• by Jess Nelson , May 18, 2016

Visual content marketing platform Olapic and data solutions provider Bluecore will help marketers create more personalized email marketing campaigns through the use of user-generated content (UGC).

Seventy-eight percent of B2C brands incorporated UGC into marketing campaigns in 2015, according to a report by the Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs and Brightcove. The poll of more than 5,000 global marketers also showed social media content (other than blogs) has the fastest-growing B2B content marketing tactic. 

Bluecore brings to the partnership SaaS email marketing technology that helps marketers react to consumer behavioral data. Olapic’s marketing platform helps to curate visual content created and shared by consumers across Instagram, Vine, Twitter and Tumblr. Together they aim to help marketers increase follower engagement and personalized consumer experiences. 

Here's how the partnership works: More than 2 billion photos are uploaded on social media daily. Olapic helps brands manage social streams as well as pinpoint and leverage specific images or videos in marketing campaigns. Olapic also offers predictive services that rank photos by expected conversion rate to help marketers pinpoint the best-performing visual content.

"User-generated content helps brands strengthen their communities, increase engagement and drive more conversions,” states Fayez Mohamood, co-founder and CEO of Bluecore. “This partnership enables marketers to layer that extremely relevant content into data-driven email campaigns in real-time and without any heavy lifting from their team -- resulting in an integration of customer data and product catalogs, Mohamood says, that "would historically require an unmanageable amount of resources and time."

The partnership also includes A/B testing, a real-time stream of consumer engagement and customer analytics, emails that can change on the fly according to context and a moderation team to help with account strategy and the successful use of user-generated content.

"The proliferation of consumer-generated images is changing marketing as consumers seek authentic interactions with the brands they love," states Pau Sabria, co-founder and CEO of Olapic. "Email with personalized, contextually relevant content outperforms email with generic, stock imagery each and every time. This partnership will help marketers lower their costs while efficiently generating high-quality content at scale." 

There are, however, some concerns to take into consideration when leveraging user-generated content. Brands should maintain consistent brand messaging across channels, but user-generated content could interfere with the level of control a marketer has. There may also be concerns as to how a user is credited for their images and questions as to who owns the photo in question.