I'm a huge fan of using existing, user-generated content for e-commerce marketing. ContentPing recently posted some conversion rate numbers about using instagram photos for content marketing in e-commerce.

User-generated content and conversion rates by the numbers

From ContentPing:

Initial results of this social commerce experiment are impressive: clients reportedly saw an increase of 5 to 7 percent in conversion rates from displaying user-generated photos.

and from TechCrunch:

Olapic also found that "shoppers who interact with a real person's photo on the site convert at 2 to 3 times higher than the shopper average," according to a blog post in TechCrunch.

Those numbers are just fantastic, and they don't require much effort to get going!

Next steps for you

There are two lines of work here that you have to pursue to get this going.

The first is developing a marketing process (using Olapic or your own searches online on Instagram, Twitter, etc.) to find user-generated photos for your products.

The second is that you need a way to store and track these photos, as well as a place to store them on your site. It's worth calling them out as "photos from customers" rather than just shoving them in with your existing product galleries, and this will require some (but not much) site experience work.

Still, how many strategies do you have right now that can increase conversion rate 5+%?