Outdoor furniture brand Kees Smit Tuinmeubelen sees amazing results after using UGC in DPA

Kees Smit Tuinmeubelen, a Dutch outdoor furniture retailer, has had a remarkable journey with user generated content (UGC); and it only keeps on getting better. Their latest success involved improving their dynamic product ads (DPA) by swapping out the standard white background product images for UGC. The campaign results? A whopping 80% increase in click-through rate, and more. 

In 1942, Kees Smit Tuinmeubelen was founded and started out by selling household items by wagon. After 20 years, they opened their first physical store in Amelo, the Netherlands. Today, they are operating two stores in the Netherlands, they are planning on opening a third, and through their online shop, they’re also active in the German and Belgian markets. In 2022, this Dutch furniture retailer is celebrating 80 triumphant years on the market – talk about a legacy! 

As a family business, Kees Smit understands the importance of connecting with your customers and thus truly understands the power of UGC. Needless to say, we’re very proud to have them onboard as a Flowboxer as they’re always keen on trying out our latest features and keep reaching fantastic results. 

“Flowbox helps us be more creative and build our community,” says Melvin Harms, Performance Marketer at Kees Smit. 

One aspect that makes Kees Smit stand out among other Flowboxers is that they have a substantial split in activity between winter and summer. Since their furniture is intended for outdoor usage, the majority of their customer interactions happen between spring and fall, and during the colder months, it gets a little more quiet. 

Challenge
Before Kees Smit was introduced to user generated content, they didn’t use any other type of customer pledges than reviews, which gets you far – but not quite all the way. UGC helps brands leverage that last piece of customer loyalty and trust, and while collecting content via a platform like Flowbox was a new concept for Kees Smit at the time, they were very eager to try it out. 

“UGC is important, and it’s getting more and more important each day,” says René Nijmeijer, Marketing Manager at Kees Smit.

Kees Smit has been running an on-going competition for a couple of years, where their customers have the opportunity to win back their entire purchase amount by sharing UGC on Instagram and tagging the brand with @keessmittuinmeubelen and #mijnmooietuin. The competition is live year-round, and the winners are announced at the end of the season every year, around September/October. As their customers are avid fans of the brand and get excited by this competition, Kees Smit essentially gets flooded with content during their high season each year, making it difficult to organize and keep track of all of the content on their own. 

Kees Smit is also an avid user of dynamic product ads in social media, and like many other brands, was limited to only using plain, white background images. They wanted to enhance their ads for their audience, and that’s where Flowbox’s UGC in DPA feature entered the picture. 

“Our biggest challenge with advertising is relevance, to reach the right people with the right content, and user generated content really helps us with that,” says Melvin Harms. 

Solution
After being introduced to user generated content by Flowbox’s very own Head of Customer Success, Ralph van Katwijk, Kees Smit quickly realized its potential and decided to start including UGC in their marketing strategy, specifically to facilitate and automate the content collection process in regards to their Instagram competition. 

“Ralph approached us three years ago, we had a meeting and we liked the idea of what Flowbox could do for us. So, we decided to start a collaboration to see where it could go, and the last three years have been very successful – we’ve collected a lot of data,” says René Nijmeijer. 

Last year, when Flowbox introduced the feature to use UGC in dynamic product ads and replace the standard white background images, Kees Smit needed very little convincing – they were ready to try it out right away. So, a one-month long A/B test campaign was launched during their high season. The goal was to compare the standard white background photos with user generated content for retargeting ads. Can you guess which one did better? We’ll give you a hint. It was UGC (by a long shot). 

Results
With the help of Flowbox’s platform, Kees Smit’s DPA campaign generated amazing results, namely an 80% increase in CTR, 50% increase in ROAS, and 40% decrease in CPC. 

“We’re definitely going to be continuing with this concept. Hopefully, if we collect enough content by our next high season, we won’t need to use the plain pictures at all anymore, and we’ll only use UGC” says Melvin Harms.

As we mentioned earlier, Kees Smit generates a lot of UGC, not only through their competition, but in general during their high season; they basically get bombarded by their customers who love to share photos of their products. In the Flowbox platform, Kees Smit can easily find all images in one place, sort through them to find the best ones, use Rights Requests to ask permission to use the images, tag their products to make the images shoppable, create Flows that are easily integrated on their website, and much more. 

“Flowbox is a perfect way to simplify the process of collecting UGC, and in the big picture, it saves a lot of time. Before, we had to go to every garden ourselves to get good pictures.” says René Nijmeijer. Now, they just need to log into their Flowbox account to find countless images waiting for them. 

A/B campaign results in numbers

• 80% increase in click-through rate (CTR)
• 50% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) 
• 40% decrease in cost per click (CPC)

Do you want to test UGC in DPA for your brand and get as great results as Kees Smit? Click here to book a free demo with Flowbox.

More information:
Bianca Rior, Digital Marketing Specialist, Flowbox
bianca.rior@getflowbox.com

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