The Ultimate Guide to Using Reviews & UGC in Email Marketing

Introduction

Promotional trends come and go, but email marketing continues to reign supreme as one of the most dependably effective tactics out there. As technological advances enable brands to deliver ever more personalized, differentiated customer experiences, email marketing is going from strength to strength. Curating this customized content yields real results — personalized promotional mailings enjoy a 29% increase in unique open rates, and a 41% boost to click-throughs.

To achieve stats like these, all your tech needs to be working in harmony. But when solutions and workflows aren’t integrated, it can be difficult to keep track of campaigns split across multiple platforms and tools. The Shopify App Store is bursting with options promising solutions, but when nothing plays nicely together, third parties can rapidly prove problematic.

With Okendo’s Klaviyo integration, brands can now streamline their email marketing campaigns within a single platform to execute an owned marketing strategy that fuels customer growth and retention. The integration combines the effectiveness of email marketing with the persuasive power of user-generated content to achieve incredible results. By joining forces with Klaviyo, brands are able to place a real focus on driving revenue and enhancing the customer experience. With the ability to leverage smart automation, enhance segmentation, and nurture brand loyalty, it’s a combination that packs a real promotional punch.

Read on to learn more about the power and possibilities of leveraging customer review data and UGC in your next email marketing campaign!

In the world of modern ecommerce, customer communication requires precision. When it comes to capturing valuable, insightful customer reviews, it’s critical that your requests land well. They should be perfectly presented, worded and timed — every time.

Email automation plays an important role in the strategy of ecommerce brands. Used correctly, it’s an exceptionally effective method of communication and promotion, with the capacity to improve customer experience, brand loyalty, conversion and so much more.

Because triggered mailings enjoy the benefit of perfect contextual timing, their messages are heard loud and clear. The statistics back this up — triggered emails have a 70.5% higher open rate and 152% higher click-through rate than their generic newsletter counterparts.

Customer reviews are a huge asset to your DTC brand, and email requests are the most direct, effective way of collecting them. By creating campaigns that encourage and incentivize your customers at the right stage of their post-purchase experience, you have the opportunity to gain powerful customer content and data (for your site and future marketing).

You’ll also obtain valuable product insights and strengthen your customer relationships with high-quality follow-up service.

Best Practices

Okendo’s integration with Klaviyo brings the powerful potential of customer review requests neatly in line with the functionality of advanced email marketing — in a way that enables total clarity and control for brands.

By listening for a trigger from Okendo, Klaviyo can automatically send out review request emails. By seamlessly connecting with our Sequences functionality, flows can be created, tested, monitored and refined. Not only does this mean merchants are able to leverage the time-saving efficiency of automation, but this will give them a much clearer overview of their customer communications and how the requests are performing.

In addition to a more concise and consolidated approach to communications and reporting, merchants also benefit from Klaviyo’s tried and tested email templates, and intuitive template builder. This means that all campaigns can be customized to the finest level of detail, reflecting brands’ personalities perfectly. Brands will also have the ability to refine their strategy, optimizing their email copy through Klaviyo’s A/B testing capacity to hone in on the most effective way of driving maximum reviews.

It’s worth highlighting that this new ability is entirely unique to joint users of Okendo and Klaviyo. Okendo is the only Certified Shopify Plus review app that supports the sending of review request emails from Klaviyo.

Results

Underwear brand Culprit Underwear wanted to transcend the creative personality of their products across their brand messaging. Although they already had customized email templates for their welcome series of emails, branding their messaging in post-purchase communications allowed them to create a unified brand message that resonated with their customers. Through the Okendo-Klaviyo Integration, Culprit Underwear has been able to establish their brand presence across the customer journey in a more efficient and effective manner.

It’s more important than ever for brands to make meaningful connections with their customers to establish loyalty. One of the most powerful ways to do this is by delivering a customer experience that’s truly personal and valuable.

Research suggests that 83% of consumers pay equal attention to how brands treat them as they do to the products they sell. This really highlights the high demand that consumers have on brands they shop with today.

Reviews allow us to improve the customer experience and deepen the relationship customers have with your brand. For example, asking customers for their feedback via a review lets them know that they are valued and listened to.

Rewarding customers for engaging with your brand via reviews separates you from your competitors because they gain additional value from shopping with you. The reward for brands who use review incentives is attractive – with a substantial amount of repeat orders and boost in customer retention. 40% of eCommerce revenue comes from repeat customers, so it’s important to ensure your customer experience is optimal.

Best Practices

With Okendo’s Klaviyo integration you can now create highly-personalized review incentive flows. This allows you to set up Klaviyo and Okendo to communicate with each other and to trigger automations based on certain events (or customer behaviors).

For example, a brand can reward their most loyal customers with an automation that increases the rewards for each number of reviews submitted. Brands can also create a flow triggered by whether the review was positive or negative, sending either a “thank you” message or a followup message for additional feedback.

This allows you to create a more personal and valuable experience for each of your customers based on their experience with you.

You can also set up different post purchase email flows to trigger for customers based on: whether or not they’ve left a review, whether they’ve left a text-only or picture review, and whether or not they’ve used their review incentive.

This functionality allows brands to increase the amount of high-quality reviews and UGC they receive. It also increases the opportunity to drive more sales from new shoppers as well as encourage existing customers to spend more and in a timely manner by using their rewards.

Results

Women’s apparel retailer Beginning Boutique has already taken advantage of the much more nuanced flows enabled by the Okendo-Klaviyo integration. With splits to acknowledge the positive or negative nature of their review, customers receive automated campaigns that encourage feedback (for those who gave a rating of less than 4 stars) or an enhanced review (adding an image to unlock an upgrade to a 15% discount). A final flow rewards loyal customers, on a sliding scale which increases in line with the number of reviews that they have left.

