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Today we’re talking about a leading interior design and furniture brand-VOX-that managed to get customers to consistently post content featuring their products on social media and increased sales because of it.
Speaking with eCommerce specialist, Damian Miziolek, from VOX, we learn exactly how they encouraged their customers to share 4,849 User Generated images and videos featuring VOX products on social media to help increase their eCommerce sales.
The best part is: through partnering with Flowbox, this high-quality User Generated Content (UGC) is now embedded in various points of their eCommerce shopping journey, bringing them an 18.76% conversion rate increase.
Read on to learn how they did it and how you can do the same for your eCommerce brand.
As an innovative brand in the home furnishings space, VOX was always on the lookout for new ways to present their products to potential eCommerce customers. Their UGC strategy all started when eCommerce specialist, Damian Miziolek, asked the team, “Why don’t we use photos of our customers on our site?”
The short answer? At the time, they didn’t have any.
But that didn’t stop them from discovering exactly how to get their customers interested in sharing this kind of high-quality content with them through their social media channels.
With a team of experts tracking social trends and conducting ethnographic studies within their market, they noticed that furniture shoppers often felt the pressure to mold their home designs into traditional style guidelines, i.e. Scandi, Boho, or glamor style. This, they found, was mostly caused by social pressure or the fear of committing a home decor faux pas.
However, VOX discovered that design choices based around these well-known styles rarely addressed the real needs of the buyer. So they decided to design their own narratives that would fit the customer rather than the current fashion trends.
This is where their campaign ‘Let’s talk about interior’ was born.
For the campaign, they developed six original “lifestyles” that they felt would better represent their customers. The idea was that their customers would be able to see themselves within the lifestyles, which would then create authentic conversations surrounding the concept.
Following the steps below, they were able to attract attention to the campaign on social media:
The response was exactly what they were hoping for. The campaign spurred their followers to share their thoughts on each lifestyle, including where they felt they fit in.
Soon enough, they were posting images of their own homes that were styled to fit into one of the VOX lifestyles. Whether it was their Ecosystem lifestyle (living a green life) or Workshop (your home is your workplace), people were eager to share their reactions to this campaign.
Because VOX understood that customers are more likely to respond to them and post images featuring their products when they feel a personal connection to the brand, they were able to generate the buzz they were looking for.
“Really, rather than designing styles, we were designing lifestyles. While this was a nice idea, we also wanted to invite our customers to share their lives within the styles that we came up with,” said Miziolek. However, they didn’t want to stop here, “We were looking for authenticity, and we wanted to find a way to make this campaign even better.
With the momentum of this social media campaign pushing them forward, they wanted to keep their brand lifestyles at the forefront of their customers’ minds – so that they would continue to post content. What they did next gave their marketing efforts a solid form, ensuring that their customers would continue to interact with the brand for years to come.
After seeing how well their audience responded to the lifestyle concepts online, they hoped to ensure that the lifestyles would live on in customers’ homes – thus, guaranteeing that they would continue to interact with the brand well into the future.
That’s why they decided to bring in specialists to create a book defining the VOX lifestyles through the eyes of the brand. Taking the beautiful images originally created by the brand of their lifestyle concepts, they put together a home decor book – the kind you might find sitting on a VOX coffee table in someone’s home.
Further introducing their freshly designed lifestyles, the book is another channel for encouraging people to identify with the brand and to design their homes based on their own needs, rather than the needs of others. It is sold both on their website and in-store and has successfully encouraged customers to continue interacting with the VOX lifestyles.
Sharing the noise about the book on social media has helped the brand recruit even more VOX fans who are happy to post content. This engagement cultivates major interest in the VOX lifestyles and, therefore, with their products. And, in the end, all of this action is what inspired their customers to create 4,849 User Generated images and videos for the brand.
Brands launch campaigns all the time, so why did this particular campaign bring VOX success?
When they created recognizable templates for how users can identify with the brand, it made their Instagram marketing efforts personal and real for each individual follower – while still inviting them to be part of the larger brand community.
So these VOX lifestyles gave each user the ability to ask themselves: which one do I fit into? And this kind of personalized – yet shared – experience is exactly what gets people posting on social media.
Customers like to feel apart of a brand community. But they also want the space to express their own individuality within it and feel like the brand will actually find value in what they share.
