How to Keep eCommerce Sales Hot This Summer Using Reviews & UGC

The warmer summer weather means more people spend time outdoors and less time buying online. It’s typically a slow season as most brands generate the majority of their sales in Q4, but there’s still plenty of room for opportunity.

Below, we’ll cover how using reviews & UGC during this season can help improve your bottom line by developing your product offering, delivering personalized campaigns, and building trust with new customers.

1. Launch New Summer Products Using Customer Feedback

Shopping habits change in summer, and tapping into the need for summer-related items can help you increase your bottom line.

Think about what products your target market might be interested in and how they relate to your other product offerings to launch a new product line in the lead-up to summer.

Reviews can help you understand how your summer products are performing so you can improve product development or identify which ones you should continue to sell in the future. Learning what customers like and dislike about your new summer products helps you develop ideas that meet their needs long after the summer days have disappeared.

Best Practice:

• Set up an automated review request email campaign to collect customer feedback at scale. Online brands using this approach have been able to increase review generation by an impressive 4,673%!
• Build personalized engagement campaigns that are automatically triggered when a customer leaves less than a 4 star review. This will allow you to reach out to customers and gain additional insight as to why they are unsatisfied with your new summer product.
• Use review reporting features to analyze the performance of your new summer products and use it to aid product development.

2. Segment Your Audience To Deliver Personalized Summer Product Recommendations & Offers Using Review Data

Customers today actively seek out personalized communications with the brands they buy from. They don’t want to be served generic marketing messages that don’t relate to their interests or needs. In fact, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with a brand who provides relevant offers and recommendations than those who don’t.

Reviews allow merchants to collect valuable customer insights — including key customer and product attributes — for advanced segmentation. You can use this information to create hyper-segmented campaigns and personalized marketing messages for your customers.

Analyzing key attributes from product reviews can help you identify which countries your customers live in so you can ensure your summer marketing campaigns are reaching the right audience. They can also help you identify attributes of previous purchases in order to recommend similar or new products relevant to the summer season.

Best Practice:

• Incorporate Attributes into your review request emails. Include customer attributes such as body shape, skin type, or reason for purchase, and include specific product attributes such as color, fit, or flavor.
• Use your review data to create custom and lookalike audiences on Facebook & Instagram to target your ideal summer shopper with ads. About 44% of consumers purchase the items seen on a brand’s social media post.
• Use the customer attribute data that your reviews contain to enhance your customer lists and deliver personalized email marketing campaigns. Online brands using this approach have been able to increase placed order rate by a massive 300%!

3. Incorporate Reviews & UGC Into Your Summer Marketing Campaigns

Research shows that UGC is 35% more memorable than other media and 50% more trusted. Why? Because consumers trust and relate to the real-life recommendations and reviews that come from their peers far more than any other content.

And on top of that, when you share UGC and reviews across your marketing channels, you create desire around your products (tapping into consumers’ FOMO) through the positive experiences of your customers.

During the review process, you can ask customers who purchase your summer products to include photos or videos along with their written review in exchange for a special discount. This will allow you to create a library full of summer content to populate your marketing campaigns with. In fact, 87% of brands use UGC to collect free and authentic content.

Best Practice:

• Take the UGC collected from your customer reviews and use it as content for your summer social media contests. Over 34% of new customers are acquired through contests, which helps increase sales and your email list so you can nurture shoppers with future promotions.
• Add reviews to your abandoned cart emails. Online stores that incorporate reviews in their abandoned cart emails have reported seeing a 16% increase in revenue per recipient.
• Include ratings and reviews in your Google Shopping PLAs. 89% of customers begin their buying process with a search engine, and online merchants that include ratings and reviews within Google Shopping’s prime real estate on the SERP have witnessed as much as an 838% increase in revenue.

Summer Brings a Wealth of Opportunity for Merchants

The summer season isn’t always the most profitable time of year for brands, but it provides plenty of opportunities to try out new products, get customer feedback, and connect deeper with new and existing customers. All of the hard work you put into your summer campaigns will trickle down into the rest of your yearly efforts, ultimately improving your bottom line.