What can be a better way to sell a car seat than to show a cute baby in the seat? Not much. And Giggle, a multichannel retailer of baby and children’s products, is seeing positive results after adding photos its customers post to Instagram of they and their children using Giggle products.
Giggle introduced functionality on Thursday that allows a website visitor to see photos of other customers wearing or using the products the visitor is perusing.
Here’s how it works. When a visitor to Giggle.com puts her cursor over certain items, she sees the highest ranked image tagged to that product submitted by a user on Instagram. The user is not financially compensated for the photo, however Giggle does include a link to that user’s Instagram profile that is visible when the image shows up. Giggle uses technology from photo management vendor Olapic to make the feature work.
“It gives that emotional sense of what that product is and how it might work for you,” Shawna Hausman, vice president of e-commerce and digital marketing for Giggle, said in a presentation this week at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition. “It really adds a rich layer to that shopping experience.”
When Hausman joined Giggle about a year and a half ago, she made it a priority to start incorporating user-generated content into Giggle’s promotional materials as a way to let customers tell the brand’s story.
“We felt that having that visual endorsement was what was going to set us apart from the Amazons of the world,” she says.
And Giggle doesn’t just use customer photos on its website.
“In terms of e-mail, we’ll feature some of our best stuff and encourage people to share, ‘show us how you Giggle,’” she says.
Olapic claims that user photos increase conversion rates by 5% and order value by 2%. Giggle didn’t specify figures on its own site, but Hausman says user photos create a more “inspiring and personal shopping experience.”
With consumers posting 70 million photos per day on Instagram, there are many images brands can draw from. But Olapic CEO Pau Sabria says retailers must tread lightly when incorporating those images into marketing campaigns.
“The first thing is to recognize the end user, to be cognizant of the user rights,” he says. “User-generated content is as much about content as it is about users. Try to engage with the audience and find some creativity in how they submit the shot.”
Hausman said she learned a number of lessons from rolling out Giggle’s customer photo initiatives, including that it’s important to be patient.
“It doesn’t have to be that great in the beginning,” she says. “It’s those first 20 images that’s super important. Once you show visually what you’re looking for and you put a great hashtag or a great campaign name with it, people are like, ‘Oh yeah, I get it.’ It just comes to life in a different way and it gets easier and easier over time.”