People want a seamless experience when they shop, one that’s tailored to their preferences, needs, and behavior. And if brands meet these expectations, they’ll be rewarded with loyalty and revenue, even in times of rising inflation and economic uncertainty.

According to Salesforce, 65% of consumers say they will stay loyal to companies if they offer more personalized experiences. And in a recent Twilio Segment report, 80% of business leaders revealed consumers spend more (38% on average) when their experience is personalized.

Yet, many brands still struggle to deliver on this front. Salesforce research also discovered that consumers’ top frustrations range from disconnected experiences (40%) to being offered products that aren’t relevant to them (33%).

So how can you effectively answer the call for a personalized customer journey that rewards both you and your customer base? How can you deliver the right message, in the right place, at the right time? With contextualization.

Chapters:

1. What is contextualization?
2. The role of digital body language
3. Privacy concerns and first-party data
4. Contextualization strategies in action
5. Personalize the entire customer journey with a contextualization solution

What is contextualization?

Contextualization is the practice of seamlessly integrating e-commerce shopping opportunities into a shoppers daily life, regardless of what channel they’re on or where in the buying process. With contextualization, your shoppers are able to find and purchase products within the context in which they discover them, be it on an app, social platform, email, or wherever they are. In practice, this could be a voice command to an Amazon Echo or a “buy now” link on Instagram or a product page.

This hyper-personalized process delivers your customers (and potential customers) an elevated shopping experience which inspires more purchases.

But while personalization relies on information from customers that you’ve previously collected, contextualization anticipates shopper behavior and reacts based on this prediction. It’s like a digital version of reading a friend or family member’s body language.

The role of digital body language

Think about the last conversation you had with a friend over coffee. Chances are, words were just one part of how you communicated and understood each other. The unspoken element of body language also played a pivotal role. A tilt of the head, a furrowed brow, or a relaxed stance — these non-verbal cues often tell us more than words alone. 

Even if we’re not aware of doing so, we instinctively read, interpret, and react to these cues, adjusting our approach, tone, and even our words. This silent feedback guides us in how to build rapport, when to push forward, and when to step back. 

In e-commerce, you don’t have physical movements or facial expressions to guide you. Instead, you have digital body language, a virtual counterpart that is equally telling. Throughout the customer journey, every action a visitor takes — from the pages they linger on, to the products they zoom in on, to the reviews they read — is a form of digital body language. These contextual signals are rich with insights, mirroring the silent cues we rely on in personal interactions. 

Just as a smile or a frown in a physical store gives away a customer’s feelings, digital actions convey similar messages. A quick series of clicks might indicate excitement or urgency, while prolonged inactivity might suggest confusion or disinterest. Interpreting digital body language is what allows brands to understand and anticipate the needs and preferences of their customers, and create a more personalized, intuitive, and satisfying shopping journey.

How to analyze and respond to digital body language

Shoppers are leaving behind a valuable trail of digital breadcrumbs, but you need to decipher them and respond accordingly. This is best accomplished with machine learning software — tools that capture a vast array of user data, identifying patterns in behavior that might otherwise go unnoticed. 

For example, a customer’s hesitation at checkout, indicated by slower mouse movements, can be instantly recognized. The tech can then respond instantly by displaying a reassuring message about product quality, rich reviews, or a limited-time discount offer. 

One significant advantage of machine learning is its ability to analyze behavior without the need for user logins. Whether a shopper is a first-time visitor or a returning customer, you can glean valuable insights from their interactions on your site. But 97 – 98% of a website’s traffic is anonymous, which means that personalization based only on previous consumer data can fail to create contextual experiences for almost all of a site’s visitors.

And unlike traditional analytics, which require time for data processing and interpretation, machine learning operates in real-time. This immediacy is vital in the context of digital shopping, where a delay of minutes can mean the difference between a completed sale and an abandoned cart. 

Privacy concerns and first-party data

By now, you’ve realized that digital body language is essentially customer data, and acting on it (a.k.a. personalizing the shopping experience) inevitably involves collecting that data. With the collapse of third-party cookies set to become final by the end of 2024, how do you go about it in a way that’s safe and compliant? That’s where first-party data comes in.

First-party data is information collected directly from your customers through interactions with your brand –– be it clicks through to website, transactions, or product searches. Unlike third-party data, this information is owned only by your brand and is provided directly by your customers, meaning you don’t have to rely on data aggregators or third-party domains. And since it’s information you get directly from the source, it’s also more reliable than third-party data.

The key concept when talking about first-party data is consent. This means that to be compliant, you need explicit permission from customers to collect information about how they interact with you. You’ve likely seen this at work before, with websites asking you for permission to store first-party cookies on your browser while also giving you the option to opt in or out of data collection.

To ensure website visitors opt in, be transparent and make it clear that it’s a win-win situation. Tell them what data you’re collecting and why. 67% of shoppers are comfortable giving out their behavioral data to allow brands to enhance their experiences, so explain that by accepting, their information will be used precisely for that purpose. 

Contextualization strategies in action

You have your customers’ permission to freely collect their data. Now, it’s time to make the magic happen and use the information to personalize each interaction to their hearts’ content.

Displaying relevant product recommendations

What if you could waltz into a store where every product on display had been handpicked for you? The colors match your taste, the sizes are just right, and every item seems to call out to your unique preferences. You’d likely linger for a while and spend a lot more money than if you were faced with a pile of generic items you had to sift through until something stood out. The same logic can be applied to an e-commerce scenario.

By leveraging data like browsing history, purchase patterns, and search queries, you can curate personalized product suggestions that resonate with each shopper. For instance, if a customer frequently views outdoor gear, showing them the latest camping equipment or hiking apparel would enhance their shopping experience.

Types of product recommendations you can display based on customer data include: 

• Similar Items: Suggest products similar to what the customer is currently viewing, like showing different styles of running shoes to a shopper browsing a specific sneaker. 

• Previously viewed items: Remind customers of items they’ve looked at in the past, which can be particularly effective in nudging them towards a purchase. 

• Cross-selling: Suggest items that complement the customer’s current selection, like recommending a phone case to a customer buying a smartphone. 

• Upsell recommendations: Offer premium or upgraded versions of the products the customer is interested in. 

• Location-based recommendations: Tailoring suggestions based on the customer’s location can significantly enhance relevance. For example, suggesting lightweight clothing to customers in warmer climates or snow gear to those in colder regions. 

Online marketplace Vinted suggests products based on the shopper’s previously bought items.

Personalizing website elements

Websites are dynamic and rich with elements that can be tailored with dynamically updating content that resonates with each shopper. From the moment a customer lands on your page, you can make it so the layout, the content, and the offers are aligned with their interests and behaviors.

One effective approach is to recognize and cater to returning customers. This can be as simple as displaying discounts and highlighting the popularity of items they viewed but didn’t purchase during their last visit. A feature like this not only saves time for the shopper but also demonstrates that your brand values their interest and time. 

Other key website areas can dynamically adapt to the visitor’s preferences and behaviors. This includes: 

• Homepage banners: Tailor these to showcase products or offers relevant to the visitor’s past interactions. If they’re a first-time visitor, highlight your best-selling or featured products to give them a taste of what your brand offers

• Product pages: Adjust product descriptions and images based on what the visitor has shown interest in previously

• Product categories: Customize the display order of categories or highlight specific ones based on the user’s browsing history or the popularity of products within that category 

• Checkout or shopping cart page: Personalize these pages with last-minute additions based on the items in the cart or make the shopper feel great about their choices by highlighting how much money they’re saving

Amazon encourages customers to pick where they left off and prominently displays the most relevant product categories based on previous website behavior.

Enabling dynamic pricing

Dynamic pricing involves adjusting prices based on factors like demand, competitor pricing, and inventory levels. For example, during high-demand periods, such as holiday seasons, prices may increase slightly. In the context of personalization, dynamic pricing means leveraging a customer’s purchase history and engagement levels to adapt pricing in real time.

Past purchase data provides insights into your customers’ preferences and spending habits. For instance, if a customer frequently purchases high-end products, they might be more receptive to premium offerings at slightly higher price points.

Conversely, customers who typically look for deals or budget items could be more price-sensitive, and offering them competitively priced products could increase the likelihood of repeat purchases.

Customer engagement is another critical factor in dynamic pricing. Customers who regularly interact with your site — whether through frequent visits, newsletter sign-ups, or consistent browsing — show a higher level of interest in your products. This engagement can be a signal to offer personalized discounts or deals, encouraging them to move from browsing to purchasing.

It’s important to remain transparent so you can maintain trust and prevent potential dissatisfaction. Customers should be aware that prices may vary based on several factors, including demand, seasonality, and their shopping behavior. 

Adopting triggered messaging

Triggered messages are automated responses to specific actions taken by customers while they peruse your website. Although usually pre-set by e-commerce teams rather than using diigtla body language, they’ll still improve the shopping experience.

Whether someone adds an item to their cart, spends time on a particular product page, or even shows signs of leaving the website, each action can trigger a tailored message that encourages them to move forward in their journey.

Triggered messages can look like:

• Welcome messages: Sent immediately after a new subscription or account creation, these set the tone for the customer relationship (and often include discounts for first-time visitors) 

• Abandoned cart reminders: Target customers who have added items to their cart but haven’t completed the purchase, gently nudging them to return. These usually pop up when the customer is about to leave the website, but can also appear when someone comes back

• Post-purchase follow-ups: Messages that thank the customer, provide shipping information, or suggest related products once they complete a purchase

• Special discounts: If a customer is lingering on a product page, a pop up can display a discount code, bundle deal, or a similar strategy that encourages purchase

• Time-sensitive/low-stock messages: These alerts inform customers about limited-time offers or notify them when an item they’ve shown interest in is running low in stock, or if it looks like the visitor is about to leave the page 

When it comes to triggered messages, timing matters. They should be sent when the customer’s interaction is still fresh so that the message is relevant and has a greater impact. 

Fashion brand Cider uses triggered messages to offer special discounts when first-time visitors access specific product pages.

Personalize the entire customer journey with a contextualization solution

Bazaarvoice’s AI-driven contextualization technology sets the stage for a new level of enhanced online shopping experiences and customer engagement. The solution offers unprecedented insights into shopper behavior, allowing you to deliver precisely timed, relevant content that resonates with each customer’s unique journey. 

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Our Shopper Experience index found that 78% of consumers say reviews impact their purchase decisions, and a separate survey revealed that 88% of shoppers use reviews to discover and evaluate products they’re considering. So how do you get that content in front of shoppers? With testimonial advertising.

Chapters:

1. What are testimonial ads?
2. Why are testimonial ads so effective?
3. Examples of online testimonial ads
4. Examples of in-store testimonial ads
5. UGC is the key to your testimonial ads success

What are testimonial ads?

A testimonial ad is putting your customers’ words on display in your marketing campaigns, both online and offline. As mentioned, customers trust their peers’ words over those of a brand, so it’s time for you to use those words to your advantage. 

In a time when the voice of the customer matters more than ever, testimonial ads are perceived as more honest and authentic to shoppers than strategic brand copy. If you have UGC in the form of ratings and reviews or you’re active on social channels, you already have a wealth of resources to pull your testimonial quotes from. 

Why are testimonial ads so effective? 

Testimonial ads work because people trust other people. In one survey, 76% of consumers said they trust online reviews as much as a recommendation from friends and family. Social proof is the idea that when we’re trying to make a decision, we look at the decisions our peers have made before to help. When we’re unsure about something, we’ll assume that someone else with more knowledge of the topic knows more than we do. 

For example, if you want to buy a new pair of noise-canceling headphones, but you don’t know a lot about tech, you’ll look to your peers. Maybe you’ll check out a tech blog, ask a friend, or read reviews of your top choices. You’re using others’ experiences to help make your decision. 

A product description crafted by your copy team is excellent, but a product description that details how customers use the product in their own words is better. Why? Because it provides social proof to online shoppers. And, by incorporating common customer use cases and customer phrasing into your product pages, it also helps improve search and marketing copy.

Read on for the best examples of testimonial ads we’ve seen.

Examples of online testimonial ads

Brands and retailers tend to use testimonial ads on multiple digital channels. You don’t have to limit testimonials to your product description pages or homepage. You can use them in email campaigns, social media posts, or out-of-home ads.

And don’t just think online testimonial ads only benefit your digital shelf, either. Our research shows that 30% of shoppers conduct online research while shopping in a physical store. Meaning these digital ads impact purchasing decisions everywhere your shoppers are.

Here’s a few brand examples of top-notch digital testimonial ads. 

1. Nisolo 

Ethical shoe and accessory brand Nisolo recently sent out this email campaign with the subject line “Comfy AND cute? You can have both!” And to hammer home the message that their shoes are actually comfortable, they used a quote from a recent review that highlights the stylishness and comfort of the shoe. 

2. Peloton

Fitness brand Peloton uses customer testimonials as part of their social media campaigns. They’ll post a customer photo with a quote about how Peloton has positively contributed to that person’s overall health journey. 

3. Brooklinen

Home essentials brand Brooklinen relies on the voice of the customer to sell their sheets. Since they’re sold online, curious shoppers can’t just feel the linens to see if they like them. That’s why the brand expertly uses big quotes on its homepage to provide real social proof to online shoppers. 

