15 Proven UGC Strategies To Incentivize, Collect, and Use UGC—Legally

Learn from industry experts and real-life examples how to incentivize, collect, and use UGC in your business’s marketing strategy.

It’s one thing to talk about how great your own products are; it’s an entirely different thing to get happy customers to talk about how great your products are. 

User-generated content (UGC) can take the form of photos, videos, or reviews that customers have contributed online after risking their own money to purchase your products. UGC combines social proof with details about your product’s specifications and features. It acts as a pitch to buy that’s subtle and often more effective because it comes from prospective customers’ peers.

But securing high-quality UGC is difficult when you have limited control over how customers use your products. You’ll also need explicit permission from the original creator before you repost their content to your branded channels. 

This guide shares how UGC flows from social to commerce, with strategies to incentivize buyers to create content and capture it. We’ll also share how to activate user-generated content across the entire customer journey, with UGC examples throughout. 

Why user-generated content strategies matter in 2026

Today’s consumers are subject to a world of noise. Combine the sheer volume of advertisements we’re exposed to daily with the rise of AI-generated content—most of which is regurgitated and offers no genuine value—and it’s easy to see why digital trust is declining. 

User-generated content solves this using the voice of genuine customers. Instead of raving about how great your product is, people who’ve spent their own money to acquire it do so for you. This adds an extra layer of social proof while also reaching your customer’s audience (if they share the UGC on their own platforms).

The value of UGC is well documented:

• 60% of consumers think UGC is the most authentic and influential content.
• Two in five customers believe UGC is important when deciding to make a purchase. 
• Brands have reported 15% to 25% increases in search traffic as a result of customer-generated content.

The same concept rings true for business-to-business (B2B) brands. Per eMarketer, companies still rely on human validation when they’re buying from vendors. More than half state that UGC is helpful in their purchase decision. 

Take it from Boost Auto, an automotive parts brand that uses dynamic installation content and customer builds to drive revenue. They’ve grown a $5,000 investment into a multimillion-dollar business, with UGC central to social engagement and product discovery.

Core types of UGC to prioritize

1. Reviews and Q&A on product and category pages
2. Short-form video, livestreams, and Stories
3. Communities, forums, and co-creation programs
4. Social posts, hashtags, and community challenges
5. Organic vs paid vs influencer content

1. Reviews and Q&A on product and category pages

Reviews have long been praised as one of the best forms of social proof—and for good reason. Per BazaarVoice’s Shopper Preference report, customer reviews and ratings are the most trusted source on social media. The report also found written reviews with photos are the most helpful—a unique type of UGC you can incentivize existing customers to share. It’s best if the photos are either of the product in use or showing the effects of the product that the customer used. 

You don’t need thousands of 5-star ratings to put this type of UGC to work. One study found a small number of reviews can increase purchase likelihood by up to 270%, especially for higher-priced items. 

The Impact Dog Crates homepage features Reels of UGC submitted from happy customers.

2. Short-form video, livestreams, and Stories

Social commerce platforms like TikTok and Instagram heavily prioritize short-form content in the form of TikToks, Reels, and Stories. Customers who are looking to build their own audience often leverage these features to grow their own audience, making it an easy way to collect UGC for your own social accounts. 

Hismile, for example, leans heavily on creator and customer content on social media platforms to grow an international beauty brand. They encourage creators to submit short-form video and social commerce UGC in a highly visual category. 

3. Communities, forums, and co-creation programs

Communities make customers feel like part of a club. They capture the 41% of consumers who believe brands should create private groups, while also strengthening emotional connections with your target audience to turn them into repeat buyers.

The reciprocity bias may also come into play when customers are invited to a brand’s community. Members who receive perks—like early access to new drops, exclusive content, or input on future products—might subconsciously feel like they owe something back, even as simple as a photo of their favorite product.

Chubbies, for instance, built a passionate community (“Chubster Nation”) with more than 1.5 million email subscribers and a social following in the millions, using customer-driven content and weekend lifestyle storytelling to fuel 50% YoY growth. 

