The Benefits of User-Generated Content and Social Media Influencers in Email Marketing
On average, your subscribers receive and send over 121 emails per day.
They’re inundated with emails, and reading an update on your brand is probably the last thing they want to do (unless, of course, you’re Taylor Swift).
So, what can you do to win their attention and engage with them?
The answer is simple. Instead of promotional content, focus on being relatable. Utilize influencer-led strategies and user-generated content (UGC).
While there are thousands of ways to leverage the two in your email marketing strategy, here are eight proven strategies to reap the benefits of user-generated content and social media influencers.
1. Use Them for Relatable Content
When brands craft campaigns, we often make aspirational statements (e.g., “Explore five countries in only two weeks!”) instead of relatable content.
However, influencers and users tend to push back, mainly because they’ve already established credibility by simply being who they are.
In other words, your subscribers will trust people who talk like them and look like them, rather than the credibility of a no-face brand whose agenda is likely to sell something.
For example, if your audience and influencers used the same headline above, it’d look something like this: “How I visited five countries for under $3000 (and how you can do the same!).”
This relatability makes your marketing message (and, ergo, your product/service) feel attainable, which motivates users to convert.
2. Use Them for Social Proof
Another great way to leverage UGC and influencers is to use their content to build social proof.
For example, some design/content templates you can consider are:
1. Before-and-After Photos
Before-and-after photos act as product-led content and show your audience how useful your products actually are. This format works well because it’s not vague promotional content that floods everyone’s inbox.
For example, consider Hims & Hers marketing strategy — they usually partner with influencers who can vouch for the effectiveness of their products against hair loss, misuse of ED medication, mental health issues, etc.
While they mainly use this content format on social media, you can replicate it for email marketing, too.
2. Sharing Concrete Data
Reaching out to customers for UGC can also provide insights into how beneficial the product was for the user.
For example, consider getting concrete data from our customers like “It helped reduce bottlenecks by 80%,” “It increased productivity 2x,” and “It was beneficial in managing X, Y, and Z things in my workflow.”
3. Honest Conversations
Oftentimes, the conversations around your brand and product/service aren’t the ones you’ve participated in but the ones your customers/influencers have.
For example, a user could’ve recommended your product to their friends via texts, and/or an influencer would’ve mentioned your product’s benefits while replying to a comment — those are the honest conversations you can get from influencers/users that can be leveraged later on.
We understand you have busy lives, and it might be impossible to sit and craft every email around the UGC and influencer content you receive. In that case, using AI marketing tools to put it on autopilot might be easier.
That means using AI to find top influencers and generate templates to contact them. But wait, there’s more. You can also use magic links to collect social proof and create emails around the content you receive. Work smarter, not harder, for your next email marketing campaign.
3. Use Them for Case Studies and Customer Stories
Another way to leverage influencers and your customers is to create case studies and/or customer stories around how your product/service helped them.
Consider these examples by Descript (for case studies) and Loom (for customer stories).
This type of content will also help you identify:
- What your customers find most beneficial about your product/service
- How your customers talk/common phrases they use
- Customer sentiment surrounding your brand
- Unique use cases of your product
- Common customer pain points
All of this can be extremely helpful in developing future marketing materials and updating your sales scripts.
4. Use Them for Building Authority
Influencers’ testimonials and words of confidence (especially those with a large following) can greatly impact your brand.
For example, suppose the aim of companies such as Cruise America is to get users to buy used RVs. In that case, it might benefit from the testimonials of travel influencers who already have credibility and authority in their niche.
A simple video showcasing the influencers’ adventures and tours of a potential RV for sale naturally encourages viewers to consider the option of saving money by purchasing a used RV.
Adding this type of user-generated content to your email campaigns can add relatability and authenticity, helping recipients imagine their own experiences with the product.
Why is this so effective? Even if you partner with the best marketers and get a celebrity to endorse your product, it can feel disingenuous if they don’t know what they’re talking about or don’t have direct experience with your product.
5. Use Them for Exploring Newer Topics of Conversation
Connecting with customers and influencers for UGC and influencer-led content can also help you explore new content ideas, since they speak from personal experience and may have different stories to share.
For example, Remote, a company that helps employ remote workers, saw a trend in conversations among its network after the pandemic. Most of their audience was asking about the benefits of being a contractor vs. an employee (especially a remote employee).
Based on this trend, it started pushing influencer content about these (or surrounding) topics.
Even today, it pushes and reposts influencer content that sometimes covers the individual benefits of remote work and the benefits of being a contractor (though it is all via social media).
6. Use Them for Building Relationships
With relatable, engaging user-generated content, you can keep your audience invested in your email marketing campaigns.
Beyond that, you can build stronger relationships by asking them to share personal stories, sharing social proof that builds trust, and pushing relatable content that shows you understand their issues/pain points.
While this is intangible, UGC shapes how your audience perceives you and builds relationships with your brand.
Moreover, if your audience and influencers promote the content they generate on their social media pages or blogs, you can also begin creating relationships with their audiences.
7. Use Them for Different Perspectives
When creating email marketing campaigns, many of us play a guessing game about what we believe our audiences will like, what their journey looks like, and what their daily life (and daily life problems) look like.
Stories and content from your users (such as UGC) help you take off those rose-colored glasses and consider different perspectives, pain points, and ideas.
Essentially, UGC can help you form an identity resolution about your customer that’s true to a thousandth degree because it comes directly from them.
Aside from this, UGC might also provide some insights into your customer’s behavioral patterns. You can then supplement these insights with data from sales enablement tools to create marketing campaigns bound to convert.
For example, with UGC and sales tools, you might realize your audience prefers buying product bundles instead of single items.
8. Use Them for SEO Purposes
Last but not least, user-generated and influencer-led content are also excellent for improving your SEO. Why? Mainly because both content types can give you backlinks, visibility, and social signals.
For example, if an influencer posts about your brand on their page, that can improve your visibility, followers, likes, and social signals right then and there. Or, if a user pushes your product forward in a guest post, that’s a backlink you earn.
Backlinks directly affect your SEO score. Social signals and visibility also play a huge role in how search engines crawl and interpret your content and view you as an authoritative source.
And the more authoritative search engine algorithms think you are, the higher your rank and the better your website domain rating (DR). Make sure you know how to check Google rankings so you can track progress and adjust your strategy as needed.
Get Notified About Your Email Marketing Efforts
We know it’s easy to list a thousand ways to leverage content to improve your email marketing campaigns; the hard part is getting started.
Once you’ve climbed that hill, you still need to send emails at a decent cadence, interact with your audiences, think of new ideas, plan strategies to push your products, and analyze your efforts to see whether the investment yields results.
In short, email marketing isn’t easy. Not even close. However, reaping the benefits of user-generated content and relationships with social media influencers is well worth the effort.
Our best suggestion for optimizing your campaigns at the start is to start small. One way to do this is by using a simple email marketing service, like Benchmark, to help you.
You can use Benchmark to create your first email (don’t worry, it’s completely free). We have all the email templates, integrations, and analytics you need, so you don’t have to stress and can leave the heavy lifting to us.
Author Bio
Jeremy is co-founder & CEO of uSERP, a digital PR and SEO agency that works with brands like Monday, ActiveCampaign, Hotjar, and more. He also buys and builds SaaS companies like Wordable.io and writes for publications like Entrepreneur and Search Engine Journal.
