• by Jess Nelson , March 8, 2017

Stackla announced the launch of a new email plugin on Wednesday that enables email marketers to leverage user-generated content in dynamic email campaigns.

Stackla is a social media aggregator and content marketing platform that specializes in curating user-generated content (UGC). The company can discover and pull content from across 15 different social networks globally, including Chinese social networks, which marketers can then incorporate into their digital marketing efforts.

“UGC helps a big brand with a lot of content find the best content they should use by categorizing content around campaigns and user personas,” says Peter Cassidy, chief product officer at Stackla. “UGC is more authentic, very valuable, and can dramatically improve the performance of a lot of campaign.

The company’s technology categorizes content via visual and sentiment analysis, identifying key characteristics that might boost the appeal of a certain image, such as a sunset or brand logo. Brands can utilize Stackla’s asset manager to query any type of content they might be looking for, and additional machine-learning algorithms provide recommended content to marketers as well.

Cassidy asserts that UGC offers marketers something valuable that they don’t often have the time to create themselves: content.

Cassidy discussed the three core value propositions of user-generated content: volume, metrics and humanization. UGC helps marketers generate a higher volume of personalized campaigns quickly, it improves ad conversion rates and it helps humanize brand communication. 

“UGC helps make the brand more personable,” says Cassidy. “You don’t want to feel like you’re being sold to. UGC content performs better, but it also creates a great brand sentiment.”

The Stackla Email plugin generates a JPEG rendering of user-generated content that can be easily placed into any HTML email template. Stackla produces an image, hosts it, and provides a URL that can be dropped into any email marketing platform. That same URL constantly refreshes to capture recently published social posts so subscribers see the freshest content.

Since the email campaigns are dynamic, the content populates when an email is opened as opposed to when it is sent. Theoretically, subscribers could return and re-engage with the same email because it’s delivering new and fresh content every time. 

Images are also optimized for mobile devices and render on any device, says Cassidy.  

Stackla is what Cassidy refers to as an “agnostic platform” and works with any email marketing solution, including Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, Responsys, Exact Target, Pardot, Bronto and Marketo. 

"More and more marketers are pushing the envelope with creative email marketing design, sending beautiful and engaging emails,” says Andrea Wildt, CMO of Campaign Monitor. “The most captivating emails today have images that stretch edge-to-edge across different screen sizes, and the most engaging images are the most authentic to a particular brand, often created by real customers."

Founded in 2012 and based in San Francisco and Sydney, Stackla works with more than 500 global brands to evaluate social content posted by fans and followers, and then incorporate the most compelling user-generate content into digital campaigns.

The Stackla Email plugin is available now to any Stackla customer, no matter what tiered business plan they subscribe to.