4. Social posts, hashtags, and community challenges

Branded hashtags and social media challenges are an easy way for real customers to share UGC. Instead of asking them to share content on their own accord, it incentivizes them to do so with the premise of joining a community or winning a prize. 

Nina Shoes takes this approach with their Instagram challenge. Followers are invited to enter the giveaway for a pair of shoes, with an extra entry awarded for those who share what they’re grateful for during the holiday season using the brand’s UGC hashtag #NinaThankfulSteps.

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A post shared by Nina Shoes (@ninashoes)

5. Organic vs. paid vs. influencer content

There are three main types of UGC that differ depending on the context and person who submitted it:

	Organic UGC	Paid UGC	Influencer UGC
Creator	Customers	Creators (no followers required; just an ability to produce UGC content)	Influencers with their own following
Cost	Free	Moderate, as fees are charged per piece of content produced	High cost relative to an influencer’s follower count and engagement rate
Pros	Content is authentic and cost effective to produce	High-quality content production by professional creators and full control over messaging with a UGC brief	Huge reach potential and brand credibility if an influencer’s audience overlaps with your target market
Cons	Limited control over creator content, and usage rights aren’t guaranteed	More “hands-on” to manage and may appear less authentic	High costs and limited usage rights
Best for	Social proof, reviews, and community building	Paid ads, website content, and product explainers	Brand awareness and product launches

Building a UGC engine across the customer journey

1. Set goals, guardrails, and success metrics
2. Run UGC campaigns, contests, and ambassador programs
3. Design always-on capture across checkout, post-purchase, email, and POS
4. Connect your UGC stack
5. Enforce rights, moderation, and AI/fraud controls
6. Measure and optimize performance

6. Set goals, guardrails, and success metrics

Much like any ecommerce marketing plan, a successful UGC strategy begins by answering one question: 

What goal are we trying to achieve? 

The answer to this question dictates your roadmap going forward. 

For example, if your goal is to:

• Drive conversions, focus on customer reviews and testimonials on touchpoints further along the buyer journey (such as product pages). Measure success with metrics like conversion rate, time on page, and return rates.
• Increase brand awareness for a new product drop, run challenges or influencer-created UGC to reach new audiences. Use KPIs like reach, impressions, and engagement rate to track success. 
• Improve paid ad performance, aim for a collection of different UGC formats—tutorials, unboxing videos, etc.—to test which types your audience responds best to. Track metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS), click-through rate, and watch time (for videos). 

Once you’ve got your goal, set guardrails to ensure UGC is on-brand and meets legal regulations. These act as a rulebook to approve or reject UGC before it’s published to brand-owned social media channels. For a health brand, that might be: “No health claims, before/after transformations, or unsafe usage depictions.”

7. Run UGC campaigns, contests, and ambassador programs

User-generated content campaigns are structured and tied to spike submissions around a particular product or promotion. 

If you’re launching a new Christmas-themed collection, for example, you might do the following activities in Q3:

• Distribute free products to UGC creators to collect authentic content you can use in upcoming holiday ad campaigns. 
• Create an ambassador program that segments VIP customers and rewards them with loyalty perks—such as points, affiliate commission, or early access—in exchange for UGC.
• Launch a giveaway or UGC contest that gives entrants the chance to win a prize in exchange for a UGC submission. 

💡Tip: If you’re commissioning UGC, don’t restrict the creator to only share the positives. Almost half (43%) of consumers trust creators who share the pros and cons of a product. A separate report reinforces the demand for authenticity: Some 35% of consumers consider this attribute when deciding which product reviewers to trust.

8. Design always-on capture across checkout, post-purchase, email, and POS

Campaigns designed to encourage UGC have their place, but they’re time intensive. A more efficient approach is an “always on” capture that reminds shoppers to share their experiences throughout the entire customer journey.

