Boost Social Proof With Visual Galleries

Drive purchase decisions with authentic customer photos

Visual marketing is a powerful tool in social commerce. In fact, social media posts that contain photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% higher click-through rates. And after watching a video, 64% of consumers are more likely to buy a product online. A major challenge for brands is to produce enough fresh and engaging visuals to showcase across every channel.

This is where visual user-generated content comes in. User-generated photos and videos are authentic and relatable to shoppers, and drive results when it comes to influencing purchase decisions and increasing conversion. Not only that, but customers constantly create and share new visual UGC, ensuring you always have enough new, varied content to use on and off-site.

How customer photos boost conversion rates on product pages

Any customer that has made their way to your product pages is expressing intent, and is likely looking to find more information about the product they’re thinking of purchasing. And while product photos with models or the perfect lighting will entice, customers are often on the lookout for what the product will really be like if they buy it.

This is the perfect opportunity for you to showcase your best visuals of customers using and enjoying that product to give shoppers the social proof they need to feel confident about it and drive purchase decisions forward — and that means higher conversion.

Curate Instagram galleries to show how customers use your products in real life

Visual UGC can do more than just offer proof that customers use and enjoy your product; it can also help with decisions. Creating galleries of different types of customers with your products can help shoppers better understand how the product looks in real life, in terms of sizing, styling, and quality.

For example, let’s say your brand sells a fashion scarf. You have several photos of the item on your product page, but none of someone actually wearing it. A customer may like the print but be unsure of how to actually tie it. A gallery of real customers wearing the scarf in different ways could help lead that customer to purchase.

If soliciting and curating photos sounds like a lot of work, it doesn’t have to be. Using tools like Yotpo’s Visual Curation and Tagging Assistant makes it easy to collect and tag photos right from Instagram and showcase them in visual galleries on your product pages. With these features, you can also collect visual UGC submitted with customer reviews.

Chances are, your customers are already sharing photos and videos featuring your products in reviews or on Instagram. Collecting them and using them to create beautiful visual galleries is a great way to let real people do your marketing for you.

Grow a community, not just a customer base

Now that most shopping experiences are moving online, it’s important to cultivate a sense of community and an emotional connection to your brand. This doesn’t only make a customer more likely to return for future purchases, but also inspires them to become advocates of the brand, as they naturally recommend the business to others after having a positive experience.

There are a few different strategies your brand can use to grow community online, including:

• Encouraging customers to upload photos or videos to reviews.
• Asking customers to tag your brand in photos or videos on Instagram.
• Create a hashtag for your customers to use when sharing visual content across social media.
• Create a competition that asks customers to upload their best content to your site to win a prize.

Not only will these strategies make your customers feel like they’re part of a community that loves your products, but you can then curate visual galleries to showcase on your product pages, as well as other areas of your website and across your social channels. This will help you to create a deeper relationship with your existing customers, and convince shoppers to become a part of that community.

How Sol de Janeiro used visual proof to increase reviews and sales

Award-winning body care brand Sol de Janeiro is the company behind the famous Brazilian Bum Bum Cream, an all-over body lotion that makes skin appear firmer. They wanted to take their customer-centric attitude a step further, and find better ways to connect directly with their community of devoted fans.

To collect more reviews and photos, Sol de Janeiro incentivized customers by offering coupons through post-purchase emails. The brand then used Yotpo’s AI smart filters and search to allow customers to sort reviews by topic, like fragrance, or by customer attributes, like skin type. With Yotpo’s Visual Marketing Suite, Sol de Janeiro was able to curate and display customer photos taken from Instagram, as well as photos in reviews and photos uploaded directly on-site.

The result? In just six months, Sol de Janeiro increased reviews by more than 4x. Over 82% of all Sol de Janeiro sales now come from shoppers that have interacted with UGC. Sharing customer photos helped promote the “beauty is an attitude” mentality that is essential to Sol de Janeiro’s brand identity.

Social proof by itself is a highly effective tool for boosting conversion and brand trust. Adding visuals, like photos and videos, to the mix will help you to take your reviews — and your business — to the next level.

Conclusion

Visual UGC allows customers to become the face of their favorite brands, while also giving brands a powerful way to promote authenticity. Using customer photos and videos offers fun social proof for your products, thus increasing conversion.