4. Gillette 

In a recent campaign, razor brand Gillette let the words of their customers speak for them. In this effective commercial, the brand displays customer reviews and shows how Gillette genuinely listens to the feedback from reviews to improve products.

5. Lush

Lush uses pull quotes from customers on their product detail pages (PDPs) to give shoppers more information. On this PDP for a bath bomb, the customer quote tells online shoppers how the bath bomb smells and how their skin felt after using it. Social proof like this can be highly beneficial for bath and body brands online because shoppers can’t see or smell the products in person. 

6. Hardys Wine

Having collected over 1,700 reviews through an offline marketing strategy, Hardys decided to incorporate them into online paid testimonial ads. The ads generated 10,000 clicks through to retail partner sites and decreased cost-per-click by 60%.

According to Alister Dell, Digital Marketing Manager at Hardys, “We’re really pleased to report that [using reviews in paid testimonial ads] has led to an increase in advertising effectiveness in the form of better cost-per-click and more engagement.”

Examples of in-store testimonial ads 

A lot of UGC is found online. It’s very easy for shoppers to access reviews, photos, and videos for products they’re curious about when browsing the web. But what about in-store shoppers?

In-store testimonial ads can help customers make better purchasing decisions too — 62% of shoppers look at UGC on their phones while shopping in a store. Many brands and retailers have begun making that process easier for customers by proactively displaying UGC in-store in the form of signage, digital displays and QR codes. Let’s take a look at the best in-store testimonial ads examples.  

1. Amazon

The online giant has a few brick-and-mortar stores across the country. In these stores, they curate items that customers have rated 4-stars or higher and sometimes include quotes from customer reviews on certain products.

Your brand doesn’t need to create a whole separate store for your highly-rated items, but you could consider using a small section of your store to showcase what customers love best and use quotes from reviews on signage and other displays as social proof. 

2. Neutrogena

Cosmetics and skincare brands can use in-store UGC to provide social proof for products that customers can’t open and test.

This display from Neutrogena highlights a customer’s 5-star review and uses a pull quote to describe what the customer loves about the product. 

3. Chobani

Food and beverage brands are another category that sometimes rely on UGC for social proof. In these billboards, Chobani could’ve written marketing copy about how good their yogurt tastes or what ingredients they use, but instead, they let their customers speak for them.

The brand uses customer tweets as quotes in a billboard to campaign to promote their yogurt and build trust with shoppers.

UGC is the key to your testimonial ads success

Putting your most compelling UGC front and center ensures your products are discovered and championed. By using testimonial ads mined from UGC in your marketing campaigns, website, social channels, and product pages, you’ll build trust and provide the authentic social proof that shoppers are looking for.

But the first step is having a comprehensive UGC program that allows you to gather consumer insights. Then, you can turn around and display this valuable content to inspire fast and confident purchases. 

Or if you’re a Bazaarvoice partner, you can leverage our Insights tool to quickly find customer quotes that can be used as testimonial ads on your product pages, emails, and other campaigns. And if you’re not a Bazaarvoice partner, get in touch below to learn more.

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Chances are you’ve most likely been to a Home Depot or ordered from them online. Need a new drill? Repainting your living room? Updating your lighting? Bored on a Sunday? It’s off to Home Depot. 

The home improvement retailer has 2,200 stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and offers more than one million products for its shoppers. They serve DIY customers, professional contractors, and installation businesses across North America. 

For brands that sell their products on HomeDepot.ca, figuring out how to maximize channel sales is critical for business. Brands can of course come to HomeDepot.ca with their own user-generated content (UGC) — like reviews, Q&As, and social posts — but the retail chain partners with Bazaarvoice specifically to provide robust UGC collection tools for brands. 

A UGC strategy done right increases the discoverability of products, boosts sales, and creates a valuable dialogue with customers and new shoppers. It also informs SEO benefits, provides insights for product innovation, reduces return rates, and ensures shoppers have a positive experience with your brand. The impact of reviews by numbers:

Customers who interact with UGC are 2x more likely to convert, according to Bazaarvoice research. Reviews help customers validate their purchasing decisions and feel more confident about the products they buy. 

Home Depot Canada has launched several Bazaarvoice solutions and features that improve the customer experience and help suppliers optimize UGC. One of its most successful solutions is its sampling program, the Home Depot Seeds Program. 

What is the Home Depot Seeds Program?

The Home Depot Seeds Program is a product sampling program that puts a brand’s high-priority products in the hands of Home Depot Canada’s most loyal shoppers, in exchange for honest reviews on HomeDepot.ca.

Bazaarvoice and Home Depot partnered to help brands select which key items to sample, identify Home Depot Canada audiences within the sampling community, and guide brands through fulfillment. 

How to leverage the Home Depot Seeds Program

Home Depot encourages its brands to enlist the Seeds Program for seasonal, exclusive, and new products. Or even any products that just need a fresh crop of reviews:

• New products: Brands can collect authentic UGC for products ahead of a new launch. Insights found within reviews ensure your products launch with a bang, and will help future shoppers feel confident about purchasing your new products
• Seasonal items: Optimize seasonal item product pages with UGC to boost discoverability and increase conversions during their limited time
• Home Depot exclusives: If your brand sells products exclusively through Home Depot, then HomeDepot.ca is the only place where shoppers can see that valuable UGC
• Products with outdated reviews: Search engines like Google favor pages with fresh content, so a a continuous flow of review content means more traffic to your product pages, which means more sales

Getting started with Bazaarvoice + Home Depot

The Home Depot Seeds Program has already helped some brands on HomeDepot.ca more than double their conversion rates. In addition, the program has been so successful that Home Depot vendors in the United States are now interested in using it to collect reviews for their Canadian exclusive items and product launches. 

Learn more about the Bazaarvoice + Home Depot partnership and more ways you can utilize strategies to increase channel sales over on our partnership page. Or get in touch directly below to get started.

But what’s interesting is that while most brands recognize this, most are still catching up in fine-tuning their content strategies and channel investments to meet this new demand.

If you’re one of the brands looking to transform your shopping experience but aren’t sure of the best way to go about it, our new research has the answers to help you get started.

All stats are from our Shopper Experience Index report, unless stated otherwise.

Chapters:

1. What is voice of the customer?
2. 8 ways the voice of the customer transforms the shopping experience
3. How to successfully navigate using the voice of the customer
4. Get started with the voice of the customer

In today’s economy, where every purchase is given a second thought, delivering an exceptional shopping experience is essential — 98% of shoppers value experience over price. Even shoppers minimally affected by inflation and rising prices are looking to cut costs wherever they can. They’re questioning non-essential purchases, shopping around for bargains, and turning to more private-label brands.

But here’s the thing. Shoppers don’t want to hear about how great your products are from you — they want to hear it from your customers. Case in point: our research revealed that 74% of consumers trust shopper content more than brand-provided content on a product page.

So what can you do to meet their needs? 

Develop a voice of the customer strategy that helps you gather conversion-driving shopper content. Your voice of the customer content can also reveal insights that can be used to improve products, services, and the shopping experience. 

What is voice of the customer?

Voice of the customer (VoC) is the process of collecting and analyzing shopper feedback and then using this information to understand how consumers perceive a product, service, or brand. The feedback captures consumers’ opinions, preferences, and expectations through surveys, reviews, social media, and other channels.

Keeping a customer first mindset and learning from the outside in is a powerful tool for brands and retailers that want to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. And given that 78% of consumers feel more confident in a purchase when they view content from other shoppers, it’s what consumers want to see.

User-generated content (UGC) is the voice of the customer in physical form. This shopper-created content, in the form of customer reviews, Q&As, and social imagery and videos, is a reflection of a customer’s authentic voice. It can be used on your website, product pages, and social media channels, and every part of your digital shelf to transform the shopping experience — and drive growth.

VOC value for brands and retailers

It’s no surprise that 67% of brands and retailers intend to increase UGC spend in the next year. Currently, brands and retailers are using UGC to:

• Improve the shopper experience (80%)
• Increase product discovery (79%)
• Increase conversions (78%)
• Improve marketing messaging (76%)
• Improve product pages (74%)
• Boost SEO (68%)
• Reduce returns (67%)

But how does your organization view the voice of the customer? And does it include user-generated content today? If not, it’s time for a review.

8 ways the voice of the customer transforms the shopping experience

From more sales to more satisfied customers, here’s eight ways voice of the customer marketing can help you boost engagement throughout the buying cycle. 

1. Drive more sales  

For many brands and retailers, the most appealing aspect of tapping into the voice of the customer is that it helps them increase sales.

• Over half of shoppers say they’re unlikely to buy a product that doesn’t feature any type of customer opinion-sharing content
• More than 75% of consumers say reviews and Q&As affect their purchase decisions 
• 69% agree photos of products taken by other shoppers have an impact on their purchases 

When it comes to UGC, consumers want to see a variety of content. A 5-star rating is nice, but shoppers need more context to feel confident in their purchase.

In the first 20 seconds of landing on a product page, consumers say high-quality reviews will have the biggest impact on their shopping experience, followed by average star ratings. The number of reviews will also determine whether they add the product to their cart (we’ll have more on how much user-generated content you need in a minute). Shoppers also want to see reviews that are relevant to their experiences and use cases.

Consumers are willing to do their research. For high-cost items, 89% of shoppers will spend 5 minutes or more reading user-generated content like reviews, images, and social content before making a purchase. Even for low-cost items, more than half of shoppers are willing to spend at least 5 minutes reading other shoppers’ reviews and feedback. 

Voice of the customer doesn’t just affect your online sales, either. When we look at our network data and omnichannel research, we see consumers relying on opinion-sharing content even when they’re shopping in-store. 

For example, the average ROBO (research online, buy offline) multiplier for brands in the Bazaarvoice Network is 3.91x — meaning that for every $1 of revenue influenced online, VoC content influences $3.91 in-store.

Each industry has different ROBOs. For example, health and beauty products see an average of $5.26 of additional in-store sales for every $1 of sales influenced by voice of the customer content online.

2. Stand out in search 

With 70% of consumers open to trying a new brand or product during the present economic downturn, now’s the time to stand out on search.

Voice of the customer content, like reviews and other user-generated photos and videos, provide a consistent stream of fresh content, a major factor in Google’s ranking criteria.

When someone else searches for the same terms found in product reviews, those product pages will appear higher in search results. The clickthrough rate of long-tail keywords is also 3% to 6% higher than broad searches, and they’re also less competitive to rank for than shorter keywords.

But search is changing. One of the biggest revelations from our study is that social media is the new search engine. While traditional search engines (Google, Bing) are still the primary place shoppers start their online journey, social media (Instagram, TikTok) is also playing an increasingly important role, with 58% of shoppers saying they discovered a product or service through social media (as opposed to 49% through search engines).

Over half (58%) of shoppers say they often discover a product or service through social media, and 49% agree they’re more likely to find products and services on social than any other channel. 

Social media influences the full shopper journey especially for younger age groups. For example, while 50% of all shoppers have bought products via social media in the past year, this percentage increases to 73% among 18-34-year-olds and 64% among 35-44-year-olds.

To effectively meet shopper expectations, it’s crucial to engage with customers on their preferred platforms. Meet them at their watering holes. Nowadays, that’s predominantly on social media.

3. Acquire new customers

Another takeaway from the report is that current economic conditions and changes in buyer behavior present a unique opportunity for retailers and brands. 

To save money during the financial downturn, shoppers are open to trying new brands and products. More than 2 in 3 shoppers (70%) say they’re willing to consider switching to a new brand, even for products they normally buy.

The changes in where people shop are also providing additional opportunities to meet consumers where they are in their buying journey and give them the extra info they need to move forward. 

4. Reduce content creation costs

Let’s be real. Content creation takes time and not all of your products will have the same content resources allocated to them. And whether you have a team of full-time writers or are paying an outside agency, branded content creation can be time consuming and expensive. It’s a much more cost-effective to have a content supply chain of branded and non-branded content than producing all your content in-house.

To add to these challenges, many brands separate branded top-of-funnel content and bottom-of-funnel content and the teams that manage them. The beauty of UGC is that it can serve multiple purposes at multiple stages of the buying process. With UGC, you have a largely untapped resource of full-funnel content to curate and ignite to add to your current branded content.  

It’s also more likely to inspire trust than anything your team or an outside agency develops. On a product page, 74% of consumers trust shopper content more than the brand-provided content.

5. Build brand consistency across channels

We found that 75% of consumers expect to get the same experience from a brand regardless of the channel. This sounds a given, but in the digital age, your brand’s reputation is largely shaped by what customers are saying about you online. To protect your brand image and reputation, and deliver a consistent brand experience wherever shoppers are, you’ll need to embrace and share the voice of the customer (more on that to follow), listen to their feedback, and adapt strategies accordingly.

Voice of the customer content works across the funnel and enhances all of your customer acquisition channels. It can inspire a top-of-funnel blog post on your website or it can serve as a standalone social media post. And it can make for a more powerful product page experience. By telling the same story at multiple customer touch points, voice of the customer helps create a more consistent shopping experience. 

6. Collate customer feedback and trust

Showing that you’re interested in your customers’ opinions and feedback helps cultivate a sense of brand loyalty. By showcasing and taking action on user-generated content, you’re showing customers you care about what they think and are eager to learn from their experiences.

