There is a dichotomy in the way the purchasing public views reviews. On the one hand, everyone professes not to believe them while on the other, a certain percentage of bad reviews can make an object unsaleable. How can you convince your subscribers on a marketing email that almost everyone loves your product?
What we need to do in a marketing email is to get over to a potential purchaser that the products are reliable/efficient/exactly as presented. We need to convince. There’s an easy and reassuringly cheap way to do so, and that’s by presenting satisfied customers to our subscribers.
I read recently, in both blogs and newsletters, that the big trend for this year in email marketing is user-generated content (UGC). This may or may not be true. While I have my doubts, particularly as the same was suggested about two years ago, the continuing high levels of criticism of the reviews systems in well-known marketing companies mean that an alternative option might well work for us.
If you want professional-looking images, you’ve probably got to go to one of the subscription stock image suppliers. If you want a convincing video to run on your website and social media pages, you might feel that the fees charged by video production companies are too high, despite many suggesting they’re good value. If you haven’t got the budget, it’s immaterial.
Professionalism actually works against believability. Counter-intuitively, one of the benefits of UGC is it isn’t slick, beautiful or professional-looking. It proves its authenticity. Customers are more inclined to believe UGC rather than the anonymous star-ratings because they are produced by people just like them.
Our job is to encourage our customers to send in, or allow us to use, images and video they have produced, particularly of products we are selling. Can it be that hard given many put them on social media themselves? It should be remembered this is one case where originality is of no concern.
You could trawl through social media pages for something that might be useful, but it is time-intensive. A better option is to request images and video from subscribers on a marketing email. This gives the added benefit of others on your email marketing lists being aware of the request so they are unlikely to doubt it later. Ensure they know what we’re going to use the images/video for. I’ve seen some companies using images supplied by employees. That might be a bit risky as it will appear similar to user generated material. We do not want them thinking they are being deceived.
A method I like is the competition. Ask subscribers to send in their creations in order to win a discount or special prize to go with whatever’s being sold. This has the distinct advantage of making them feel they are contributing to the company, sharing in the success.
When it comes to selection of images or video, ensure you have all permissions. As it needs to convince it is genuine, lots of publicity for the requests helps matters. Put it out there.
