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Website
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VerticalApparel
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EcommerceShopify
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Neiwai Customer Story
1,925 extra
Customer Reviews
552 extra
UGC Submissions
3.33x
relative increase
in Conversion Rate
Founded in Shanghai in 2012, NEIWAI’s selection of lingerie, activewear, and daywear pieces rapidly established the brand as an industry leader throughout China. NEIWAI understands the personal nature of its products and how essential they are to daily life, so its garments are not mere articles of day-to-day underclothes — they are, as the brand says, “Made to Live In,” providing customers with style and comfort that supports their minds as well as their bodies.
As NEIWAI upscaled and branched into the US, the brand realized it didn’t want to start its community from scratch. It had a small but loyal following amongst Asian American communities but wanted to translate its Chinese customers’ excitement to a new audience. For this to happen, NEIWAI recognized the importance of reviews. Not just any reviews, either; it wanted content-rich testimonials that could help its products find a home in a new market and appeal to shoppers who were previously hesitant to buy lingerie. After deciding its original reviews provider wasn’t sufficient, NEIWAI migrated to Okendo to streamline the review process, collect customer feedback, and syndicate its testimonials to a new US storefront.
Creating Good Faith with a New Audience
Chinese audiences were familiar with NEIWAI, but a much smaller portion of the US had heard of the brand. NEIWAI wanted to assure consumers that its products were the real deal. However, the brand acknowledges that customers have more credibility in certain regards than marketers and even designers, so it needed a way to showcase how large of a community it had already built and create good faith with wary shoppers.
This good faith was necessary not just because NEIWAI was entering a new market. Many consumers are hesitant to buy lingerie and loungewear because they’ve never done so before or don’t believe they have the stereotypical “right” body type for it. Breaking through consumers’ social and personal reservations was one of the most formidable barriers NEIWAI had to face, and its most practical tool in overcoming this challenge was user-generated content.
“It’s essential for customers to have access to what other shoppers are saying about the products they’re thinking of purchasing. This way, they can glean an idea of what to expect and be emboldened to try it on for themselves,” says Darren Baldwin, one of NEIWAI’s Marketing Team leaders.
Encouraging shoppers to purchase something they want but didn’t feel like they deserve was a powerful move. However, before this could happen, NEIWAI needed to ask customers to share photos and videos of themselves wearing their garments in the first place. The brand recognized that this kind of request was not to be taken lightly, so it set a goal of identifying a reviews platform that could automate the process and only solicit reviews from verified customers, as well as display UGC in an organized and on-brand way.
“Finding the right platform takes the headache out of automating review requests, organizing and displaying reviews, and has the bonus of an added layer of authenticity. There are many platforms out there, and some are better suited to different sites than others, but for us, Okendo was the answer,” Darren adds.
Collecting and Sharing Customer Feedback
With UGC plainly visible on product pages, nervous shoppers were assured that countless other consumers of all body types were happy with their NEIWAI purchases.
“We appreciate this feature tremendously and are thankful to our customers who take the time to write their thoughts about their purchases for the sake of other shoppers — especially those who are bold enough to include photos. As a lingerie brand, we acknowledge and admire the bravery and self-confidence involved in doing so. It’s necessary for shoppers to have insight into what a product might look like in a more authentic setting or on varying body types.”
Much of NEIWAI’s UGC comes from Review Request Emails and Okendo’s review capture widget, but another major source is Instagram via Okendo’s Foursixty integration. With Foursixty, NEIWAI can request permission to re-share its followers’ posts in a media gallery on its homepage. Consumers often share content they want their own networks to see on social media, so Foursixty enables NEIWAI to use the same material as social proof.
Besides displaying UGC, NEIWAI uses Okendo’s platform to collect feedback based on specific product attributes such as fit, quality, and comfort and note what size they purchased. Shoppers can factor these Attributes into their decision-making and identify which customer situations are most similar to their own. NEIWAI also leverages Okendo’s grouping feature so that when a customer reviews an individual product, their testimonial and Attribute feedback will still appear if that product comes in various iterations.
NEIWAI’s audience has evolved into a tight-knit community, and Darren says a near-unanimous majority of the brand’s customers know what to expect whenever they make a purchase due to testimonials and accurate marketing. In fact, he adds:
“Interestingly, we’ve noticed some of our repeat customers faithfully leave reviews for every purchase — a sense of community that we adore.”
Thanks to Okendo’s ability to collect UGC from various sources, display Attribute data, and syndicate testimonials between international audiences, NEIWAI has grown its US customer base significantly and has multiplied its conversion rate by 3.33X.
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