Urban Barn sees a 270% lift in time on site by featuring user-generated content

The first Urban Barn opened over 30 years ago in Vancouver. With wooden floors and a farmhouse door, the store served as a rustic, homey space in the heart of a big, bustling city. Since then, the brand has helped people throughout Canada create stylish homes full of gorgeous furniture and accents.

The company’s goal is to meet the customer where they are and offer a consistent experience, whether that be online or in-store. Because furniture is such a large purchase, Urban Barn has found that many of its customers visit its website before coming into a store to actually buy the item they’re looking for.

“A typical customer journey is to research online and then visit a store to validate before the customer proceeds to purchase,” said Sasha Becker, Director of E-commerce at Urban Barn. “One of our unique selling points is bespoke custom sofas, sectionals, accent chairs, and fabric beds. These products can only be purchased in our stores currently.”

The brand is always looking for ways to improve its omnichannel experience, which is why it partnered with Bazaarvoice to amplify user-generated content (UGC) across its website, social media channels, and stores.

“User-generated content is key to our success. We aim to inspire our clients and use UGC to do that,” said Ainslie Fincham, Director of Marketing at Urban Barn.

Keeping up with content demands

Urban Barn decided to update its website in 2019. Two of the goals of the website revamp were to create more engaging and interactive experiences, and make the most of social commerce tools.

“The demand for new content keeps increasing, and content tends to get stale very quickly. Engagement numbers drop if we don’t refresh content regularly,” said Becker.

The brand worked with Bazaarvoice to find ways to leverage UGC to freshen up content, showcase the diversity of its products, create additional shoppable product listing pages, and display galleries for special occasions (like Mother’s Day).

Leveraging UGC across every channel

Today, Urban Barn uses Bazaarvoice Galleries to showcase visual UGC across several channels. A few of the brand’s highest-performing efforts include Shop the Look pages and galleries on the website, a strip of customer images in every email footer, and using UGC in digital ads and social platforms.

One way Urban Barn collects UGC is by encouraging customers to post images of its product using the hashtag #Rightathome. Then, the brand identifies the most on-brand content from those submissions and showcases it in galleries on the website.

“Customer images show the diverse styles of interiors and different angles of the products that are not often captured by our in-house photographers,” said Fincham.

The brand uses Like2Buy, which features pinned navigational tiles (similar to an Instagram grid), to push social traffic to web pages like new arrivals, the blog, and Urban Barn’s YouTube account.

“Our store associates are trained with an omnichannel approach,” said Becker. “If a client sees a particular item they like in-store, the associates will use an iPad to show them content demonstrating how a space could be curated with that item.”

A 59% lift in conversion rates

Since partnering with Bazaarvoice to enhance its UGC strategy, Urban Barn has seen a:

● 270% lift in time on site
● 59% lift in conversion rate
● 29% lift in average order value

Plus, open and click rates for emails that incorporate UGC galleries are much higher than emails that don’t include UGC.

Urban Barn’s full-page inspirational gallery using its custom hashtag #rightathome has seen a click-through rate of 15% to product pages. This page makes it easy for shoppers to find the products they love with product tags and motivates them to purchase. It also encourages them to submit their own UGC to be featured in the onsite gallery in the future.

“We really do want to inspire people and give them the tools to create a beautiful home, and we do that through sharing UGC across all of our channels,” said Fincham.

This year, Urban Barn hopes to improve the omnichannel experience even further by replacing existing product tags in stores with a QR code that links to the website product page. Another initiative for the year is to offer a curated collection of pre-configured custom sofas, sectionals, accent chairs, and fabric beds available to purchase online rather than just in-store.

“Our end goal is to create beautiful spaces that people can come home to and feel good in,” said Becker. “Every employee on every level is here to help. Everything we do from how we present ourselves on the website, the products we create, to how we pack, ship, and deliver, is to help people create homes they love with a lasting sense of pride, personal identity.”

Learn more about how social UGC tools like Galleries can help you increase conversion and revenue.