• 16% of shoppers consider themselves to be proactive creators who actively seek out opportunities to share their opinions
• 36% identify as reactive contributors. They’re happy to share their opinions — when asked

So how do you tap into the power of proactive creators and boost the contributions of reactive shoppers? 

• 43% of shoppers say they prefer to receive an email asking for their opinion on a product they have purchased
• About 20% say they prefer to receive prompts via text messages, the retailer’s app, or an in-person interaction
• 35% say they would prefer to receive a sample to review
• 70% of consumers are open to a brand asking to share their social media post or video — as long as they’ve given the brand permission to do so

The bottom line is this: consumers want to see shopper content about your brand. And consumers want to leave feedback about your brand. You can easily foster a customer loyalty loop by enabling both.

7. Build trust — especially during a downturn

During a downturn, shoppers are turning to user-generated content to make sure they’re getting the best value for their money. They want to make sure they are getting the right product for their needs.

This trend is more extreme in the US, where 43% of shoppers are turning to other customers’ opinion-sharing content to make sure they’re making the right decision. Younger shoppers, including 50% of 18- to 20-year-olds and 51% of 25- to 34-year-olds, rely on user-genrated content to discover, consider, and purchase new products and brands.

8. Set expectations

A customer wrote a negative review. Time to freak out, right? Not necessarily. Negative reviews can actually be a boost to your voice of the customer program. 

In a separate survey we recently published, over half (60%) of respondents said that negative reviews are as important as positive reviews in their decision to buy a product. They give consumers a true sense of a product or service.

• 75% of shoppers say it’s important to read a balance of positive and negative reviews when purchasing to set expectations correctly

Negative reviews also provide an opportunity to engage with consumers. By responding to, and acting on, negative feedback, you’ll foster more trust and loyalty with customers. 62% of consumers expect a response from the company when they leave a negative review, so give them one.

How to successfully navigate the voice of the customer

Knowing the benefits of tapping into the voice of the customer and how it can transform your shopping experience is one thing, but knowing the tactics pitfalls to watch out for is another. There’s a few best practices to follow that ensure you provide the most authentic voice possible and keep up with content demands.

Keep up with consumers’ need for shopper content

When it comes to user-generated content, consumers want to read a lot of reviews and ratings before they feel comfortable completing their purchase:

• 63% of shoppers need a product to have more than 10 reviews 
• 28% of shoppers need a product to have more than 50 reviews

And it’s not just reviews. The vast majority of consumers also want to see user-generated images in addition to branded photos:

• 76% say they need to see shopper photos to make a confident purchase
• 64% of shoppers expect to see shopper photos on product pages
• 69% of shoppers want to see user-generated videos to feel more confident about their purchase 

But a slew of good visual UGC and reviews from 2019 won’t cut it. Around half of shoppers say recent reviews are more reliable than older ones. The majority of shoppers (55%) are confident in reviews when they’re less than 3 months old.

Some tactics for easily collecting fresh UGC include product sampling, where you send product samples in exchange for honest feedback, or review request emails, which automatically request a review post-purchase. You can also tap existing communities of everyday content creators like the Influenster App.

If you can, consider translating your existing reviews. The majority of shoppers (62%) say they trust translated reviews. That trust is higher in places like Canada (67%), France (67%), and Spain (75%).

Brand safety and authenticity are paramount

As voice of the customer content like reviews and user-generated videos become more popular, so do the efforts of bad actors who are trying to scam the system. 

Fake reviews can come from a variety of places, be it disruptive or trolling activity, commercial messages, generative AI submissions (we’ll talk more about those in the next section), illegitimate or degrading content by a competitor, and self-promotion by employees.

Protecting your brand from fake reviews is essential — you want to showcase the authentic voice of your customers, not fake or fraudulent voices. According to a recent Bazaarvoice survey, typically the behaviors that cause the most suspicion among consumers are:

• Multiple reviews with similar opinions on the same product (55%)
• Review content not matching the product (49%) 
• Bad grammar/spelling mistakes (36%) 
• An overwhelming number of 5-star/positive reviews (35%)

Fake reviews aren’t just making it harder for shoppers to trust voice of the customer content. They also put your brand at risk of legal recourse. For example, in the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently announced two important regulations to battle fake reviews:

• They published the final Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. This is the first refresh of the guides since 2009 and it provides new and updated guidance around endorsements by social media influencers as well as ratings and reviews 
• The proposed Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials clarifies what constitutes a “fake” review

Regardless of how you collect your voice of the customer content, remember that you should never ask for or incentivize positive reviews.

If consumers are offered a free product, promotional material (such as discounts or coupons), or a chance to win something of value in exchange for providing an unbiased review, then we recommend adding descriptors such as “this reviewer received a free product in exchange for their honest feedback” to any reviews collected via a promotion. 

The future of the voice of the customer

Like we mentioned, emerging tech like generative AI — the advanced technology that powers applications like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google Bard — can be used to create fake reviews. That’s the bad news.

But it can also make providing high quality user-generated content far easier for shoppers to provide and brands/retailers to personalize and learn from, which is better news. The goal is to ensure AI supports the the customer voice, not replace it. And in a separate research peak we recently undertook around AI and UGC, we learned:

• About half of consumers (49%) would like to write a review on a website where generative AI guides them on what categories to cover
• Almost half (45%) say they would trust websites more if they put measures in place to protect against voice of the customer content fully generated by AI

Get started with the voice of the customer

Voice of the customer is a commerce goldmine. Especially so during an economic downturn. 

With shoppers becoming more cautious about their spending habits — and being more open to new products and services — tapping into the voice of the customer in the form of user-generated content can help savvy brands and retailers stand out in a crowded marketplace.

It provides a treasure trove of insights that, when used effectively, can significantly enhance the shopping experience, drive conversions and revenue, instil trust and loyalty, and provide essential guidance to consumers in a rapidly evolving retail landscape. 

Brands and retailers that embrace the voice of the customer and use it to adapt to the ever-changing shopping experience have the unique opportunity to thrive. Eager to get started? Learn more about how the voice of the customer is affecting the consumer journey in this year’s full Shopper Experience Index report.

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Shopper Experience Index: Volume 17

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This comprehensive guide to thought leadership strategy for brands and retailers will explain the benefits of thought leadership marketing and what quality thought leadership content actually looks like, including examples from consumer brands.

Chapters:

1. Thought leadership marketing benefits and metrics
2. How to get started with thought leadership content strategy
3. Create brand momentum with owned media 
4. Convert momentum into revenue with earned media
5. Fuel brand momentum with shared media
6. Why a thought leadership strategy needs authenticity to work

Tech and finance workers in New York City adopted a new look after 2008’s economic downturn, one that reigns supreme today: a button-down, slacks, and a Patagonia vest. Patagonia, an outdoor brand known for their commitment to sustainability, was an incongruous staple in the “midtown uniform,” but a staple it became. One might see a sweater knit, a Nano Puff, and a fleece on the same Murray Hill city block, but all three vests will be Patagonia. And until recently, the finance worker’s vest might have included a logo of Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, or Goldman Sachs.

In 2019, Patagonia decided to stop selling logo-clad fleece vests to finance firms through their corporate sales program, a move that was lauded by the press and Patagonia’s core audience of outdoor enthusiasts alike. While the decision came with accolades, it also carried risk: in excluding finance companies from corporate sales, Patagonia intentionally walked away from a cash-flush market of consumers who were unexpectedly loyal to their products.

Patagonia initially said they’d continue to work with “mission-driven companies that prioritize the planet” in corporate sales, but in 2021, they doubled down on the strategy, deciding to transition away from corporate logos altogether. The move impacted Silicon Valley tech workers, in particular, who often donned a similar uniform to their East Coast counterparts.

Shutting down their practice of adding other companies’ logos to their clothing was a landmark move in Patagonia’s brand marketing, one that gave credibility to decades of thought leadership strategy.

Patagonia’s brand has its roots in climate impact — before launching Patagonia in 1973, founder Yvon Chouinard was working on a way to reduce rock damage from steel pitons. Until the early 1990s, they were more product-driven, focusing thought leadership campaigns on textile innovation in the 1970s and 1980s. Patagonia returned to their sustainable roots in the early ’90s, pivoting their brand and marketing strategy toward sustainability without abandoning textile technology completely. 

Patagonia’s pivot paid off. But it took time, consistency, focus, and action to succeed. Patagonia’s decades of commitment to sustainable practices — using cause marketing to evangelize their message — earned the brand a meaningful reputation as a commercial thought leader in sustainability in the modern era. Today, Patagonia is considered one of the world’s most powerful brands.

Thought leadership marketing benefits and metrics

At its core, thought leadership is about building credibility as a brand. By showcasing unique strengths and passions that exist at the heart of a brand through content, consumer marketers build trust, foster loyalty, and stand out from competitors.

Why focus resources on building brand strength when about three-quarters of brands say that economic pressures will impact media budgets and performance marketing is easier to prove? Ignoring brand strength isn’t about vanity metrics — it’s about revenue and resilience. 

Brand strength makes everything else in marketing — including direct response — easier and cheaper. A strong brand is the basis of a resilient consumer business, one with a large base of loyal customers who repurchase, engage, and evangelize. 

Revenue-resilient thought leadership takes alignment between a brand, its consumers, and industry experts. If a brand is beloved by experts but not by consumers, it can’t grow. If it’s beloved by consumers but side-eyed by scientists, it can’t sustain its market share indefinitely.

How to get started with thought leadership content strategy

No brand is equipped to become a thought leader about everything. If your brand doesn’t know itself well enough to focus on one core message, you’ll have a harder time building enough traction with consumers or media to develop a reputation as a thought leader. A thought leadership strategy takes depth, experience, commitment, and focus over a long period of time, and successful thought leaders pick one topic and stick with it. 

Brands that have developed momentum in thought leadership marketing tend to focus on either values or products but rarely both in the same measure at the same time. 

It’s possible to be value-driven and product-driven as a brand. However, successful thought leaders put one or the other at the center of their thought leadership marketing strategy to fuel momentum in a single direction over time.

Value-driven thought leadership uses emotion to examine why a company exists and showcases their positive impact on the world. Product-driven thought leadership uses logic to showcase proprietary technology, unique product expertise, or original opinions about a product category. 

Compare Dyson, another one of the world’s most powerful brands, to Patagonia. While both have used a thought leadership marketing strategy to build and retain brand strength over decades, Patagonia now focuses on values, while Dyson continues to showcase their engineering expertise. Dyson’s relentless commitment to invention and innovation gives them a competitive edge over alternatives in multiple verticals — something they reinforce with content marketing.

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A post shared by Dyson (@dyson)

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A post shared by Dyson (@dyson)

Product-driven thought leaders like Dyson build trust through expertise and logic. On Dyson’s blog, the brand showcases the curiosity and brilliance of their engineering team to humanize and clarify product features. This interview with Dyson engineer Tim Jukes takes customers behind the scenes of a proprietary technology. Jukes details a summer-long meteorological study he conducted to recreate the feeling of a natural breeze, which was eventually incorporated into Dyson’s air purifiers.

Value-driven thought leaders rally their existing audiences around a cause. Patagonia’s video about plastic called The Monster in Our Closet, featured prominently on their website, is an anxiety-inducing manifesto about the problems of plastic in apparel, including Patagonia’s own products. 13 seconds into the video, climate advocate Maxine Bédat says, “The planet freaking needs this, and we don’t have time to be d****** around. Excuse me.”

There’s emotion in Bédat’s voice, a call to action for Patagonia’s audience to create change in collaboration with the brand.

1. Create brand momentum with owned media 

Owned media, like email, is the ideal place to create momentum toward a brand goal by seeding advocacy with happy customers.

Patagonia collaborated with Bédat, an existing thought leader in textile sustainability, to strengthen their own brand. In a case where a company’s founder or executive is value-driven and vocal themselves, brands often leverage the founder’s own voice in thought leadership content.

Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of values-driven spice company Diaspora, uses owned media to showcase her brand’s commitment to ethical sourcing. When Diaspora launched Surya Salt in 2023, Javeri Kadri focused the brand’s email announcement on ethics, not product, and signed the email herself. By detailing the mistreatment of Indian salt farmers during British imperial rule and explaining the “awful labor practices” that still exist in the salt industry, Javeri Kadri issued a rallying cry to Diaspora’s customers to help the brand solve an important societal problem through a commercial product.

On product pages, Diaspora reinforces their commitment to ethical sourcing by surfacing regularly updated wage statistics for each product. As of August 2023, Diaspora’s living wage for Surya Salt was more than 14x higher than the Fair Trade International price.

Diaspora is vocal about one thing — ethical sourcing — on every channel. Diaspora’s focus, consistency, and commitment to a specific brand value is why the brand has a reputation as a thought leader in spices, a notoriously competitive space, in a relatively short time.

All of that brand advocacy turns into revenue. When Diaspora launched a $145 salt cellar in the shape of a tiger to complement Surya Salt, the first production run sold out in 41 minutes.

Thought leadership tactics to try on owned media:

• Conduct an in-house research project and publish the results to build credibility, like Dieux’s clinical study on cannabinoids in Deliverance Serum
• Promote a value-based blog post on a store page to deepen brand affinity, like apparel brand Eileen Fisher’s feature on their Regenerative Cotton, which they featured on their cotton collection page
• Surface user-generated content (UGC) that promotes key differentiators or resonant brand values on your product page to improve conversion rates, the same way Iconic London did with their liquid highlighter 
• Humanize a brand value with personal narratives to resonate on an intimate level, like perfume brand Scent Trunk’s Q&As with their perfumers

Leverage owned media to clarify brand positioning and deepen affinity with a core audience before growing traffic and purchase intent on other channels.

