The UGC email, and the permissions conversation nobody has first

It's credible because it's worse

A customer photograph is badly lit, slightly out of focus and taken in a room nobody tidied first. Those are the qualities that make it persuasive. They're impossible to fake, and they show your product in the conditions a reader actually recognises.

Every step you take towards making it look professional takes some of that away. Crop it for the layout if you have to. Leave the rest alone.

A public post isn't permission

1. Ask directly, in a message and not a comment, and say exactly where the photograph will appear
2. Name the uses: email, product page, paid advertising, packaging, each one separately
3. Confirm how they want crediting, and whether their handle or their first name is fine
4. Keep the reply, with the date, somewhere your team can find it a year from now
5. Honour a change of mind without arguing, because the alternative is a public complaint

Blanket terms attached to a hashtag are common and weak. They lean on somebody having read a competition rule, and they don't survive the moment a customer objects. Whatever the wording says.

Where a person is identifiable in the photograph, that's a second permission. And it belongs to whoever is in the picture, not to whoever took it.

Ask at the moment the photograph already exists

The best time to ask is the point where they've just used the product for the first time. Ask months later and you're asking them to go and take a picture from scratch. Almost nobody does.

Make the ask specific. Show us yours produces nothing. A photograph of it in the room where you use it produces something you can publish.

Don't turn it into a grid

A neat four by four grid of customer images reads as a decorative pattern and gets scrolled straight past. Two or three photographs at a size where the detail is visible, each with the customer's own words underneath, does the job the grid can't.

Where the photograph shows your product being used in a way you never intended, lead with that one. It's the most interesting picture in the set, and it doubles as a use case.

The permission you got is worth more than the campaign

Once you've cleared a photograph for every use, it belongs on the product page, in the abandonment sequence and in paid advertising, where customer imagery consistently beats studio work. The email is the least valuable place it'll ever appear.

• Product page, near the reviews and not in the gallery
• The second email of the abandonment sequence, where the doubt is about reality and not price
• Paid social, where it stops looking like an advert
• The next round of packaging, if the permission covered it

So the permission wording matters more than the campaign does, and it's why the conversion work and the email programme should be collecting into one library between them.

Count what you already have permission for

Ask whoever runs your social accounts how many customer photographs exist, then how many have written permission attached to them. The gap between those two answers is the campaign you can't currently send. Closing it is a week of messages.

Start with the ten best pictures, not with everything. Ten cleared photographs will carry a year of campaigns, product pages and advertising, which is more than most accounts we take over have cleared in total.