Sainsbury’s wanted to add more inspiration to the weekly shop by displaying the incredible UGC being created by customers everyday.
Challenge
The Sainsbury’s grocery eCommerce site provides customers with the opportunity to browse products, add items to their basket and checkout. Sainsbury’s wanted to find ways to also connect with consumers with more authentic and engaging content. Particularly as research shows that customers who form an emotional connection with a brand have a 3x higher lifetime value (Forbes).
A key objective for the project was to create a dynamic and engaging shopping experience on Sainsbury’s website, while ensuring key functionality and ease of use remained. The site had to be both informative and inspirational in order to increase engagement and overall conversion. The ambition from the Sainsbury’s team was to introduce authentic and engaging content to a customer’s shopping experience without distracting from the key function of the site. It was also essential for the solution to be able to integrate seamlessly into the existing tech stack including Sainsbury’s CMS.
StoryStream Solution
Sainsbury’s chose to use the StoryStream Content Curation Platform, a leading User Generated Content curation, rights management and publishing solution serving e-commerce brands. Using StoryStream, Sainsbury’s are able to collect a wide range of campaign and product specific UGC and get explicit rights from the content owner for its use in marketing. Approved content can also be published onto StoryStream content modules that are embedded onto relevant category, product and campaign pages.
Since rolling out StoryStream, the Sainsbury’s team has been able to deploy over 30 integrations covering a wide range of campaigns. The flexibility and ease of deployment that StoryStream offers has enabled Sainsbury’s to take advantage of seasonal campaigns and use cases including; showcasing the best cakes made by customers for bake-off week, highlighting social content from their future brand partners, social branded shelf pages from Innocent and most recently a dedicated community page celebrating the bravery and dedication of Sainsbury’s front line workers during the Covid-19 crisis. By featuring authentic user generated content across the grocery website Sainsbury’s are creating brand awareness, driving a self-sustaining model of customers sharing content and supporting overall conversions.
Results
- Reduction in content creation costs; Over 1,000 pieces of rights approved UGC collected creating a valuable new resource of assets without cost of content creation.
- Boosted consumer engagement across the Sainsbury’s eCommerce platform; 18% content open rate
- Increased conversions across the Sainsbury’s website when the user is engaging with UGC
- Greater Efficiency with faster more agile publishing; able to create and deploy new content modules more quickly, saving time and IT resource, while being able to support more campaigns and initiatives.
Testimonial
“StoryStream has provided a powerful and agile way for us to showcase more dynamic, authentic content across the Sainsbury’s grocery site. This helps us to connect with customers in a more engaging and emotional way. The technology has been easy to integrate and saves a lot of time. We will continue to scale out the use of the platform and look forward to building our partnership with the team at StoryStream who have been great to work with.”
Siobhan McMullan Fin (Head of eCommerce – Sainsbury’s)
To learn more about StoryStream and how UGC can boost your eCommerce engagement contact the team here
Photo by Lily Banse on Unsplash