2. Convert momentum into revenue with earned media

Earned media, or content that others create to celebrate your brand and your messaging, is great for converting an audience of non-purchasers to loyal customers. UGC, press, and PR are all earned media and can all be used to convert awareness into revenue. 

A product-driven thought leadership marketing strategy tends to produce UGC about products but not values, while value-driven thought leadership campaigns result in a mix. Diaspora’s audience posts UGC about the brand’s values and their products, while Dyson’s customers overwhelmingly create content about Dyson’s products. A search for “dyson” on TikTok is full of demo videos from real customers using their hair styling tools and stick vacuums. One demo of the Dyson Airstrait has 15.9 million views. 

East Fork, a pottery brand, has earned glowing features in media publications that celebrate their thought leadership in both ceramics and equitable business practices. The New York Times celebrated chief executive Connie Matisse’s candor and commitment to issues like wage equity. Architectural Digest focused on founder Alex Matisse’s artistic distinction in ceramics, highlighting his family connection to both Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp. 

Together with their co-founder John Vigeland, Connie Matisse and Alex Matisse have leveraged traditional media to turn East Fork into a thought leader and resilient business by each focusing on their areas of passion and expertise. As East Fork grows, their thought leadership messaging leans more and more in the direction of Connie Matisse’s focus. Their owned media platforms now feature values front and center, a cue to earned media that East Fork is about equity. 

Traditional media and industry outlets can be powerful advocates in building thought leadership, or they can negate a brand’s claims and disrupt momentum toward thought leadership objectives. In 2023, NPR and The Washington Post both published skeptical, even critical, articles about the prebiotic soda industry, questioning the validity of health claims from brands like Poppi.

Harper’s Bazaar was more forgiving of the industry but still refused to validate prebiotic soda brands as thought leaders. Writer Katie Intner concluded, “The wellness benefits of these tonics might be hard to quantify, but the experience of sipping one — and Instagramming it — makes me happy, and isn’t that a benefit in and of itself?”

Poppi has since removed thought leadership content from their website, including a consumer study about gut health and blog posts detailing prebiotic benefits. Instead, Poppi is doubling down on UGC, sending free products to popular influencers like Miriam Ezagui to generate buzz and featuring UGC from creators like Cassie Yeung on their homepage. 

Poppi competitor OLIPOP is testing the opposite approach to combat skepticism with thought leadership — their gut health study is still available on their website alongside resources on probiotics and the microbiome. 

Surfacing UGC in a prominent place builds trust, improves conversion, and reinforces a thought leadership campaign’s core message. In a regulated space like consumer packaged goods, UGC is helpful but not enough to build credibility as a thought leader. Pair UGC with PR campaigns to generate industry press on thought leadership campaigns and foster more trust in the market.

Thought leadership tactics to try with earned media include:

• Quantify the revenue impact using earned media value (EMV) to identify valuable placements and influencers to extend your best experiments
• Leverage UGC as a source of inspiration for thought leadership campaigns to resonate with consumers using their own words

Brands have limited control over earned media. Promote and surface the placements and UGC that reinforce core messaging to build momentum for thought leadership objectives.

3. Fuel brand momentum with shared media

Shared media refers to a channel where you have access to an audience through a third party but cannot access that audience through another tool — like social media. Leverage channels like TikTok and Instagram to reach new audiences and build awareness of thought leadership marketing campaigns. 

Established brands like Everlane pair conversational videos on shared media with long-form content on owned media. Everlane uses long-form thought leadership content to clarify their brand position and connect values to corporate action, while short-form content on shared media distills thought leadership into bite-sized messages for the everyday consumer.

Everlane focused their lens of transparency on recycling, taking customers behind the scenes of their partner recycling facilities on TikTok and publishing personal narratives of recycling professionals on their blog. 

Intimates brand Cherri, founded in 2019, uses grassroots techniques and a shared-media-first approach to build thought leadership in their marketing strategy. In a 2023 interview, founder Gabriella Scaringe said, “It wasn’t until 2021 when I discovered TikTok that Cherri was really born.”

That year, Scaringe went viral on the platform with a video talking about insecurities and underwear. It received supportive comments from other consumers who shared her frustrations, which inspired Scarine to focus on gusset sizing in her thought leadership content. 

Scaringe built on her overnight popularity with a research campaign to study whether gussets on the market actually fit the modern consumer. According to her study of over 5,000 people, the average vulva is 2.5 inches wide, while intimate brands’ average gusset is 1.8 inches wide. Scaringe’s videos generated millions of views, inspiring a new area of brand focus and catalyzing a groundswell of brand advocacy for Cherri. Scaringe continues to build on the success of her thought leadership campaign, criticizing other industry studies for only focusing on Caucasian women and inviting her audience to participate in Cherri’s ongoing research.

Dieux, a skincare brand founded in 2020, uses opinionated thought leadership content on social media to stand out in a crowded space. Dieux’s approach is still about product but with progressive values woven through to build advocacy with their target audience. In CEO Charlotte Palermino’s popular Sunscreen Diaries series, Palermino frequently criticizes U.S. sunscreen legislation. 

Palermino explains the challenges of formulating a sunscreen that doesn’t leave a white cast through videos of herself and Dieux’s team trying lab samples with mixed results. In August 2023, Palermino even collaborated with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to spark conversations on sunscreen filters, claiming that the U.S. is lagging behind countries like South Korea due to regulation practices.

Thought leadership tactics to try on shared media:

• Share key insights from a research project similar to Diaspora’s recent Instagram update on their Farm Worker Fund
• Build in the open, like Dieux’s TikTok series about the obstacles they face in trying to formulate a sunscreen that doesn’t leave a white cast
• Experiment with UGC on paid social campaigns to improve click-through rate, like Parachute, which improved click-through rate by 35% using UGC in paid social ads

Shared media is powerful but volatile. Balance shared media with more predictable channels, like email, to avoid disruptive peaks and valleys in engagement metrics.

Why a thought leadership strategy needs authenticity to work

Brands fall short of becoming thought leaders when they aren’t committed to backing their marketing messages with meaningful — even risky — actions. Yes, even the ones that spend a lot of money on their thought leadership marketing strategy.

Thought leadership takes more than high-quality content and high marketing budgets. Publishing a clinical study doesn’t automatically make a brand a thought leader. Writing an opinion piece doesn’t either. Over a long period of time, those pieces of content can fuel the groundswell necessary to strengthen a brand’s reputation — if they’re focused on the same core message and backed by meaningful action.

Otherwise, it’s just fluff. And in an era when consumers are exhausted by marketing, fluff isn’t enough.

In order to generate momentum, not scandal, thought leadership content must be grounded in truth and backed by action. Diaspora doesn’t just talk about ethical sourcing — they’ve structured their entire company to support that goal. Dyson doesn’t just talk about innovation; they hire inventors who routinely invent new technologies.

It’s not enough to pick a buzzy topic and post an opinionated take on the blog. It’s not enough to claim a brand value on a website and run a splashy campaign to improve a brand’s image. Without years of focus, commitment, and systemic action, those tactics aren’t a thought leadership strategy — they’re just PR.

A well-crafted thought leadership marketing campaign can break through the noise and engage rather than exhaust consumer audiences. Thought leadership takes time to pay off, but getting started is easy. Start asking high-value customers for UGC to kickstart inspiration and foster trust almost immediately. Not sure how? Try this on-demand masterclass: How to collect content that engages and converts.

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How UGC strengthens customer relationships to grow your brand

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Chapters:

1. What is multi-touch attribution?
2. How to collect the right data for multi-touch attribution
3. Multi-touch attribution and the customer journey
4. Types of multi-touch attribution model
5. Multi-touch attribution tools for a privacy-first world
6. Data won’t tell you everything

In a privacy-first world, legacy approaches to multi-touch attribution are neither accurate nor reliable. Ad services like Meta and Google continue to remove user-level tracking capabilities from their reports in response to regulations, and marketers who rely on third-party cookies to quantify the mid-funnel are doomed.

User-level data is less reliable than ever and low accuracy isn’t a winning start to data-driven decision-making.

So, what are data-driven marketers to do — go back to the siloed, single-touch attribution models of Web 2.0? In an omnichannel landscape where consumers interact with brands across channels prior to a conversion, single-touch attribution doesn’t make sense. An effective marketing strategy requires a cohesive set of tactics that build on each other’s efforts to create and maintain momentum in a focused direction. 

Single-touch attribution only allows marketers to look at one tactic at a time, usually in the discovery or conversion stages. Marketers who rely on single-touch attribution to understand multi-channel strategies risk myopic decision-making by ignoring critical mid-funnel tactics. Brands need a fuller picture of what’s contributing to success to make informed multi-channel decisions. 

What is multi-touch attribution?

Multi-touch attribution is a marketing model that measures every touchpoint on the customer journey by assigning a numerical value to each channel so that marketers can see the impact each touchpoint has on conversions.

The mid-funnel is hard to measure, but investing resources in quantifying the mid-funnel pays off. Mid-funnel marketing makes a brand’s acquisition efforts more successful by lifting conversion rates across multiple channels. It also smooths the path to retention by building advocacy early, improving LTV, and taking pressure off of customer acquisition. 

Multi-touch attribution — assigning value to every stage of the customer journey — is still an important framework, but today’s version is a far cry from the third-party cookie-based approach marketers used to love. 

How to collect the right data

Third-party data collected through pixels and cookies used to be the primary source of multi-touch attribution. If a marketer wanted to track user behavior across channels, devices, and platforms, they just had to add a snippet of code to their website. Traffic would get tagged with a Facebook or Google cookie automatically without the user’s consent. That cookie would follow the user around the web to watch what they did and retarget them with relevant ads. Marketers would aggregate data from third-party cookies into multi-touch attribution reports to understand user behavior and optimize customer journeys. 

Today, that same user-level data is harder to access. GDPR and CCPA prompted Google, Facebook, and other platforms to phase out third-party cookies, a move that forced marketers to abandon tried-and-true methods of multi-touch attribution. 

Data-driven marketers have started to adapt to the new analytics landscape, leveraging first-party data and zero-party data to quantify performance across the marketing funnel.

The distinction between zero-party data and first-party data is relatively new. Until recently, all data that a brand collected was considered “first-party.”

Today, first-party data refers to quantitative behaviors that a brand tracks through their interactions with customers. First-party cookies, tags, and urchin tracking modules (UTM) are the common methods consumer brands use to collect first-party data. Omnichannel retailers might also track brick-and-mortar store visits in tandem with e-commerce customers’ behavior, like cart abandonment and email clicks. GDPR-compliant cookies can replace some of the metrics marketers used to track using third-party cookies.

Using them properly requires a privacy-first strategy that asks for consent and allows users to request that their personal data be deleted.

Zero-party data refers to qualitative information a customer tells a brand voluntarily. Customer support conversations, product reviews, survey responses, and social media comments all fall under the umbrella of zero-party data. Qualitative customer data can be invaluable to a brand if leveraged properly, but finding meaningful insights in text can be challenging to marketers used to relying solely on quantitative reports.

In an era of increased regulations and phased-out tracking systems, the best consumer marketers rely on Bazaarvoice’s zero-party qualitative insights to illuminate buyer journeys and find opportunities for growth.

Multi-touch attribution and the customer journey

Using multi-touch attribution in multi-channel marketing uncovers tactics to increase conversion rate, reduce average time to purchase, and improve average order value (AOV). 

Marketing tactics don’t exist in a vacuum — they exist in a multi-channel ecosystem. Giving full credit to any one tactic through single-touch attribution, no matter where it lies in the customer journey, ignores everything else that plays a role in customer acquisition. A brand’s relationship with prospective customers in the mid-funnel is crucial to earning more business and increasing revenue.

In a multi-channel marketing landscape, multi-touch attribution is the key to understanding what’s working and why. Consider this fictional six-step purchasing journey for a $500 Dyson vacuum cleaner. 

Using first-touch attribution, a marketing team might conclude that paid search was a clear winner. But paid search isn’t the full story. Dyson might not drive as many conversions without social proof from UGC and affiliates, which first-touch attribution can’t illuminate. 

If Dyson relied only on last-touch attribution, the team might decide to build their marketing strategy on discounting — a tricky move for a premium market player. Dyson’s products are unapologetically expensive, a pricing strategy that works because of Dyson’s proprietary technology and strong brand. Heavy discounting would counteract Dyson’s brand superpowers instead of complementing them, creating a race to the bottom that nobody can win.

Multi-touch attribution gives Dyson a better understanding of their paths to conversion, which presents more options for experimentation. Since UGC is known to improve conversion rate and plays a role in their (fictional) customer journey, Dyson might decide to experiment with more UGC ads the following quarter to increase revenue.

Types of multi-touch attribution model

Consumer marketers use linear, J-shaped, inverse J-shaped, and U-shaped models to attribute performance across the customer journey.

Linear attribution gives equal weight to every stage along the customer journey and gives marketers a balanced view of the path to conversion. It gives more credit to mid-funnel tactics than other models, which can be useful when focusing on the mid-funnel for the first time. 

