Using authentic UGC to connect with customers during the quarantine

Salsa Jeans is a Portuguese jeans brand that focuses on technical jeans for both men and women. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, they were ready to adjust their User Generated Content strategies to continue building relationships with customers despite the challenges of being at home.

Numbers

The Story

Salsa Jeans has spent the past few years leveraging an authentic User Generated Content shopping experience to better connect with their international base of customers. But when COVID-19 forced the world out of the streets and into their homes, Salsa Jeans saw an opportunity to enhance their UGC strategy amidst a pandemic.

Challenge

With the prospect of a customer-base that could no longer leave their homes, brands across the world were suddenly dealt the challenges of staying connected with their clients completely virtually. As an innovative brand in the market, Salsa Jeans quickly began to develop their remedy for continuing to reach customers and build a brand community despite being at home.

With this, their “Never Surrender” campaign was born. Encouraging customers to continue posting content featuring Salsa Jeans products on social media with #NeverSurrender, the brand has been able to leverage the uptick of time spent online and maintain their strong relationship with customers during the quarantine.

“Since mid-March, we have tried to adapt, creating a new concept that we wanted to start communicating: Never Surrender. We have tons of communications around this concept, like a charity capsule collection (100% of the profits will be donated to the red cross), content related with ‘Everything we can do together, even though apart, a tribute to our Heroes’ (the people on the frontline of this battle), etc. And for us it was super important to adapt the website to this movement. It makes sense for us to adapt and change the image, the copy, and everything.”

Simão Figueiredo – eCommerce & UX Specialist at Salsa Jeans

Solution

With their adapted UGC strategy, the brand not only demonstrates their innovative resiliency to customers – but also continues to nourish this strong community with authentic engagement. All of this is achieved through a brand identity that customers help to create with their shared content.

“This concept can help us because the consumer that lands on our homepage will see content from people continuing to post their looks in their homes. They are continuing with their life, they are super happy, they are wearing jeans at home. This can help other customers who land on Salsa, and they don’t know the brand. They can see these images that can create a different feeling for them.”

Simão Figueiredo – eCommerce & UX Specialist at Salsa Jeans

With the help of Flowbox, Salsa Jeans was able to quickly react to the changing circumstances and create an online shopping experience that brings their community together – despite the physical distance.

“It was super easy to adapt the UGC widget on our website, change the copy and try to improve images that communicate working from home, or looks at home, or activities from home, etc. So that was our main goal.”

Simão Figueiredo – eCommerce & UX Specialist at Salsa Jeans

With the increase of social media use thanks to the COVID-19 situation, Salsa Jeans is also making the best use of the only available channels for communicating with customers during the quarantine. And customers are responding well.

Not only have they seen many people posting with their new hashtag, they’ve also seen an increase of people inspired to shop their UGC content in their eCommerce. With the COVID-19 crisis, Salsa Jeans saw a 17.27% increase in eCommerce conversion rates during the month of April.

Plus, this strategy has helped them reach a brand goal – to reach a younger market.

“With this concept, we’ve reached much younger targets – and this was our goal as a brand. Through Flowbox we started to see younger targets posting photos with Salsa and with the hashtag #NeverSurrender – so it was nice to see.”

Simão Figueiredo – eCommerce & UX Specialist at Salsa Jeans

Results