but we’ll focus on how it can transform your email marketing performance. 

Email marketing is all about creating an ongoing connection with your customers.  According to SaleCycle data,  50.7% buy something from a marketing email at least once a month, with 23.8% of shoppers making a purchase via email several times a month. Email is not only a way of keeping in touch with customers, but ensuring they stay loyal.

With UGC, you can show your subscribers that they are part of a community. Through user-generated content like photos and reviews, customers will feel assured that your products or services are just as good as you say they are. 

Not only does user-generated content save you time and resources compared to creating your own, but it’s also proven to be more effective in persuading your audience to take action. For email marketing, that action could be click-throughs or conversions, both of which can see positive impacts from UGC.

Let’s look at the types of UGC, and how they can work specifically for email marketing.

Reviews

Both B2B and B2C businesses can and should collect reviews. 93% of buyers cite reviews as making an impact on their purchase decision, with customers being 1.5X more likely to be motivated by an online review than by a discount offer. 

Of course, customers can find reviews themselves via third-party platforms, or on your website, but often these people are already in the consideration stage of purchasing. By showcasing reviews via emails direct to your customer’s inbox, you can demonstrate that your offering is really as good as you say it is. 

This is particularly effective when paired with audience segmentation and email personalisation, whereby marketers can send relevant emails to subscribers who have shown interest in products, abandoned baskets or purchased similar items previously. Including reviews in these emails adds influence to your messaging, and ultimately encourages them to take action.

Here’s a simple example of using reviews in email marketing from the sustainable clothing brand, Rapanui:

Comments

Social media is a divisive place, but it can be a goldmine for brands with a loyal following. You’ve probably seen brands re-use comments on their posts as content, and this can be useful for email, too. 

Like reviews, positive comments provide additional influence to your content. Used correctly, they demonstrate to your audience that real people love your products/services. 

Social media comments are often more spontaneous than reviews, so you’ll need to have a process for checking your old posts and selecting the right ones to use. 

Photos and videos

This is one of the most effective types of user-generated content, because it quite literally shows your product in situ. 

Many brands will offer an incentive to encourage users to share their photos or videos. An easy way to organise entries, and also ensure permission is gained, is to run a specific campaign with a hashtag and allow people to use this hashtag on the content they want to share in exchange for a discount code or prize draw entry. 

A campaign-led approach also allows you to be clear with your audience about how content will be used, and you can create relevant policy documents on your website to clarify this.

In terms of email marketing, we know that images are an integral part of any campaign, and ensuring you have a solid collection of relevant imagery is always a priority for marketers. Some email marketing platforms also support video embedding from YouTube, Instagram, or even TikTok, so if you are sourcing video content, you may choose to edit it all together into a highlight reel. 

Here’s a great example of user-generated photo content in an email marketing campaign from online retail giant ASOS:

Before you start gathering photo or video content from your users, you will need to familiarise yourself with usage permissions. We’ll touch on this in the next section where we look at best practices for UGC, including privacy concerns, legal considerations and more… 

Now we’ve covered the ins and outs of user-generated content, it’s time to kickstart your campaign. Here are some tips for collecting UGC to upgrade your email marketing efforts:

Set your goals

As with any marketing activity, it’s vital that you have a goal in mind and work backward from there. If your goal is to increase email subscribers, your approach may be different from that of boosting click-throughs. Make sure your user-generated content campaign aligns with the overarching goal from the outset. 

For example, if your goal is to increase conversions, consider asking users to share examples of how they use your products in their daily lives. Aspirational content is powerful when it comes to turning browsers into customers.

Offer incentives

While some customers will love your brand so much that they’ll be happy to share content for ‘free’, that’s not always the case. In order to collect a wide range of great quality user-generated content, it’s worth offering users an incentive 

Don’t just stick to social

We’ve talked about the power of social media when it comes to collecting UGC, and that’s definitely the primary place for it. But don’t discount email marketing as a channel for collecting and sharing UGC. UK clothing brand Lucy & Yak runs a long-term UGC campaign to collect images of customers wearing their products, and this is often mentioned in email newsletters and promotions to ensure consistent messaging across the board.

Create a brand hashtag

Much like the above, an ongoing brand campaign with a set hashtag is a great way to collect user-generated content, especially on a platform like Instagram where you can easily search and find content using a hashtag. 

With this approach, you are asking people to use your hashtag, but that shouldn’t mean you assume they will be okay with you repurposing their content—especially on another channel like email. 

To ensure maximum clarity, it’s worth creating a user-generated content policy and linking in your social media bio and also replying to posts individually to ask permission from the user to re-share their content.

Post-purchase emails

Another way email marketing can be used to collect UGC is to use the email journey to ask customers to write a review or share photos after making a purchase. Again, make sure customers know how you will use this information and only reshare the personal details that are absolutely necessary, e.g., remove full names.

So, email marketing can be an invaluable tool for both collecting and sharing user-generated content as part of a healthy marketing mix. It’s proven to boost performance and encourage brand loyalty for many different types of brands.