Here are a few key touchpoints where it makes sense to share UGC along the customer journey: 

• Checkout: This is when customers are most excited about their purchase. Share user-generated content with prompts on your order confirmation page, such as “Share your new look with #brandedhashtag for a chance to be featured on our social media accounts.” You could also invite them to join your community or creator program to plant the seed for UGC submissions. 
• Post-purchase: Strike when a customer has just tried your product with an email or SMS series. For example, when the product is delivered, invite them to share an unboxing video on social media. 
• Point-of-sale (POS): Add UGC prompts to retail receipts and display in-store signage that encourages customers to share snaps of their visit. You could also add a QR code at checkout that links to a UGC submission form and create “Instagrammable” areas in your store.
• Customer-centric marketing: Regularly repost UGC featuring customers to your branded social media accounts; it can entice more customers to share their own content for the chance to be featured. Combine this with a permanent footer in email marketing campaigns and a “Community spotlight” feature to normalize contributions. 

Cereal brand Magic Spoon uses TikTok to create an always-on stream of UGC. They use the Shopify app integration to sync inventory, orders, and customer data between the social storefront and its unified commerce platform. 

TikTok has become a valuable sales channel for the brand. They can reach new customers where they already spend their time, and capitalize on viral UGC in real time. 

“One of the real strengths for our team has been utilizing existing PDPs and configurations in TikTok Shop,” says Magic Spoon ecommerce and digital product manager Ciara Lydon. “We now have a really seamless setup and process there.” 

9. Connect your UGC stack 

A modern commerce tech stack streamlines UGC collection and helps keep track of usage. 

At its core, your UGC stack includes:

• A unified commerce platform like Shopify: Bake UGC requests into checkout, order confirmations, POS, and post-purchase emails, using consent-capture fields to collect reposting permission. 
• Review apps: Look for tools with moderation filters and AI detection of fraudulent reviews and customer testimonials. Make sure there’s a consent checkbox to get permission from the contributor before you repost it. 
• UGC platforms like Bazaarvoice, Twirl, or Emplifi: These can connect you with professional creators, issue briefs, and track submissions to scale UGC programs. 
• Digital asset management (DAM) platforms: Only add approved assets that you have usage rights granted for. This centralized repository lets multiple teams use approved UGC, while also making it easy to remove content if a contributor revokes consent. 
• Customer data platforms (CDP): Track customer orders and divide shoppers into groups based on qualities they share. Use this to display UGC to customers who reflect similar traits to the original creator. 
• Marketing automation tools: Automate the collection and approval of UGC with tools like Shopify Flow.
• Social listening tools: Keep track of who’s mentioning your brand, even if they don’t tag you, with tools like Mention or Brandwatch.

💡Tip: Shopify is the only platform to natively unify POS and ecommerce on the same infrastructure. It acts as a centralized operating system for enterprise brands without the need for custom coding or patchy middleware. An independent research firm found this approach reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 37% and lowers annual third-party support costs by 89%.

Shopify is a centralized operating system for growing brands.

10. Enforce rights, moderation, and AI/fraud controls

Not every piece of content you’re tagged in is able to be reposted to your own channels. Even if a customer tags your brand or uses your hashtag, you do not automatically own usage rights. 

You must have explicit, trackable permission from the contributor before you use their content in your marketing:

• Use a rights request workflow. For example, if someone tags your brand in a social media post, use a marketing-automation tool to DM the customer and ask for permission to use it. 
• Store the proof—for example, a screenshot of the conversation—in your DAM platform for future reference. Use metadata to tag the original creator, when the usage right expires, or the product is featured.
• Have contributors sign a UGC agreement that covers what rights the customer grants (ideally a nonexclusive license), where the content might be used, and the duration. 
• Add moderation and compliance filters. Brands in regulated industries have more legal red tape around the content they can share—including submissions from customers. Use UGC tools to moderate what you accept. 
• Use fraud detection tools. As AI tools evolve, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish AI-generated content and genuine submissions provided by customers. Use tools to flag fake reviews, AI-edited customer photos, and manipulated videos. 

11. Measure and optimize performance

UGC is a piece of dynamic content that should be treated the same as any other element. Ask yourself: Is this the best asset to use at this stage in the customer journey? A/B testing variants can edge you closer to the answer. 

Use onsite personalization and CRO tools like Nosto or Shoplift to split-test creatives throughout your website. Compare conversion rates with and without UGC to see which performs better. If you find the former is true, test which (if any) particular assets have the greatest uplift.