It’s a good starting point, but it might inflate the value of unimportant interactions and undervalue crucial tactics. Linear attribution modeling can therefore help marketers challenge their own assumptions about what works but is rarely accurate enough in the long term to work for every scenario.

A traditional J-shaped model assigns more credit to the last stages of the customer journey, while an inverse J-shaped model puts more weight on the beginning stages of a customer journey.

U-shaped models, also called position-based models, assign equal weight to first and last touch with a smaller percentage attributed to everything in between.

Let’s look at how each type of multi-touch attribution would assign value to our fictional $500 vacuum buyer’s journey.

The attribution model a brand chooses depends on their scenario, priorities, and philosophies. Teams that are focused on building discovery might use an inverse j-shaped model to understand the beginning stages of their customer journey, while teams that are focused on the mid-funnel might apply a linear model to generate insights. 

Leveraging a multi-touch attribution model in multi-channel marketing

Here’s a scenario: a children’s apparel brand wants to find growth opportunities for their e-commerce channel. 

Using first-touch attribution, the team concludes that unbranded paid search traffic has a higher average order value (AOV) than customers acquired through paid social but generates less revenue overall.

If they stopped there, the apparel brand might conclude that despite the lower volume, paid search is a better use of their time and money. That could make sense but would increase end-of-month (EOM) revenue by a relatively small margin.

Baseline EOM Revenue: $212,350

Pairing a multi-touch attribution model with a first-touch report gives the team more options. 

When they run a buyer’s journey report in Segment, the team discovers that higher-AOV buyers from paid search traffic tend to visit a testimonial page on the store in the days preceding a purchase. The page highlights reviews from happy customers and is linked on product pages. 

Since the brand is looking at performance from an acquisition standpoint, they decide to use an inverse J-shaped model to understand the path to conversion from paid search, a high-AOV customer journey. 

After comparing the relative value of each interaction to those from lower-AOV buyers’ journeys, the team decides to direct paid social traffic to the testimonial page through a retargeting campaign, which might increase AOV from that channel.

Enter Scenario B: Leverage UGC, in this case ratings and reviews, to improve AOV and get more revenue from paid social. The team hypothesizes that AOV from paid social will increase to $99 as a result of the experiment. If it works, the experiment would increase revenue by a greater increment than Scenario A. 

Baseline EOM Revenue: $212,350

Multi-touch attribution puts complementary tactics in context, giving a team what it needs to make nuanced decisions with the constraints of their market and the strengths of their organization. 

Multi-touch attribution tools for a privacy-first world

Bazaarvoice’s suite of omnichannel commerce tools is the best way to collect zero-party data. 

Hardys Wines, the UK’s #1 wine brand, uses Bazaarvoice to collect zero-party data through ratings and reviews, two of the most important contributors to a purchasing decision. After syndicating reviews across retailers through Bazaarvoice’s platform, Hardys increased their review volume by 2,300% and improved their average star rating from 4.32 to 4.59.

Since many online shoppers filter results to show products rated 4.5 stars or higher, Hardys was able to get in front of more potential customers, building revenue across multiple channels with one mid-funnel tactic. Insights & Reports inside Bazaarvoice helps brands like Hardys maximize the value of zero-party data.

Pair Bazaarvoice’s tools with an owned marketing platform like Klaviyo to collect behavioral data that complements zero-party qualitative insights. Klaviyo’s customer profiles allow brands to map buyer journeys at the user level and then deliver a personalized experience through their suite of email and marketing tools. 

Leverage aggregation tools like Segment to quantify the customer journey across channels and uncover purchasing patterns at scale. Segment integrates first-party data flows from multiple sources, connecting insights to help consumer brands understand common buyers’ journeys and attribute performance across the entire purchasing journey.

With Segment’s Linked Profiles, consumer brands can segment customers based on affinity, buying patterns, and sentiment, getting more specific with multi-touch attribution to drive engagement and loyalty.

Data won’t tell you everything

Attribution models are just that — models. Every model has flaws, vulnerabilities, and blind spots. Brands that take quantitative data at face value without leaving room for nuance, insight, and intuition incur more risk, not more safety, in their overreliance on data. 

Multi-touch attribution is not perfect — even in the days prior to GDPR, multi-touch attribution models were never an unbiased picture of reality nor a foolproof blueprint for success. Every business uses a slightly different approach to marketing attribution — none are “wrong,” but all of them reflect different priorities and intrinsic biases.

Approaching multi-touch attribution like a model rather than a prescription is key to opening the door to strategic conversations and meaningful insights.

For a well-rounded view of customer behavior, pair quantitative attribution models with qualitative user data from Bazaarvoice. Ratings, reviews, and user-generated content are a goldmine of insights that consumer brands can leverage to understand their audience.

Bazaarvoice’s Insights & Reports tools equip brands with sentiment data, social analytics, and customer feedback trends to optimize the mid-funnel and improve conversion across channels.

Chapters:

1. What is marketing automation?
2. Benefits of marketing automation
3. How to implement a marketing automation strategy
4. Examples of successful marketing automation strategies
5. Prepare for big changes

The only constant in life is change — or in the e-commerce industry’s case, total digital transformation.

Marketing automation is an essential conductor of a huge range of digital operations required to meet consumer demand and the latest industry standards. Companies know they need to adopt marketing automation strategy, but many don’t know how. 

According to the McKinsey Global Survey, there’s an increase in the number of companies using automation technologies (70%), “yet few of these companies have achieved automation’s full potential.” Most respondents agree they can implement automation for some of their organizations’ tasks, but less than 20% have applied it more extensively across departments.

It will take a mindset shift and concerted effort for companies to widely introduce marketing automation. The ones that do will improve customer and employee satisfaction and ultimately grow their business. The survey respondents who had the most success with automation were the ones who made it a business priority. So, to borrow another trope, you have to go big or go home. 

Find out how to craft and execute an effective marketing automation strategy that will make your business run more smoothly, efficiently, and successfully.

What is marketing automation?

Essentially, marketing automation performs marketing tasks based on triggers. Software designed for these purposes manages tasks and stores the customer data necessary to execute and measure them. 

It’s a way to mechanize, streamline, and expedite targeted, data-driven marketing campaigns. Marketing automation can take over mechanical and repetitive day-to-day tasks from individuals, such as:

• Data visualization
• Content creation
• AI powered personalization
• Managing and segmenting email lists
• Manually launching individual social media campaigns
• Running paid ads campaigns

Automating tasks like these gives marketers and other team members space and time to focus on other priorities (that are likely a better use of their time ). 

Marketing automation is a crucial tool for delivering personalized content to customize the online shopping experience for your e-commerce site and app users. It does this by generating messages and notifications based on consumer data like website activity and purchase history.

It also provides real-time insights based on campaign results, so you can quickly and easily adjust and optimize targeting, messaging, and other details of your strategy as needed. 

Benefits of marketing automation 

Allowing digital tools to complete sometimes tedious yet impactful tasks has many benefits. Perhaps the most obvious is that your team doesn’t have to do them. You have to set up the tasks and monitor them, but the software does most of the work — and fast. Because time is money, this means the technology investment is definitely worth the saved operation costs and increased team productivity in other areas. 

Automation also enables personalized campaigns, improved targeting, lead generation, better customer experience, higher average order values (AOV) and conversions. And it provides rich customer data on demographics and behavior. 

The following chart shows the top benefits of marketing automation observed by global marketers who integrate it into their strategies. 

Regardless of these coveted outcomes, marketing automation is becoming more of a necessity for e-commerce brands and retailers to keep up with current trends and stay competitive. If you’re not automating, you’re not going to be as quick and nimble as the other guy.

How to implement a thoughtful marketing automation strategy

Before you enforce marketing automation as quickly and vigorously as possible, make a plan first. It might be tempting to forge ahead at full speed, but you need to be intentional about where and how to focus your automation efforts for the best results. 

1. Define the goals for your marketing automation strategy

Any good marketing strategy starts by defining what goals it wants to achieve, and the tactics should align with those goals. To identify your automation goals, start with the weaknesses and unmet needs in your current marketing program. That will guide all the actions you take to overcome those pain points and meet your goals, including what campaign types and channels you lean on for automation.  

Setting the goals for your marketing automation strategy will provide the “why,” which is where the real value is. This will also help you orchestrate your strategy. Orchestration means intentionally setting up the steps for automation, including the specific action that triggers each task.

Creating bandwidth and reducing task overload to prevent employee burnout is an example of a primary goal for your automation strategy. You could further refine that goal by thinking about what in particular your team is spending time on that’s keeping them from doing their best and most fulfilling work. This is already a leading goal for 78% of marketers who welcome the chance to hand off tasks to digital tools so they can devote more time to other priorities.

The need to provide online shoppers with a more personalized experience could be another important goal. In that case, you could consider automated personalization tactics — think targeted product recommendations and review request emails that feature product info and reviews based on shoppers’ website activity. 

The uses of marketing automation extend beyond marketing too, so other departments should collaborate on the best ways to leverage the tools you have. For example, SMS marketing and live chat are two automation possibilities that can provide significant support to your customer service team.

2. Decide what automation types and channels to leverage

Once you’ve established your goals, drill down on the channels that will produce the desired results. Below shows the current top channels used for marketing automation worldwide. Let’s dig deeper into the use-cases of some of these top channels.

Email marketing  

Email marketing is the top channel for automated campaigns worldwide, probably because it’s a main driver of customer acquisition and retention. Despite of what maybe some marketers think, email is still a versatile tool for sending targeted and relevant automated campaigns to customers. There’s many triggers you can program to deploy a variety of different emails. 

A big one is abandoned cart emails, prompted when a customer adds items to their online shopping cart but doesn’t follow through with the purchase. Email is also effective for generating product reviews that will encourage other shoppers to make purchases. These types of emails can increase product review volume by a whopping 4–9x. You can set a review collection email trigger for when an order has been delivered or a few days after, for example.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is critical to the success of digital brands and retailers. Leveraging marketing automation in conjunction with social media will supercharge its results. There’s many reasons to focus on social as an automation channel. Those include: 

• Making tasks more efficient and manageable
• Increasing engagement
• Gaining more awareness of mentions and feedback about your brand
• Analyzing campaign performance

Social automation tools allow you to manage all of your different accounts in one dashboard. You can schedule posts on the days and times when most of your followers are active on each channel. You can easily follow mentions, keywords, and hashtags to find opportunities for engagement and discover customer insights about your products. And you can access analytics to measure your KPIs, like follower growth, reach, and engagement.

You can also automate certain social commerce functions to strengthen connections with your customers on social. For example, if a customer clicks the Like2Buy link in your Instagram store, you can collect their contact info to retarget them with relevant emails featuring products and promotions they would be interested in.

Certain social commerce tools will also segment your current customers on social into categories and identify new audiences based on the qualities of your current email list. 

Landing pages

The primary purposes of landing page automation are lead generation and lead nurturing. First, you build a landing page for a specific purpose, like to attract shoppers to your rewards program, monthly subscription option, or new product collection. Then, you integrate that landing page with your automation platform. Finally, you assign actions to certain triggers, for example:  

• Collecting zero-party data when a customer fills out a form
• Segmenting customers based on the product or service they’re signing up for 
• Adding subscribers to an email list 
• Adding leads to a customer relationship management (CRM) platform 
• Sending a review request email, like a welcome or FAQ email

Cross-selling and upselling

Cross-selling and upselling are fundamental marketing automation strategy tactics for increasing AOV and conversions across your e-commerce site. Product recommendations labeled with calls to action (CTAs) like “you might also like,” “people also bought,” and “based on your past orders” are examples of cross- and upselling. 

These automated prompts appear to your website visitors based on triggers like a product page visit, adding an item to a shopping cart, or a checkout page visit. Another example of an automated upsell is a CTA encouraging customers to add more to their cart to reach the minimum amount for free shipping. 

Live chat

Chatbots are a way to automate live chat on your e-commerce site and messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Originally, the latter two were meant for personal use, but as we all know, they’ve scaled much larger to become major marketing tools for brands. An effective conversational commerce strategy can have a big business impact for e-commerce brands. 

Automating live chat gives customers and shoppers access to a chat option literally anytime since it doesn’t require a human operator. With live chat, you can provide answers to common customer questions, direct customers to the right pages according to their needs, upsell and cross-sell, and a variety of other actions.  

Automated chat is a helpful option for e-commerce companies to leverage during off-hours and to support their customer support teams. 

Quiz funnels

Marketing quizzes on your e-commerce site – a.k.a. quiz funnels – are a fun and interactive automated lead generation tool. You can create quizzes as a website pop-up or landing page to learn more about your customers, collect first-party data, and include product recommendations to increase conversions.

Some different types of quiz funnels include:

• Personal style quizzes – fitting for beauty, apparel, and interior design brands
• Product discovery quizzes for to help customers decide which products are best for their needs
• Consultation quizzes for specialized health and beauty products 

3. Select the right tools for your marketing automation strategy

Just as you need to align your automation channels to your goals, you need to match the tools you use to each channel. That will likely require using a variety of different tools with different functions. According to Gartner, the number one automation mistake is “falling in love with a single technology.” Instead, they recommend building a “toolbox of technologies that provide a more comprehensive set of capabilities to align to a flexible range of business outcomes and redesign approaches.”

