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.