Through the Klaviyo-Okendo integration, Beginning Boutique saw a 37% increase in Review Request Click Rate, 109% increase in Review Rate from Email, and 53% increase in Coupon Code Redemptions. Beginning Boutique was able to drive more sales through timely incentives and customers were taken on their own personalized journey where loyal buyers are rewarded. This strengthens the brand-buyer relationship and encourages future purchases through powerful user-generated content.

In terms of grabbing attention and building trust, reviews have powerful potential wherever they are leveraged. The effectiveness of reviews when integrated alongside product listings on online stores is uncontested, but brands that neglect to also include this valuable data in their email campaigns are missing out.

Don’t underestimate the impact that peers’ product reviews can have on your customers. Including reviews in your email marketing has an immediate impact on its effectiveness. 76% of consumers say they trust the reviews they read online as much as personal recommendations from friends. UGC has been shown to be 20% more influential when it comes to purchasing and 35% more memorable than other types of media.

Reviews add a layer of honesty and authenticity to your email marketing campaigns — in fact nothing else comes close. Combine this with an element of personalization where recommendations or customer behavior (i.e. cart abandonment) are the driving forces, and you’re ready to take things to the next level of impact.

Best Practices

In establishing Okendo’s integration with Klaviyo, they’re enabling brands to seamlessly incorporate review data such as star ratings, review counts and review texts (from Okendo) into triggered emails or SMS (sent from Klaviyo).

The scope for creatively deploying this content is vast. Campaigns can be centered around cart or browse abandonment, to give customers the reassurance (and reminder) they need to get the sale across the line. Similarly, personalized product recommendations can be backed up by concrete social proof, encouraging conversion.

From product popularity to expert endorsement, knowing that our peers are enjoying a product makes investigation almost irresistible. When including review data within email campaigns, brands should see performance increases on a range of key measures, including click-rate, revenue generation and repeat purchases.

The beauty of the Okendo-Klaviyo integration is that it streamlines and simplifies the process of bringing together the powerful combination of review data and sophisticated email campaigns. Busy ecommerce marketers can now pull data into their campaigns with ease and accuracy, letting our automated flows do all of the heavy lifting.

Results

Luxury, high-performance activewear brand Nimble Activewear has already untapped the opportunity to turn intent-ready browsers into buyers. By deploying a 50/50 split-test campaign between flows featuring Okendo’s review snippets and without, they were able to significantly raise conversion rates on abandoned cart emails.

Okendo’s intuitive review capture feature and Klaviyo’s powerful automated email sequences proved to be a magic combination for Nimble Activewear’s AC flow. Validation from previous customers is one of the most important factors for prospective customers. The results were unanimous. The variation that included the Okendo review snippet garnered a 6% increase in click-through rate, 16% increase in Average Revenue per Recipient, and 74% increase in relative change overall.

General profiling of your audience is no longer enough in today’s competitive ecommerce landscape. Customers need to be understood on a much more granular, individual level. Savvy use of segmentation applied to marketing campaigns is a must if you’re looking to provide appealing, relevant content and build a strong sense of recognition and trust.

Segmentation is a necessity for ecommerce retailers looking to enjoy the full potential of their email marketing campaigns. Marketers who create segmented campaigns have been shown to see as much as a 760% boost to revenue. A blanket approach to your lists no longer lands — messaging must be carefully and appropriately targeted to corresponding customer profiles, across all communication.

Review data can provide a great source of insight when it comes to building up these profiles. This gives retailers a deeper understanding of their customers based on how they interact individually with the brand and product offering.

This is about much more than simply driving conversion. By understanding who your customers really are, you can target your messaging to truly delight, inform and inspire them. Over time, when applied to your email marketing (and broader targeted social media efforts), you have the opportunity to really strengthen brand loyalty and advocacy.

Best Practices

The Customer Data Sync functionality enabled by the Okendo’s Klaviyo integration combines Attributes, Okendo’s first-party customer data collection feature, with Klaviyo’s customer data platform.

This opens up a whole new world of options to marketers when it comes to collecting customer insights and delivering more personalized customer experiences.

From gender, age, interests and purchase patterns, the information that Okendo can gather over time within Attributes enables advanced segmentation so campaigns can be personalized to a very specific degree.

Leveraging the insight that Attributes can give also provides retailers with a clear idea of the kind of incentives they should be offering to certain customers. For example, a brand enthusiast who has left multiple 5-star reviews may be more motivated by exclusive products, early access to new drops or seeing their own reviews or UGC featured, than they would be by a discount code.

Segments who have been less satisfied with products or services in the past, leaving poor reviews as a result, could be re-engaged with money off or more appropriately pitched messaging.

Results

WAG, an ethical dog treats company, wanted to forge a deeper connection with their customers to create a better shopping experience. Although they already had a great handle on their segmentation, data collected from customer reviews enabled them to add a new layer of personalization to their email marketing campaigns.

Armed with new, deeper knowledge of the eating habits, medical conditions and personalities of their customers’ dogs, WAG was able to create super-specific messaging and offers. As a result, their stats soared. They witnessed a 300% increase in Placed Order Rate and a staggering 423% increase in Revenue Per Recipient. Open rate lept by 43%, while Click Rate jumped up by 64%.

Conclusion

By establishing this integration for all users on Okendo’s Power plan and above, we’re enabling a significant opportunity for brands to take their customer experience and marketing strategy to the next level. Users on these plans are allocated to an experienced Customer Success Manager who reviews the success of your reviews program, identifying opportunities and areas needing optimization to make sure you’re maximizing your success with Okendo.