Do the necessary research to find the tools that are the best fit to execute your strategy. For example, if you want to offer live chat on your e-commerce site, make sure your website platform has a chat option. If you want to focus on email and SMS marketing, you may consider a specialized tool that can do both. 

When assessing the performance of your automation tools, focus on whether or not you’re meeting or making progress toward your initial goals. Are these tools and processes delivering their intended outcomes? If not, you should modify or optimize your strategy, which is often the case when testing new technologies. 

A built-in benefit of whatever marketing automation tools you use is insights and analytics. These features allow you to track the performance of your automation campaigns. You can access a wealth of sophisticated data depending on which reporting platform you use, from customer sentiment to competitor analysis, conversions, content gaps, subscriber growth, and more.

Leverage a Bazaarvoice partner for added insight. Working together with Bazaarvoice and Movable Ink, marketers can leverage real-time ratings and reviews within email in an automated way to create a relevant shopping experience for each user, and influence more purchases.

Examples of successful marketing automation strategies in action

SMBs and enterprise companies alike are finding ways to automate areas of their marketing for better efficiency and ROI. Each of the following examples demonstrates how different types of brands identified challenges that automation could solve.

Those areas of opportunity include improving online customer support and experience, simplifying processes, and scaling their business. 

Luxury retail brands and conversational commerce

Before all the chatter about digital transformations and the metaverse, luxury retail brands relied heavily on the in-store experience. Now, they have to increase their investment in online channels, and three iconic luxury brands show how to deftly wield the power of conversational commerce. 

• Louis Vuitton’s automated Virtual Assistant takes a tactful approach that’s natural, easygoing, and welcomed by its visitors. The experience guides shoppers to a quicker and more confident purchase decision by providing unique value. It’s also transparent, making it clear that it’s AI-powered while giving the user the option to connect to a real agent. 
• In addition to live website chat, Burberry offers a texting option on WhatsApp. We’re officially in the next era of customer service. Its virtual shopping assistant Lola often initiates conversations to determine the needs of each customer, then passes the mic to sales associates who can help with product recommendations, sizing advice, etc.
• Another luxury innovator in conversational commerce is Prada, which is an early adopter of WeChat to serve its Chinese market. Prada cleverly uses WeChat as a channel to share engaging video and photo content, practice social commerce, and offer the option to live chat anytime with the Prada team. 
• HSN’s marketers know how important it is to celebrate major milestones. In this campaign, HSN used their 41st birthday as an opportunity to promote app downloads via an email communication. Once the customer downloaded the app, the same creative appeared in their in-app messages promoting the exclusive app-only deals.

Minted and paid ads

Paid ads are another primary marketing channel that performs well with marketing automation. For one agency, implementing automation for paid campaigns was a “breakthrough moment.” The agency leveraged Google’s automated, cross-channel campaign dashboard, Performance Max, for the home decor and gifts company Minted. 

By automating elements of its ad strategy, the agency experienced a 55% increase in ad spend ROI, which led them to scale the same approach to other clients. Overall, managing multiple automation campaigns and tracking their results all in one place enabled them to focus on “simplifying account structures to consolidate performance data and free up more time for strategic thinking” across the agency.

Beko and email automation

Customer reviews are instrumental to the success of Beko, a leader in European home appliances. Without a reliable collection of product reviews, the brand wouldn’t have been able to successfully expand into new global markets. 

Beko’s review strategy focuses on acquiring native reviews on its main e-commerce site and then catapulting that content to retail partners. Syndicating its reviews to retail partners, especially in new markets, has resulted in “exponential sales growth.”

In order to syndicate a large volume of authentic customer reviews across different retail partners, the company needed a solid base to pull from. That’s why its native reviews are so important. Out of the 8,000+ reviews the company has accumulated, “most [are] from review request emails sent to customers after registering their appliance.”

Big moves mean big changes. Prepare accordingly. 

The more comprehensive your marketing automation strategy is, the more ROI you’ll see. The automation leaders identified in the McKinsey Global Survey “are making sweeping (rather than incremental) process changes part of their automation agenda.” That means applying automation to a diverse range of business functions across departments, not just marketing. 

Such far-reaching changes require people in different teams in the organization to adapt to new systems and processes. Your teams will need training on these technologies. In order to manage new tools effectively, they’ll need to be adept at analyzing data and insights, as well as project management. 

This shift also means refocusing efforts beyond the laborious tasks that will no longer be necessary. A top benefit of marketing automation is the freedom for employees to take on higher-level tasks and responsibilities. They’ll need the necessary support to succeed, whether that means more learning and development opportunities, a redefining of roles, or whatever will best benefit your team.

These are all important factors to consider when planning to implement a marketing automation strategy, but they’re all manageable and achievable if you prepare for them. And one way to ease the transition is with the best tools for the job.

Bazaarvoice specializes in marketing automation tools and provides the guidance and attention needed to support customers throughout the implementation process. Just saying.

Working together with Bazaarvoice and Movable Ink, marketers can leverage real-time ratings and reviews within email in an automated way to create a relevant shopping experiences for each user and to drive more purchases. Get in touch below to learn more.

And when customers spend less, businesses feel it.

So, what’s a brand to do when it’s fighting for market share in an increasingly competitive landscape and trying to do more with an ever-shrinking marketing budget? Every customer counts and every interaction matters when it comes to winning and keeping customers.

According to the Qualtrics 2023 Global Consumer Trends report, 80% of customers say they would switch brands after a bad customer experience. That means the pressure’s on.

Marketing strategies in a recession

Recession marketing — or marketing in an economic downturn — requires some strategic thinking. During recessions businesses must defend market share for core inventory, introduce and grow new products, produce content efficiently, maximize the cost of ad impressions (CPM), and generally deliver more with less.

Defend market share for core products

Anticipation of a possible recession combined with rising costs has slowed consumer spending across demographics. Even spending among high-income consumers, who traditionally buck this trend, is down. With customers everywhere looking to get more bang for their buck, brands need to find ways to maintain their share of the market for their bestsellers and core inventory. 

Create a frictionless shopping experience

For retailers, one of the strongest offensive plays is providing customers with a frictionless shopping experience. What does that entail? Make doing business with you as easy as possible. Essentially, customers should know exactly what to expect and shouldn’t encounter any obstacles or issues that require extra effort on their part.

96% of customers who had high-effort experiences were ready to switch brands, according to Gartner research, while just 9% of customers who had low-effort experiences considered swapping loyalties. Frictionless shopping experiences often mean meeting customers where they are. This could look like:

• Targeted product galleries on social media platforms and click-through purchasing
• Alternatively, visual galleries on product pages that pull content from social media mentions can show shoppers what your products look like with real customers
• And implementing a helpful Q&A feature on the product page where you and your loyal customers can answer questions from potential buyers still in the research phase of their purchase journey gives your audience the information they need when they need it

These types of user-generated content (UGC) — that is, product information and reviews, social imagery, or videos created by consumers rather than the brand — do a lot of heavy lifting for brands looking to minimize friction for shoppers.

Gigaset, the European market leader for cordless phones, adopted a UGC strategy, including questions and answers on its product pages, to great effect. The brand experienced a 70% lift in conversions within 15 months.

Since Gigaset’s products are complex, and customers typically do plenty of research prior to purchasing, making questions and answers available right on the product page cuts down on friction in the customer journey and increases customer confidence.

Reward loyal customers with extra value

When customers are pinching their pennies, a well-timed promotion or sale can sway shoppers to your brand. In a recent survey of Influenster members, 85% of respondents said that receiving buying incentives would help keep them loyal during times of inflation.

Giving customers a monetary reason, like a well-planned brand loyalty program, to stick with what they already know and love — your brand’s core products — can tip the scales in your direction.

Build and maintain growth for new products

Perhaps you’re less worried about the products that already sell well and more concerned with marketing new products in a recession, when customers are hesitant to spend money on an unknown quantity.

Launching something new can be nerve-racking, even in the best economy. Throw in the looming threat of a recession and you’ve got a potential disaster. Then again, with a couple of strategic plays, you could have a real winner on your hands.

Solicit reviews with targeted sampling

Without reviews on your product page, you’ve already lost a third of your customers. That’s how many consumers say they wouldn’t purchase a product that didn’t have any reviews. How do you get reviews for a product that hasn’t yet launched? Targeted product sampling.

A sampling program gets your new product in the hands of potential customers to try and use and — yes, that’s right — review. Sampling is an effective way to seek out UGC in order to help other customers discover a new product and feel confident purchasing it.

When Kraft Heinz was getting ready to introduce eight new flavors of salad dressing, the brand first launched three targeted sampling campaigns to seek out authentic feedback and drive awareness through UGC.

The campaigns garnered 2x the expected reviews and over 5x the program’s investment via earned media. 

Listen to (and act on) customer feedback 

When building an audience for a new product, it’s not enough to simply seek out customer feedback. All of those reviews, good and bad, are valuable insights into the viability of the product and your customers’ needs. Understanding the customer and acting on feedback can make the difference between an army of loyal customers and a collection of fair-weather spenders.

Unilever are no strangers to marketing in a recession. When the brand noticed a trend of customer complaints about a reformulated product, it discovered a link to a bad batch. The company reached out to affected customers, replaced the product, and educated the customers on the benefits of the new formula — a real lemons-to-lemonade situation. 

But acting on feedback isn’t just about addressing complaints. Analyzing customer sentiment can also highlight opportunities for cross-promotion or marketing gaps. Unilever brand TRESemmé observed reviewers of its Keratin Smooth haircare line suggesting dry shampoo the next day to maintain results. Since TRESemmé didn’t have a dry shampoo in the Keratin Smooth line, the brand promoted and recommended dry shampoos from its other lines.

That results in a smoother (pun intended) shopping experience all around.

Embrace the power of positive (and negative) reviews

You believe in your products. You want everyone to love them. But in reality, negative reviews come with the territory. Critical reviews can be vital for improving products, discovering marketing gaps, and researching customer needs, but they also lend authenticity to your products. 

Many shoppers think negative reviews are just as, if not more, important as positive reviews because, well, a product with nothing but 5-star ratings seems a bit suspicious. Critical reviews help customers get a more complete picture of whether a product will work for their needs. If you’re looking to build authentic trust and loyalty, embrace all reviews — the good and the not-so-good.

Deliver more with a smaller marketing budget

Customer budgets aren’t the only ones that shrink during a recession — marketing budgets are taking a hit, too. But that doesn’t mean stakeholders are satisfied with diminished results. So how do you deliver more with less? Leverage UGC, which more brands are starting to do.

When you’re working with limited resources, UGC is an efficient way to produce content — and it’s also preferred by customers. The majority of shoppers rely on UGC over branded content when deciding what or whether to buy. And UGC is especially effective for marketing in a recession.

One of the smartest ways to lend credibility to your brand, answer customer questions, and raise awareness of products, new and old, is to lean into the people using your products.

Petco experienced this firsthand. The pet care retailer saw a huge increase in organic search traffic, conversions, and revenue per visit from a sampling campaign aimed at generating brand awareness. The brand benefitted particularly well from buzzy reviews and social media posts at the start of holiday seasons — potential customers were able to see authentic, user-generated images from those who’d received the samples and get answers about seasonal products that they might have otherwise passed on.

Boost customer trust to better weather a recession

Marketing can be tricky to nail at the best of times. But marketing in a recession is a whole other level. As many brands implement new technology — everything from marketing automation to generative AI — into everyday operations, customers value authentic shopping experiences now more than ever. 

The Qualtrics Global Consumer Trends report lists human connection as the top trend in 2023 to win customer loyalty, and building trust through UGC is an excellent method of connecting in that authentic way customers crave. As your community of brand loyalists grows, you’ll be prepared to weather any economic storms.

Want to learn more about maintaining customer loyalty? Watch our masterclass on how to maintain brand loyalty during tough economic times.

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Lately there’s been increased importance to get customer acquisition right because recent shifts in the global economy have put marketers under increased pressure to prove the impact of their efforts. 

Although most understand the need for building an omnichannel experience, focusing on the customer acquisition channels that work best for your brand has never been more important. While some marketers continue to experiment with different tactics, 69% of them say they’re focusing on channels that deliver positive ROI. 

The 7 most effective customer acquisition channels

Identifying and prioritizing your most effective customer acquisition channels is essential to attract more customers and maximize revenue. 

1. Website and blog

Optimizing your website and e-commerce content marketing, and investing in search engine optimized (SEO) content on your blog helps your brand rank higher in search results pages, bringing more traffic (and potential customers) to your website. 

Organic search 

Search engines are the top source for brand discovery, which makes your website and blog a key customer acquisition channel. Organic search results are ranked and compiled by search engines based on factors like relevance and authority. While brands can buy their way onto the first page of Google’s search results (more on that later), landing on page one organically can also be accomplished by implementing best SEO practices on your website. 

A solid SEO strategy for organic search is crucial to appeal to every customer segment, especially for e-commerce brands where the website acts as the storefront. In order for customers to move through the acquisition lifecycle into the conversion phase, they need to be able to locate, access, and navigate your website.

If your website isn’t optimized, it might rank on page two or three, which makes it difficult for potential customers to find you. 