Through this campaign, VOX discovered the perfect formula of shared experience versus personal experience that enabled them to cultivate over 4,000 User Generated images and videos.
Miziolek continued, “What we found is that people are really interested in this kind of communication. You can see this on our Facebook where people comment on our lifestyle posts. In this way, it allows them to take part in our interior designs and bring it to reality in their own home.”
It’s also important to note that most of the content they saw was of a high-quality. Why? Because the VOX customers were inspired by the brand-created images from the book. This gave them a template for how to create content featuring their products that matched the brand image.
With all of this high-quality content waiting for them on social media, the next piece of the puzzle was deciding what to do with it. VOX’s next decision led them to a stunning increase of revenue and an improved user experience.
As VOX can attest, creating an online brand community can feel like a laborious feat. But once your customers are happily posting content with your products, it’s well worth it.
That is, if you know how to leverage this content to your advantage.
Having created their devoted brand community on social media through the lifestyles campaign, VOX was eager to do more with this social media success. But they weren’t quite sure what that would look like yet. In the meantime, they were intent on improving their online store.
Miziolek had an idea. “Our website hadn’t been refreshed for a few years, so I came to the team with the idea to do something new on the site. To accomplish this, we launched a survey on our product pages using Hotjar, asking only one question: Does this page have all of the information that you want?”
The team received back almost 4,000 responses.
Reading through them, they noticed a few trends within the customer feedback:
Using this information, the team brainstormed next steps. They figured they could launch a basic written review section, but this method felt a bit old school. Plus, it didn’t help resolve the lack of product images.
That’s when they came back to their social media engagement.
“Over the past few years, the amount of amazing interior photos people uploaded on Instagram immensely increased. We are constantly amazed by how our clients use our products and make them work in their own style. Consequently, we thought it would be a great idea to use this content as visual reviews,” Miziolek stated.
Their idea was to collect the customer content and integrate it into their eCommerce store to use as visual reviews or social proof and to show their products being used in new and authentic ways.
This idea would resolve both outstanding customer critiques of the website in one fell swoop. The only question that remained was the feasibility of the concept.
With a lot of moving parts on their hands, VOX wanted to take the simplest, most effective path to achieving their goal. That was when they discovered Flowbox, Europe’s leading UGC platform.
This technology allows them to easily collect their abundance of customer content from social media and manage which images will appear in their eCommerce store. From there, the brand seamlessly links products to images, enhancing their online shopping journey and increasing eCommerce conversions with shoppable UGC.
Learn how to increase your eCommerce conversion rate with UGC.
While VOX has an extensive list of furniture products to filter through, Flowbox’s image recognition tool helps to identify which of their products appear in the images, ensuring that the process is simple and manageable.
One concern for the brand was the legality of using these customer images on their online store. They discovered that the Media Rights Tool, which is built directly into the Flowbox platform, enables them to instantly request rights from customers.
“I like all of the Flowbox features, I use all of them. If there’s something new, we make sure to use it. For me, every feature that Flowbox sold us during our negotiations is really nice. We are really happy with them.”
Damian Miziolek
The best part is that this innovative shopping solution brought in results: an 18.76% increase of conversion rate.
By clicking on an image, customers are brought directly to the products that are featured within them, thus creating a more compelling online shopping journey that allows customers to go from browsing social images to buying on the spot.
With this integration, VOX was able to address both issues that their survey exposed with one solution. Plus, it gave them the opportunity to provide customers with authentic home-styling inspiration from real homes.
“We’re stunned by how many people see these customer photos and click on them – it’s amazing. We didn’t believe our numbers at first, so we used Hotjar to record some sessions of our customers going through the pages on our site, as we wanted to see if really 18% of our customers looked at these photos before purchase. It turned out to be true,” concluded Miziolek.
The integration brought an 18.18% average order value increase for VOX, which they measured through Flowbox’s analytics.
By truly understanding their customers and by giving them the ability to share their voice with the brand, VOX achieved the ultimate goals of any eCommerce: higher engagement and an increase in conversions.
The best part is, it wasn’t impossible or crazy difficult. All they did was:
By finding your own version of the VOX lifestyles, one that fits your brand image and personality, you can do exactly the same.
