Holiday program prep: small actions, big impact, better shopping

Get ready for the busiest time of year

The holiday season is the busiest and most important time of year for e-commerce. You’ve been planning all year, and we shared our end-to-end technical guide to help you ensure your systems are ready to go. Now, check out a few final ways you can optimize your UGC strategy for success. This guide is all about quick, easy actions so your program stays in lockstep with the holiday rush. And don’t forget to redeploy if you change any configuration settings!

Collect high-value content

With increased traffic to shopping websites during the holiday season, you don’t want to just collect content, but high-value content that connects and converts at greater levels. To encourage more high quality content, make it easier for your customers to:

• Upload video. As the fastest rising medium and one that customers are ingesting more than ever, reviews are no longer just words and images! Make sure your review requests clearly include video.
  • Start with the review request email (RRE) and include a direct ask for videos and photos. When customers hit your review submission form, make sure you have native video enabled in the “Display Options”. (KB article)
  • As an extra push, we’d also recommend using the ghost text in review prompts as a reminder to submit videos. (KB article & demo)

• Submit rich, meaningful reviews with the help of AI Content Coach. Enable this in your “Display Options” to help customers create better reviews and reach out to Support to activate this AI feature (Adv and Ent only). (BVU course, KB article & demo)
• View high converting social UGC with Immersive Video Galleries, bringing the social experience to your site. Choose the “Video Optimized” option when creating your gallery.  (BVU course, KB article)

Enhance your UGC presence for a standout digital experience 

The holiday season is all about quick support and clear communication. These actions will help you stay on top of issues and keep customers happy.

• Resolve questions promptly. Monitor question trends in real-time using the dashboard filters for unanswered questions to act fast. Ensure customer service teams are prepped for surges in content to be answered. (BVU course)
• Maximize your review reach. Make sure product families are configured for all products that should share reviews, and you’ve listed out all variant UPCs so that applicable reviews also get shared correctly at retail. (BVU course)
• Resolve gaps in syndication. Log into Portal to make requests to match products at a retailer using our new self-serve product matching tool. (BVU course, KB article)
• Don’t spoil the surprise: Want to keep that gift a secret during the holidays? Haven’t opened the product yet to try it out? You can now set a custom delay for Review Request emails. Just set it once, and collect reviews later. (Ent only) (BVU course)
• Find holiday-ready quotes from real customers. Easily spot phrases like “perfect for holidays” in reviews to build compelling marketing copy. Acting now allows you to build out your campaign messaging and headlines before the holiday season. Use the text filters in custom reports to search for these keywords. (BVU course, KB article)
• Get to the heart of what customers are saying: Save your shoppers from reading countless reviews by bubbling up user sentiment on your PDPs. Turn on review summaries in Config Hub and reach out to Support to activate this AI feature (Adv and Ent only).  (BVU course, KB article)

Put these small, impactful steps into action immediately. Optimizing your UGC strategy now guarantees your program is prepared to deliver the rich, helpful content customers need for confident purchasing, letting you keep pace with the rapid surge of holiday traffic.