Your blog is another pathway to acquiring customers if it provides valuable content like tips and tricks, how-tos, and product or comparison guides. It can lead potential customers who are researching products or services in your niche straight to your website. If you don’t have an in-house marketing department, you can work with a content marketing agency to ensure your blog is search engine optimized. 

Paid search

Customer acquisition through search also includes pay-per-click advertising (PPC) via search engines like Google or Bing. These ads will place your brand at the top of the search results page, marked as an advertisement. PPC advertising, like Google Ads, is advantageous because it’s targeted, measurable, and customizable. 

It’s also a faster way to get eyes on your website than investing in SEO, but it only covers half of the journey. Once potential customers land on your website via a paid ad, they need a reason to stay there, which PPC advertising cannot accomplish alone.

To do that, you’ll need to employ elements that build authenticity and trust, like user-generated content, and deliver convenience with an optimized website and smooth checkout process. Paid search is an effective customer acquisition channel for specific scenarios like new product launches, inbound lead generation, or limited offers like free trials and discounts. 

2. Social media

According to Dentsu’s 2023 Global Ad Spend Forecasts, social media ad spend increased by 18.8% in 2022, putting digital advertising ahead of traditional channels. There’s multiple pathways to acquiring customers through social media, ranging in budget and effectiveness.

Affiliate and influencer marketing

Affiliates and influencers are core aspects of a typical social media marketing strategy because they can introduce your brand to a large following. Research shows that social media users prefer smaller influencers for product recommendations and advice over prominent celebrities and social media stars.

42% of shoppers would likely purchase a product recommended by a smaller influencer or everyday social media user compared to 7% who would do the same from a celebrity. 

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Working with influencers and affiliates can help generate brand awareness while building consumer trust. Use cases for influencer and affiliate marketing include product reviews, new product launches, and educational content like how-to videos. These content types typically fit the creator’s format and the audience’s expectations.

For example, users who follow beauty influencers expect to see recommendations and product tests, making them a natural fit for this audience and content type. 

User-generated content

User-generated content (UGC) consists of images, reviews, and video content created by real customers for your brand. Not only is it considered the most trustworthy source of content by shoppers, but it’s also immensely cost-effective because it’s typically done for free. The exception to this is UGC creators who often create authentic-looking content for a small fee or free products. 

Social media posts featuring visual UGC can range from testimonials to product reviews to unboxing videos that show real consumers opening and testing your products. But UGC can also become a prominent feature of your landing pages and product description pages, providing potential customers with added valuable information and building trust.

Sporting gear brand Le Col, for example, saw a 125% increase in conversion rates after implementing UGC, like reviews and imagery on its website. 

“Our reviews provide social proof to new customers who are discovering the brand for the first time,” said Andrew Longley, Head of Digital at Le Col. “It gives them confidence that the products are the highest quality and we believe reviews are as important to new customers as our own product claims.” 

Organic posts

Organic posts on social media, whether in feeds, Stories, or Reels, reach potential customers naturally through the platform’s algorithm. If users follow topics, creators, or businesses related to your brand, there’s a good chance that they’ll come in contact with your posts at some point. Brands can employ certain tactics to speed up the process, like:

• Researching their target audience’s social media behaviors via Bazaarvoice Insights
• Experimenting with hashtags and consistently using relevant hashtags
• Posting fresh content on a regular basis (ideally, one to two posts per day)
• Varying content types to include branded posts, UGC, and influencer partnerships 

Of course, social media strategy varies across platforms. For example, posting multiple videos per day is the norm on TikTok, while LinkedIn posts should be kept to a maximum of two to five per week to remain effective and relevant.

It all comes down to your target audience and marketing goals, so brands with products aimed at a younger audience might get the most value out of platforms like TikTok and Instagram, while B2B companies should focus on LinkedIn. 

Paid ads

Paid ads purchased through social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok boost your posts so your target audience is more likely to see them. Brands can set specific demographics based on age, gender, location, and more or keep it open to reach a wide variety of users, depending on their goals. 

The best use cases for this customer acquisition channel are targeted ads for a specific audience. For example, a home improvement brand decides to launch a new model of cordless drills. It can boost a product launch ad and set the parameters to include users interested in home improvement, people who work in construction, or audiences who follow other home improvement brands on the platform.

This helps your paid ad reach the right audience, and your efforts (and budget) aren’t wasted on users with no interest in your product. 

3. Mobile marketing

According to Statcounter, mobile browsing contributes to over 57% of all web traffic, signaling a major shift in user behavior. With so many users relying on mobile phones, mobile marketing is critical to the customer acquisition strategy. 

Chatbots

Chatbots are an effective way to ensure customer satisfaction, preventing shopping cart abandonment and keeping customers coming back. According to Freshworks, 47% of online shoppers are likely to abandon their purchase if they can’t find quick answers to their questions or concerns. 

Chatbots can also provide personalized product recommendations to help funnel customers into the conversion stage. Segment’s State of Personalization Report shows that 49% of consumers believe they’ll return to a brand that offers a personalized experience.

Imagine a shopper is comparing your brand to a competitor with a similar product, but you provide personalized recommendations and immediate answers via a chatbot while your competitor doesn’t. The customer will likely choose the brand that shows a commitment to customer care and provides a user-friendly experience. 

SMS and messengers 

Short message services (SMS) and messengers are an effective way to start conversations with customers because they fit seamlessly into people’s natural tendency to check and respond to new messages. Some reports show that SMS open rates are over 90%. 

SMS marketing and quick messages on other platforms like WhatsApp can be used to share promotions, upcoming special events, and discount codes. They can also replace shopping cart abandonment emails, especially if they provide a direct link to your storefront or app to streamline the transaction process. 

Mobile apps

60% of shoppers believe that the ability to shop on a mobile device influences their preferences when it comes to brand selection. While e-commerce brands will likely have digital storefronts, mobile apps can enhance online shopping by providing a customized, highly targeted, personalized experience.

Even brick-and-mortar retailers who lack a web presence can benefit from a mobile app connected to in-store products, which creates a more omnichannel shopping experience.  

Mobile apps can send push notifications about new product launches, inventory updates, and price reductions. They can also act as mobile wallets for loyalty programs. Brands that leverage the best practices to increase in-app conversions can increase the benefits of building and maintaining a branded app. 

4. Email 

According to Segment’s 2022 Growth Report, 83% of marketers agree that email is their primary channel for customer acquisition. Email marketing provides a range of opportunities to reach customers in the acquisition phase of the customer lifecycle.

Since customers in this phase are aware of your brand, targeted emails can push them into the conversion stage by offering valuable information, discounts, or other incentives. 

Newsletters

Email newsletters work well for company announcements, product teases, brand stories, and re-purposed blog content. Focus on content that builds interest and excitement, pushing customers to learn more through your website, a webinar, or any other format that drives them deeper into your products or services.

Newsletters also open up the opportunity to use diverse content, like images, infographics, and videos, to engage and entertain your customers while providing value and establishing positive sentiments about your brand.

Cart abandonment emails

Around two-thirds of digital carts end up abandoned by shoppers, making it a prevalent issue for e-commerce brands. Shopping cart abandonment leads to missed revenue, but it also signals a larger problem. Why are shoppers abandoning their items? There’s a number of potential reasons, like lack of trust or inefficient checkout processes, but cart abandonment emails that address these issues are an effective way to draw customers back to your storefront. 

Open rates for cart abandonment emails were 49% in 2022, compared to 21.5% for general emails across different industries. Cart abandonment emails that pique your customers’ attention and target why they abandoned in the first place can encourage them to complete their purchase. Say your product pages lack ratings and reviews, leading shoppers to doubt your trustworthiness.

Send out cart abandonment emails showcasing UGC, like reviews and photos, to build that trust and provide added value for your potential customer.  

Special occasion emails

There’s a reason the global greeting card industry was valued at over $18 billion in 2020 — people love celebrating special occasions! Sending out personalized, heartfelt, and celebratory emails around special times like holidays, birthdays, and other milestones allows brands to connect with customers on their email list in a way that isn’t highly promotional, which can build positive sentiment around your brand.

Special occasion emails are the perfect opportunity to offer incentives like a special single-use discount count on a customer’s birthday or a 10%-off email the week before Mother’s Day. Sending out these emails a few days to a week prior to the occasion is key because it gives customers time to browse the storefront and make a purchase in time for the occasion. 

Drip campaigns

Drip campaigns — automated emails pre-scheduled to be delivered at specific points of engagement — are powerful tools in your customer acquisition strategy. They can be triggered when customers:

• Abandon their digital carts
• Download content from your website
• Place an order on your storefront
• Communicate with customer service
• Register for an event or sign up for a free trial of a product

Drip campaigns aren’t a singular point of contact but rather a series of emails that engage your potential customers without overwhelming them with information. Let’s say a new lead provides their email in order to download an e-book you offer.

You now have the perfect lead-in to introduce your brand and educate them about your company by sending out a series of short emails that offer a quick look at additional on-site content.

5. Loyalty and referral programs 

Loyalty programs are traditionally used as customer retention tactics, but they can also help brands acquire new customers if they provide enough value.

Imagine Brand A and Brand B offer similar products at similar prices, but Brand A has a points-based loyalty program that allows customers to get free products as they shop. Brand A provides added value while Brand B doesn’t, making it a more attractive option to consumers. 

Referral programs put your existing customers to work by transforming them into spokespeople for your brand via word-of-mouth marketing. Provide an incentive, like a discount or free products, to current customers for sharing your brand with friends and family through a referral code. The code ensures that referrals are easy to track and analyze while the incentives keep existing customers happy and loyal to your brand. 

6. Events

Customer acquisition isn’t just for digital channels — it benefits the physical shelf too. Whether virtual or in-person, events and webinars are valuable tools for connecting with potential customers directly while providing added value via knowledge sharing. 

Virtual events

Virtual events like webinars, conferences, and digital fairs can reach a wide audience at a fraction of the cost of in-person events. They’re also easy and convenient for potential customers to attend from the comfort of their homes, increasing the chances of drawing a large crowd. 

Virtual events are best used to showcase products or demonstrate services, share knowledge or research, and facilitate networking. They’re also a prime opportunity to launch a digital conversation with potential customers since most attendees provide an email to register for virtual events. 

In-person events

In-person events, like tradeshows, networking events, and conferences, can be more costly when factoring in travel, space rentals, and staffing, but they can also facilitate deeper conversations, engagement, and trust-building. Meeting potential customers face to face builds rapport and gives your brand a human touch.

In-person events also give potential customers the opportunity to interact with and explore products and services in real life, which can move them toward a purchasing decision faster. 

7. Traditional advertising

Despite the growth of digital advertising, customers still place trust in traditional channels, making them a strong addition to your marketing channel mix. Traditional methods range from big-budget endeavors like TV commercials and magazine advertisements to smaller-scale efforts like flyers and radio promotions.

The right channels for your brand depend on your target audience, business goals, and marketing budget. 

For example, independent retailers might have more luck with local methods like flyers and radio advertisements to build up a customer base within their neighborhood. Large e-commerce brands with high-priced products might be more successful with national TV advertisements that target a larger population. 

How to lower customer acquisition costs

While acquiring new customers is essential for growth, the costs associated with your customer acquisition channels can be 5x higher than the cost of customer retention. Brands can lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) by utilizing existing customers, optimizing digital channels, defining their audience, and tracking. 

Utilize existing customers

UGC is one of the most impactful ways a brand can lower its CAC. Using the words, images, and videos of existing customers to build trust with potential customers is free but, more importantly, effective. 85% of shoppers rely on UGC rather than branded content when making purchasing decisions because it comes from real people who have real experiences with the product — not a marketing team. 

If a low financial investment with a high ROI impact sounds too good to be true, try the UGC Value Calculator to see how employing UGC will affect your marketing efforts and budget. 

Optimize digital channels

Employing SEO best practices on your website and blog and A/B testing to pinpoint the best user experience can reduce CAC in the long run. An optimized website is more likely to rank higher in search results, leading more potential customers to your products or services. Brands that find success with organic search may find that they’re able to reduce their budget dedicated to paid search. 

A/B testing involves showing different versions of variables, like a landing page or a specific page element, to different audience segments in a randomized fashion. The goal is to determine which version of a variable results in the most positive impact, which can vary depending on your goals. 

Say a SaaS company wants to increase sign-ups for its free trial. It might use A/B testing to place the sign-up button in various locations on the website to find the ideal spot.

According to a study by Forrester, A/B testing that results in an improved user interface can raise conversion rates by up to 200%.

Define your audience

Targeting the right audience with the right channels can significantly lower your CAC because you’re strategically allocating your marketing budget. An in-depth analysis of your target audience will reveal which platforms they engage with most, where they are in their buyer journey, and which tactics they’re most likely to respond to.

For example, advertising products aimed at busy parents on LinkedIn might not deliver the same positive results as investing in SEO and paid search targeting keywords they’re likely to search, like “backpacks for kids” or “best kid’s backpacks.” 

Track results

One of the easiest ways to overspend on customer acquisition is by failing to track your customer acquisition channels and how they’re performing. Investing a sizable portion of your marketing budget in TV ads may not be effective if your target audience is younger and doesn’t typically engage with traditional media.

Tracking the results of your marketing campaigns might show you that your Gen Z audience is much more receptive and engaged on TikTok and Instagram, preferring UGC and small-influencer content instead. 

