When you incorporate user-generated content in emails, you can get your audience involved and inspired and shave precious hours off of your production time. So, Liz Tashik, our Associate Account Director, teamed up with our friends over at Curalate to share her best UGC advice in a webinar.
If you missed the live session, you’re in luck. We’re sharing the recording and answering some questions from the webinar.
Q&A
Should a brand always offer an incentive to get UGC?
We love a good sweepstakes, but it isn’t always necessary or relevant. Your audience is using social media to interact with the brands they love regardless, so you don’t need to introduce an incentive each time.
What is the best way to curate trending posts?
Movable Ink can pull in trending posts over a threshold of likes or retweets and during certain time periods. From there, you can continue to curate your UGC to make sure you’re always showcasing the best creative available.
How can you tell if your customers are actually seeing what you intended them to see?
Once you figure out how you want to curate your creative, it can update dynamically. A new call for content is sent each time the user opens the email, so each person will see the freshest, approved content at the moment-of-open. Of course, since we’re showing creative imagery in these feeds, recipients will need to enable images with their email client, which is actually a default for most clients at this point. Relevant alt text and supporting copy are always a good idea to pair with the feeds to let readers know the content is fresh, updated and meant to be engaged with! If you’d like to animate the feeds, Movable Ink can target static content to the email clients that don’t support animation, namely Outlook.
Do you have any examples from the non-profit sector?
In the non-profit sector, tap-to-tweet donation promos are really popular. Marketers can create a pre-populated tweet that users can just click or tap to show support for your organization. This use makes it incredibly easy for people to share directly from your email. Personalized infographics of how you’ve supported the organization over a period of time can also be great to pre-populate in a tweet, similar to the Strava example shared during the webinar. Often people fall into the trap of thinking of UGC as candid photos of a product, but it’s inclusive of so much more than that. Testimonials, photos of an experience, and recaps are just a few other types of UGC that you can use to elevate your emails.
When sharing UGC in an email, would you link the images to your Instagram feed, or would you link it to the product in the images?
This all depends on what kind of email you’re working on and the goals of that campaign. If it’s an abandoned cart email, you should link to your product page, but if the email is in your welcome series, linking to your Instagram would be your best bet for engagement and strengthening that relationship with your customers.
How can I incorporate advanced personalization with social?
When it comes to personalization, you have plenty of options. And with Movable Ink, you can pair first name image personalization (creatively displaying the user’s name) with a social feed to introduce someone to your brand in your welcome series. Or you can use time-targeting to promote offers while using UGC to show the product in action. And device targeting makes sure your UGC looks great on any screen. A single email can have several different creative variations based on your audience’s context.