The same concept applies to wherever else you’re using UGC, including ad creatives. Assign an equal budget to different UGC ads—keeping the remainder of the ad the same—to determine which assets garner the greatest return on ad spend. 

💡Tip: Keep a close eye on visitor behavior with Shopify Analytics. Choose from over 60 prebuilt reports or create your own dashboard using metrics and benchmarks that are most important to your business.

Activating UGC across channels

1. Onsite merchandising: product pages, homepage, and collections
2. Email and SMS with customer stories and social proof
3. Paid social, display, and social commerce ads powered by UGC
4. Retail and experiential: in-store screens, QR codes, and packaging

12. Onsite merchandising: Product pages, homepage, and collections

Your ecommerce storefront is the ideal place to house UGC. Visitors are searching for product details and specifications. It’s where they commit to their purchase; persuasive UGC can tip them over the edge and towards checkout. 

Touchpoints to include authentic UGC include:

• Homepages
• Product pages
• Collection pages 
• About us page
• Contact page

13. Email and SMS with customer stories and social proof

People who’ve opted in to hearing from you—either by SMS or email—are interested in what you have to say. Take advantage of this by using your customer’s creatives to subtly sell for you. 

Instead of showing the same creatives to everyone, email marketing platforms like Klaviyo can personalize the content with dynamic blocks. Use Shopify segments to group subscribers who share similar traits, then feed this into Klaviyo to display UGC from customers similar to them:

• For a segment of UK subscribers, include reviews written in British English. 
• For a segment of women aged 50 to 65, display UGC images from other women in this age range.
• For a segment of parents with young children, integrated UGC like TikTok videos from parenting creators who’ve used your products. 

14. Paid social, display, and social commerce ads powered by UGC

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) are rising. Retargeting campaigns make your advertising budget stretch further by displaying the products—and the UGC you’ve collected for them—a potential customer has already viewed.

In practice, this could mean:

• Showing UGC of a happy customer using the product a customer has viewed or abandoned in their cart. 
• Displaying the same creative to the same customer across multiple channels.
• Using slight variations of an asset created by the same creator. 

15. Retail and experiential: In-store screens, QR codes, and packaging

Retail is still thriving. Businesses on Shopify generated an average of 81% of their total sales in person last year. Capitalize on this willingness to shop in-store by including UGC throughout the retail experience.

You could:

• Display UGC on retail signage and window displays.
• Add QR codes to product packaging, customer-facing displays, and retail receipts that take new customers to a UGC submission form. 
• Host in-store experiences that invite VIP customers and local influencers to visit the location and share their experiences on social media. 

NEOM, for example, hosted a launch party for the grand opening of their new London store. The event provided the perfect opportunity to collect UGC of people interacting with the space, which they later posted on Instagram: 

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A post shared by NEOM (@neomwellbeing)

User-generated content strategies FAQ

What is the difference between UGC and influencer marketing?

User-generated content (UGC) is created voluntarily by customers, fans, or engaged community members, usually without direct payment. Influencer marketing happens when brands partner with creators or influencers who are compensated or gifted products to produce content. 

How can enterprises encourage UGC in regulated or niche industries?

To encourage UGC in a niche or regulated industry:

• Use fun, non-claims-based challenges to collect UGC.
• Give explicit instructions on what customers can and cannot say.
• Ask customers to focus on experiences over claims.
• Have contributors sign a UGC agreement to get permission to repost their content. 
• Work with experts or industry-verified experts. 
• Have legal teams pre-approve UGC before it goes live. 

How much budget is needed to launch a UGC program?

The budget required to launch a UGC program depends on your goal and UGC marketing strategy. Start for free by enabling “always on” collection through post-purchase emails, checkout pages, and brand loyalty programs that invite customers to share UGC. Scale this when you have the budget to commission professional UGC creators or influencers who charge a fee in exchange for their submissions. 

How should brands manage legal rights and permissions for UGC?

To manage legal rights for UGC, secure explicit written permission from the original creator. Have them sign an agreement that grants you permission to repost it, and store the approved creative in your digital asset management (DAM) system. Tag when the contract term ends to avoid using UGC when the agreement expires.