Transform your customer acquisition strategy with Bazaarvoice

The Bazaarvoice platform works behind the scenes to power your customer acquisition strategy. Tackle SEO by implementing review syndication to boost search engine rankings or gain consumer trust with cost-effective, UGC-powered social posts.

Discover more about your target audience and track the effectiveness of your social channels with Bazaarvoice Insights. Bazaarvoice’s solutions help shoppers discover your brand and transform your customer acquisition channels. 

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How to stand out and win customers at the digital shelf

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Chapters:

1. What is recurring revenue?
2. How to calculate annual and monthly recurring revenue
3. Benefits of recurring revenue
4. 10 types of recurring revenue streams
5. Brand examples of recurring revenue streams
6. Power your recurring revenue streams with user-generated content

What is recurring revenue?

Recurring revenue is the portion of your company’s monthly or annual income that is anticipated to continue at regular intervals — thanks to loyal customers. 

For e-commerce and retail brands, understanding recurring revenue and its many streams is the key to steady, scalable growth. It’s especially prevalent and beneficial in the tough economic times we face.

How to calculate annual and monthly recurring revenue

Calculate recurring revenue by multiplying your number of active subscribers by your average revenue per account (ARPA). You can measure recurring revenue over any accounting period you want — daily, weekly, monthly, or annually.

Recurring revenue formula:

Number of active subscribers or buyers × Average revenue per account (ARPA)

If you’re an e-commerce or retail business, active subscribers or buyers are customers who buy from you regularly — especially those who have shared their card details for seamless payment. And ARPA is a measure of your total revenue per active customer account. 

For example: Say you sell makeup products and you have 20 customers signed up for a monthly subscription service program. If each box costs $100, your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is $2,000.

Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) = 20 active subscribers × $100 average revenue per account (ARPA) = $2,000

Unless a subscriber cancels their subscription or new customers join the program, your MRR will remain the same. 

Benefits of recurring revenue

Recurring revenue gives you a stable stream of cash flow that allows you to support business operations, scale, and maintain a healthy bottom line.

It provides consistent cash flow for better planning

You earn recurring revenue from repeat customers, so it is predictable and consistent — unlike one-off sales from shoppers who buy from you once or once in a while.

Once you can predict your revenue for the next week, month, or year, it’s also easy to plan for business expenses like salaries, rent, restocking, budget allocation for campaigns, and more.

It enables innovation and expansion

With a consistent flow of recurring revenue, you can invest in research and development to innovate and improve your products and services.

You can also use the cash flow to grow your business by developing new product lines, setting up bigger or more production facilities, and building more profitable partnerships.

It reduces the pressure of customer acquisition

With customers that buy from you on a regular basis, you’ll be under less pressure to convert new ones. 

This isn’t to say that recurring revenue is a replacement for acquiring new customers. But if your customer retention rates are high, it means you have consistent cash inflow while you’re trying to grow your customer base.

10 types of recurring revenue streams

Recurring revenue powers business growth and stability, especially when you combine multiple models and strategies. Boost your customer lifetime value (LTV) and earn more annual recurring revenue (ARR) by exploring these different income streams.

1. Standard subscription plans

When your core product is something customers buy over and over, creating subscription business plans is a great recurring revenue stream.

Some companies’ entire businesses are built around standard subscription plans. For example, the sales model of skincare subscription box companies and period care package brands set them up for recurring revenue by default. But even if your brand isn’t built completely around subscription revenue, it’s still an option for achieving income predictability.

Prioritize longer-term subscriptions so you can earn more, faster, secure, guaranteed revenue for an extended period and not have to worry about customers renewing their plan weekly or monthly. 

Longer-term recurring subscriptions are also a win for customers because they won’t need to worry about payment for a while, unlike with short-term plans. All they have to do is pay a quarterly, biannual, or annual subscription fee, and they’re good to go until the next billing cycle.

2. Tiered pricing

Tiered pricing is just like regular subscription business models but with a twist. It involves offering different product subscription packages with pricing based on factors like product size, quantity, frequency of renewal, and more. 

You can either have a fixed subscription model or let customers customize theirs to include specific items and how regularly they want to order.

For example, food businesses can have tiered subscription plans for meal prep packages or food bowls that customers can refrigerate or freeze for later. Some grocery stores also use tiered pricing models for items like fruits, vegetables, meat, milk, and more.

The whole point of tiered pricing is to let customers purchase products according to their needs and purchasing power while also enabling brands to earn recurring income.

3. Auto-replenishments

Auto-replenishment is all about incorporating a standard subscription model to products that are typically driven by one-off sales. 

This recurring revenue stream lets customers sign up to get the same order at intervals by adding their card to a vendor’s payment system. And typically, brands offer discounts along with auto-replenishment plans to encourage opt-ins.

Imagine you run a retail e-commerce site for accessories or toiletries, and a customer tries to buy a package of socks or panty liners for $25. You can offer them a 15% discount on each package/set if they sign up for a repeat order every month.

4. Community memberships

Community memberships are another subscription model that e-commerce and retail brands use to drive recurring revenue. They involve selling access to a community where like-minded consumers exchange ideas/tips, access premium customer service, and gain exclusive discounts or freebies.

A community membership is perfect for brands that sell a wide range of products. Say you run an online retail store, like Amazon or AliExpress. You can earn recurring revenue by encouraging customers to create an account and pay a monthly fee of $10 for unlimited free delivery and early access to limited products.

5. Cross-selling and upselling

Cross-selling involves offering users related or add-on items to products they’ve already bought or which they buy consistently. Upselling is all about encouraging customers to purchase more premium versions of their past purchases.

Encouraging customers to buy related or bigger ticket items doesn’t always work as a recurring revenue stream, but consistency drives results. For your brand, you can try using “you may also like” or “others also buy” recommendations via email, checkout pages, and product pages.

Finding a healthy balance between prompting users to buy and not being overbearing makes all the difference between successful or unsuccessful cross-sell and upsell campaigns. 

If you’re a beauty brand and a customer typically buys body cream from you, you can try and cross-sell them a roll-on deodorant and bath soap for a well-rounded shopping experience.

Or if your business is all about hair extensions, you can prompt customers who bought a 12-inch weave to try the longer 16-inch version.

6. Sunk money consumables

Sunk money consumables are goods that require users to buy related products from the same brand for their original purchase to keep being useful. Many e-commerce and retail brands use this strategy because it guarantees steady, recurring revenue year in and year out. Even when their main business model is based on big one-time sales.

This recurring revenue model is very common with automobile and consumer electronics brands, but it applies to other niches too. 

For example, if you get a car and it needs a new engine, or you purchase a phone and want some headsets, you’d likely buy from the original brand or dealer. The same goes with refillable perfume bottles or diffusers that need their reeds replaced every now and again.

7. Gifting packages

Celebrations like birthdays, anniversaries, and weddings are endless, and you can leverage them to introduce gifting packages that keep customers coming back. These gifting packages include vouchers, gift cards, or product sets that customers can purchase and send to friends, colleagues, or family members for special occasions.

For customers, gift vouchers and packages also take away the worry of wondering what to give important people in their lives on their days of joy. 

If you run a jewelry or makeup brand, for instance, you can set up a gift card page for customers to buy and send them to anyone they want. The receiver can then use the voucher to buy any item(s) within budget on your website or app.

8. Installment payments

Installment payments involve customers paying for products in pre-agreed sums at preset intervals until their payment is complete. This payment plan works for any type of product in any industry, and it helps businesses make money even when customers can’t pay the full amount for an item immediately.

Besides guaranteeing recurring payments for you, installment payments let customers pay for items at a convenient pace. And with this payment model, you can either choose to deliver the product to the customer after they’ve paid up to a certain amount or the full product cost.

Say you’re a mobile device dealer. You can sell new phones to customers and offer them installment payment plans with a total slightly greater than the original price (to make up for not getting all the money at once). Then release the phone once the customer has paid the first or a few installments — depending on your agreement.

9. Pre-orders

To raise money before production or (re)stocking, you can run pre-orders — selling unavailable or out-of-stock products to customers for less than the original price.

Pre-ordering is an effective recurring revenue stream because it helps you gauge product demand and avoid filling your shelves with slow-moving products that’ll tie up valuable cash.

It also allows you to keep making money off of customers who love and buy a certain product regularly, even when it’s out of stock. Pre-ordering is a win for customers because they get to call dibs on items earlier than others and at a discounted price.

Pre-orders are perfect for brands that sell clothing items, books, or limited-edition footwear.

10. Reward vouchers

Reward vouchers are points or discounts that shoppers earn for making purchases up to a certain amount on an e-commerce site or at a walk-in retail store. With these vouchers, customers can buy new items immediately or save them to apply to their next purchase. 

Businesses use this technique because it incentivizes customers to keep buying and generates steady cash flow.

For example, you can give buyers two points on each purchase up to $15 and create a system where 10 points equal $5 to spend on items in your store. Every time customers buy from you, their points increase, and they can easily use them to get more items for “free.”

If you like, you can also give customers virtual or physical loyalty cards that the points get logged into so they can easily use them at checkout.

5 examples of recurring revenue streams

There are many ways to use different recurring revenue streams in your business. Get inspiration from what these top e-commerce and retail brands are doing to reduce their customer churn rates and earn predictable revenue.

1. Fresh: Beauty and skincare brand

Recurring revenue streams: Sunk money consumables, auto-replenishments, tiered pricing, installment payments, and gifting packages.

Fresh offers a wide variety of beauty and skincare products that serve as sunk money consumables to each other, from face creams to serums and cleansers. The brand also has an auto-replenish option that gives customers a 10% discount on every replenishment order.

Many Fresh products come in various tiered prices and sizes — travel, full, and jumbo — so customers can choose whichever one works best for them. The brand lets customers pay for items in installments too. And if buyers need to surprise anyone with a beauty or skincare product, they can simply navigate to Fresh’s gifting page for relevant gift sets.

To encourage its shoppers to make more purchases with confidence and drive consistent recurring revenue, Fresh leverages user reviews and ratings across its websites and partner sites.

2. Bellami: Hair extensions and styling brand

Recurring revenue streams: Cross-selling, tiered pricing, and gifting packages.

Bellami sells hair extensions, wigs, and styling products. The company cross-sells these different products at its physical hair salons in the US and Canada — and on its website via its product and checkout pages.

For customers who are interested in different hair colors and lengths, Bellami also offers a wide range of tiered options. The brand uses styling videos and guides to show buyers how to use its products, encouraging them to revisit the site and make a purchase.

3. Jeanswest: Apparel chain store

Recurring revenue streams: Installment payments, gifting packages, and community memberships.

Jeanswest deals in male, female, and maternity clothing items. The brand integrates seamlessly with payment processor Klarna to enable shoppers to pay for items in four interest-free installments instead of all at once.

To cater to shoppers looking to buy clothes for a friend, colleague, or family member, Jeanswest sells gift vouchers that can be redeemed at physical stores for up to three years.

Jeanswest also encourages customers to spend more on its site by adding a twist to the standard e-commerce community memberships. The brand runs a tiered rewards program that gives buyers who spend up to a certain amount access to guaranteed discounts, exclusive events, and other special offers.

Jeanswest boosts its revenue per customer by combining these strategies with authentic user-generated content (UGC) and collecting buyer experience feedback.

4. Sephora: Personal care and beauty product retailer

Recurring revenue streams: Standard subscription plans, auto-replenishments, cross-selling, and reward vouchers.

Sephora stocks personal care and beauty products from different brands (including its own). The retail store has a beauty subscription box package that lets customers place a recurring order for samples of five different products, either quarterly, biannually, or yearly.

At Sephora’s physical stores and on its website, shoppers also get a wide range of related product options to buy together or one after the other. For example, a customer might buy a Rare Beauty lipstick from Sephora today, then follow up with a lip liner and oil combo next week.

Via Sephora’s loyalty program, Beauty Insider, buyers also earn 1 point for every $1 they spend. And for every 500 points a customer earns, they get $10 to spend on their next order, encouraging more purchases and contributing to future revenue.

5. Urban Barn: Furniture and decor company

Recurring revenue streams: Sunk money consumables, gifting packages, and preorders.

Urban Barn specializes in furniture and interior decor items like tables, chairs, rugs, wall art, and more. Many of these products are sunk money consumables that need to be bought together or in succession to make a space look classy and presentable.

So, if you’ve bought Urban Barn furniture items for your living room, chances are you’ll get your bedroom and home office furniture from them too.

The company also offers gift cards for any occasion, from weddings to birthdays to housewarming parties. These cards can be redeemed on Urban Barn’s website or at physical stores, so receivers can choose the channel that works best for them.

Even better, the brand lets customers pre-order select furniture items at a discounted price for future delivery. And as a conversion optimization strategy, Urban Barn showcases visual UGC via inspiring “shop the look” recommendations.

Power your recurring revenue streams with user-generated content

As an e-commerce or retail brand, optimizing your website, social media, partner site, and in-store experiences is critical to securing recurring revenue. User-generated content is one powerful way to achieve this.

Gather relevant customer ratings and reviews (video and text) to populate your sales channels, and encourage purchases by sending free product samples to highly engaged shoppers or consumer communities.

Not sure where to start? Bazaarvoice is your best bet. Our products are custom-built to help you collect and maximize UGC for your business’s bottom line. Watch them in action here.

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