Most eCommerce brands are on the Instagram train at this point – and for good reason. Brands on Instagram see an increase of follower growth of 6%-8% month-by-month. And with how long people already spend on Instagram (daily average is 53 minutes), it’s a disservice not to take your piece of the pie.
But there’s more to this engagement than just what the confines of Instagram can provide.
When you embed an Instagram feed into your website, you’re taking the kind of content that people spend hours a week looking at and putting it where you want them to be spending time – your eCommerce store.
Your concern might be that an embedded Instagram feed could actually pull people away from your store. So instead of shopping your products, they’re bouncing right back to Instagram. In this case, I have the perfect solution for you: make this embedded content ‘shoppable.’
And if your Instagram feed is sprinkled with reposted images from your users, even better! This kind of User Generated Content (UGC), when integrated into your eCommerce store, is 5X more likely to convert than professional content in an embedded Instagram feed.
In this post, we’ll first talk about how to embed Instagram feeds into your eCommerce store. Then, we’ll move onto making these feeds shoppable and increasing your conversions from them with authentic UGC.
Ready? Let’s get to it.
Embed an Instagram feed into your website
First things first, you want to get your Instagram feed into your eCommerce store – but you want it to look great and not slow down your site speed.
The easiest way to achieve all of these goals is by using a tool that collects your content and enables you to manage what appears on your site in the process. Then, it integrates the media directly into your eCommerce in a stylish gallery.
While there are a lot of tools out there that claim to embed Instagram feeds into eCommerce websites, you have to be careful to choose one that won’t affect how quickly customers can access the rest of your store. You want it to bring value, not detract it.
With the Photoslurp platform, you can achieve all of these goals in one place. First, you can seamlessly connect your Instagram account, as well as hashtags that you’d like collect from.
Then, from within the platform, you have the opportunity to curate this content before it’s integrated into a gallery or carousel of your choice. All without slowing down the speed of your site.
Our technology was built from the ground up to serve small, as well as very large brands, accommodating millions of visitors a day. So you can be sure that our widgets have been designed to ensure the fastest loading times possible.
As for the integration process, this is easy as well. With Magento, Prestashop, WooCommerce or most other eCommerce platforms, a simple plug-in will do the trick. There’s even a simple Javascript option for brands that work with any other platform.
Then, it’s all about creating an embedded Instagram feed that matches the look and feel of your brand.
While tech support is always there to help you tailor your integration, our platform also comes with a Widget Editor. This allows you to make changes to your feed without any calls to tech.
With the help of the Photoslurp platform, it’s super simple to achieve an embedded Instagram feed. Plus, it’s incredibly effective for bridging the gap between your social media accounts and your eCommerce store.
If you want to make this integration even more functional, you can take it one step further by embedding an Instagram feed with ‘shoppable content.’
Make your Instagram feed ‘shoppable’
Just like in the actual Instagram platform, you have the ability to connect your embedded Instagram feed directly with products in your brand catalogue. But rather than filtering people from Instagram to your website, embedded Instagram feeds are designed to keep people on your eCommerce until they make a purchase.
That way, when a user is browsing the latest styles from Instagram in a Lookbook or a social media gallery on your site, they won’t have to go far to find the products that are featured in the images.
When your images are directly connected with products, you can track which images get the most conversions. Meaning you have some intel on the kind of social content that resonates with your customers. Plus, who doesn’t love to measure an increase of conversions!
But how do we make this content shoppable? It all goes back to picking the perfect tool for bridging social with eCommerce.
Remember when we talked about managing your content before displaying it in your embedded Instagram feed? This is also where – with the Photoslurp tool – you can directly connect content with products.
After uploading your product catalogue into the platform, you’re now ready to start connecting.
But you don’t have to worry about spending hours on this process. Photoslurp Recognize is an image recognition tool that is designed to help you easily make connections by suggesting the product that you wish to connect.
If there’s more than one image in the product, perfect! The more the merrier; simply connect more of your products to each image. Or make your content even easier to navigate with the Hotspots tool, which gives shoppers a better idea of where products appear in each photo.
Then, head to the analytics dashboard to gain advanced insights into how well your content is performing. Here, you can learn which specific images or users help you sell the most – which is a great way to get to know your customers.
Now you don’t just have an embedded Instagram feed, but you also know which of your Instagram images are actually resonating with your customers. Let’s take it one step further.
User Generated Content, the kind that many eCommerce brands are successfully leveraging in their marketing, can improve the performance of your embedded Instagram feeds by serving as authentic social proof.
Increase conversions and engagement by displaying customer content in your feed
On average, we see a 10% conversion rate increase by integrating customer content into embedded Instagram feeds on eCommerce sites. But there’s a huge potential to surpass even that.
International watch brand, CLUSE, saw a 19% increase of conversion when they integrated UGC into their embedded Instagram feeds.
The UGC strategy is already considered one of the most powerful in the world of social media marketing today, with high potential for building a brand community with customers and increasing engagement. We can’t overlook the importance of mouth-to-mouth marketing!
So with this potential at your fingertips, it only makes sense to extend it further by connecting your UGC strategy to your eCommerce strategy.
By displaying customer content on your website, you know that you’re already displaying content that resonates with your customers – because they shared it with you! UGC then becomes a sort of visual review or social proof that helps to inspire customers to purchase.
If your main concern is about getting rights to these images, there’s a solution for this too.
Within the Photoslurp platform, the Media Rights Tool enables users to easily request media rights from customers without fear.
Plus, the rights are required if you decide to use this content on Facebook or Instagram ads (another task that you can quickly manage through the Photoslurp platform).
Embed Instagram feeds everywhere
Now that you know how to embed an Instagram feed into your site that’s full of shoppable UGC, it’s time to see what else you can do with it. Lookbooks and homepage integrations are useful for reaching shoppers, but there’s a lot more you can do with an embedded Instagram feed in your store.
By displaying a UGC carousel in product pages, customers can see other people wearing only the products that they are considering.
This helps to give a big push of social proof, which will hopefully be all your customer needs to convince them.
But, if they happen to abandon their shopping cart, you can embed Instagram feeds into your email marketing. This tactic is effective because customers are shown images of products that they almost purchased being used by someone else. Then they’re given another opportunity to click back through to the product and reconsider their purchase.
When it comes to social content, think big
Whatever you imagine for your embedded Instagram feeds, it’s possible. You just need to find a good partner that can help you do it in a way that will keep the high-quality of your site and inspire your customers – not turn them away.
If any of the integrations laid out above sound interesting to you, request a free demo to try it for yourself.
Then, get to selling more with social content.
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