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TopVintage is Europe’s leading online retro boutique comprising of more than 200 brands that share their love for vintage inspired fashion for women. Their mission is to make women feel beautiful, which they achieve thanks to their unique designs influenced by the decades spanning from the 20s to the 70s.
Seeing a lot of engagement from fans of the brand on social media, TopVintage wanted to turn this interaction into something more tangible for the brand: a circuit of engagement spurred on by User Generated Content.
By encouraging members of the TopVintage community to take pictures featuring brand products and post them on social media, the images – which they post to their eCommerce through Flowbox, inspire new shoppers to make their own purchases and then post their own engaging images to social media. And the circuit continues.
The brand managed to collect 7,000 user generated images thanks to this strategy in just two months. Read on to see how they achieved these results following these simple steps:
By the end, you’ll learn how this strategy helped TopVintage increase their average order value by 8.33% and maintain a 19.59% conversion rate of people who interact with their UGC. Plus, discover tips for applying this strategy to your own marketing master plan!
With a captivated community of brand followers, TopVintage knew there was more they could do with the attention that they see on social media, namely funneling it into their online store. They recognized that a User Generated Content strategy would come with substantial rewards: visibility on influential platforms like social media and high quality content that could be leveraged further into their online store.
They just needed a way to inspire customers to share exceptional content featuring the brand’s products AND share them with the brand on social media.
It’s amazing what people will do if you just ask them. At least, that’s what TopVintage discovered when they created their “We love your retro looks” page, which explicitly explains the UGC process to online shoppers.
On this page, they detail what kind of content customers should share and where it will be featured if they’re willing to share it. By giving specific instructions, they didn’t leave anything up to chance. Rather, they found that people were creating higher quality content because they knew exactly what kind of content the brand was looking to share.
The page even includes a customer content gallery to demonstrate to potential posters what their content will look like in the webshop, which turned out to be a successful endeavor for the brand.
Anne Dolman, Content Marketer at TopVintage, explained, “We wanted to introduce the option of featuring UGC on our website because we know that our customers really like to be featured on our website and on social media. So that’s why we started that campaign and made a special landing page. We made it really simple to introduce people to the concept with an explanation of how it works.”
Following their gut really paid off. Now came the second part of the process, which helped to further augment the number of customers posting content for the brand.
If you need a favor, give something back in return. That was the strategy behind TopVintage’s UGC giveaways that encouraged loyal customers to post content with brand products to be entered directly into their contests.
“We’ll offer a 50 euro gift card as a giveaway, and we’ll explain to them that they need to share a picture wearing a TopVintage style for a chance to win the gift card. We’ve seen that they’re really responsive to this kind of action,” says Anne.
She continued, “We had a campaign in April since we’ve been around for 13 years. We had a keychain of a cat that we were adding to our packages, so we asked people to share a picture of the keychain on social with the hashtag #missmiauwsy. And we used Flowbox to feature all of the pictures with the keychains. This was an unboxing campaign we did with Flowbox to promote engagement and excitement from our birthday and the keychains.”
Thanks to these giveaways, the brand receives a constant flow of exceptional content that they use in a number of ways to enhance their online buying journey, attracting and retaining customers left and right.
“We have a worldwide community of women and we saw that we were receiving a lot of pictures featuring different looks from our website; our customers really love to share their looks. That’s why we decided to also use Flowbox to feature people’s pictures with our products, so that users can see their pictures on the website and also inspire each other with their looks.”
Anne Dolman – Content Marketer at TopVintage
Recognizing the opportunity to do more with this content, the brand decided to employ a User Generated Content platform that would enable them to not only easily collect this content through brand tags, mentions, and hashtags – but curate it and post it directly into their online store.
Working with Flowbox’s advanced UGC platform enables TopVintage to organize their content into campaigns that they can then spread across the buying journey, making it more compelling for online shoppers.
By making this content shoppable, these customer content galleries bring online shoppers directly to the products that are featured within them, going from browsing the latest styles from Instagram to purchasing in just one click.
Anne stated, “We have the widget on our home page and product pictures and we see a lot of response to that. It has a really high conversion rate, as people directly buy the products that they see in UGC. And they love to share their pictures and their personal looks.”
But how did they know that this content was performing so well? This all came down to the final step in their process.
“With UGC, you can see how everyone styles a certain dress and it’s a very big point of inspiration for our customers to see other people’s pictures.”
Anne Dolman – Content Marketer at TopVintage
Thanks to their UGC integration, customers see images of real customers wearing the TopVintage designs, feel inspired to purchase the products in the images, and take their own pictures featuring the products. Thus, the brand creates the engagement circuit effect that they were hoping for.
Then, using the advanced analytics suite in the Flowbox platform, the brand is able to attribute sales to their UGC, analyzing the highest performing images and the users that create them.
Through the Flowbox analytics, the brand found that their UGC was actually helping them to improve their online sales: they saw an average order value increase of 8.33% and a 19.59% conversion rate of people who interact with their UGC.
So, just like they were hoping, they actually see the fruits of their labor in the form of online revenue. And they’re hoping to take this buying power even further by integrating their high-converting content into Facebook Ads to further engage potential customers.
Anne concluded, “We think that users identify better with the UGC because they’re just normal people, not models. These images combine well with our product pictures because they provide variation. Plus, the styling options. With UGC, you can see how everyone styles a certain dress and it’s a very big point of inspiration for our customers to see other people’s pictures.”
With the help of a dynamic UGC integration, TopVintage discovered an authentic way to leverage their loyal community of brand followers into something tangible to use in their marketing. And they’ve seen a positive impact on not only their engagement – but their online sales.
If you’d like to apply a similar strategy to your online buying journey, use their simple model by following these 5 steps:
If you need help with this process, reach out to our team! We’d love to guide you on how you can successfully achieve this strategy within your own online ecosystem using Europe’s leading UGC platform, Flowbox.
