Vendor Spotlight: Yotpo

Yotpo is a commerce marketing cloud that enables retailers and brands to display customer content, such as user reviews and photos, on their site and across the buyer journey using an AI-powered solution and build custom, on-brand loyalty and referral programs. In 2011, Tomer Tagrin and Omri Cohen founded the company after Tagrin experienced a bad online purchase as a result of fake reviews—this drove them to develop a trustworthy solution for ecommerce.

We had a chance to interview Alexander Lazoff, Yotpo’s Senior Manager of Partnerships & Alliances to find out the why, what, and how of Yotpo.

Since 2011, how has Yotpo evolved?

Yotpo has evolved from a ratings and reviews provider for ecommerce merchants into a commerce marketing cloud offering the most innovative and effective solutions for reviews, a visual marketing suite, referrals and loyalty programs for digital-first and omnichannel brands including Everlast, Moroccan Oil and Helly Hansen.

What are the most common questions you hear from potential and current clients?

**What do I really stand to gain by managing all these components under one roof?**Our customers typically want to understand the benefit of going with a single provider and if they might be missing out on capabilities. With Yotpo, clients don’t only get the benefit of non-stop innovation that makes our individual solutions best-in-class, there are synergies between all the various components that are only possible through our platform.

**Why should we abandon our syndicated content strategy to focus on building our own content infrastructure?**Another typical conversation is around the value of empowering your own brand and site, outside of that dependency on big-box retailers for content syndication. We love this question because we’re able to help educate brands on how to develop and nurture a direct relationship with their customers through our technology. By giving their community a voice on their own site, brands have complete control and ability to manage their reputation, address any customer concerns, and gain valuable feedback data to improve products and experiences.

If you’d like to hear more from the team at Yotpo, listen to their episode on The Funnel: An Ecommerce Podcast. We cover UGC’s role in ecommerce and how to motivate shoppers to leave comments and share images. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

What kind of feedback do you hear from your clients?

“Since integrating Yotpo to our site, we have seen a significant lift in our conversion rate and engagement, resulting in a huge increase in review-recommended product sales.” – Monique Anderson, Web Manager, Dakine

“We prefer to align ourselves with like-minded companies. We’re so happy with Yotpo and their track record of innovation; they are constantly releasing new products like custom galleries – that’s why we’re sticking with them.” – Dan Stepchew, Chief eCommerce Officer, Medelita

“With this powerful and user-friendly dashboard, we’ve managed to unlock the massive value of our customer feedback. Yotpo Insights gives us clear and accessible data at the speed we need to keep up with our customers’ demands and deliver even better consumer experiences.” – Sandra Negrea, Customer Engagement Analyst, Adore Me

How are brands leveraging Yotpo?

Here are a couple of use cases:

Adore Me:

Adore Me has always valued customer reviews as a primary source of feedback on product performance and consumer experience. Sandra Negrea, Review Manager & Customer Engagement Analyst at Adore Me explains, “We use our reviews to truly listen to what our customers have to say. It was not unusual to manually read through as many as 5,000 reviews each month to extract customer insights — data mining, running different analyses, and sending reports to the relevant internal stakeholders.” Not only was this process becoming too time-consuming, but it also left critical details of customer feedback topics, trends, and sentiments undiscovered.

Adore Me uses Yotpo Insights to benchmark specific aspects of their products and service against industry sentiment scores. With actionable takeaways from consumer feedback that serve their product, marketing, and customer service teams, Adore Me could leverage their first-party data to fuel better business decisions.

UNTUCKit:

Yotpo helped UNTUCKit generate more customer content and use it to increase sales and brand & product discovery throughout the buyer journey. UNTUCKit collected rich customer review content, which helped inform future shopper decisions. Additionally, they combined photos from their reviews with curated customer photos from Instagram to showcase real customers’ UNTUCKit style in on-site galleries.

Customer photos also proved to be a scalable source of creatives for social and email marketing: “We incorporate UGC on Twitter and Facebook. We’ve also started to incorporate it into our own emails.”

For UNTUCKit, the value of review content was three-fold. They used it to increase on-site conversion, boost their SEO ranking and traffic by having tons of content for Google to crawl, and inform their product development using their reviews as a source of feedback.

How has Yotpo grown over the last few years?

Yotpo has grown tremendously in the past few years, we now operate from 4 offices in NY, London, Boston, and Tel-Aviv and have over 320 employees.

2018, in particular, has been phenomenal on various fronts:

We acquired Swell Rewards: the leading incentive marketing platform in the market!

We were chosen as Magento’s Premier UGC and Loyalty Partner

We incorporated our AI engine into our various tools

And enhanced the way our brands can leverage visual UGC

This means our platform suite offers a bold, definitive step towards our greater vision to provide your clients with the essential technology they need to win in a customer-centric world: so you can help your clients accelerate revenue growth, save time through intelligent automation, and build a better, stronger brand.

What makes Yotpo unique in the customer content and loyalty space?

Yotpo offers the most complete customer content platform and the only one powered by a proprietary AI engine. With sentiment analysis, machine learning, and other AI algorithms, brands are able to collect higher-converting content, display those reviews and customer photos intelligently across the buyer journey, and derive unique insight from customer feedback.

With our 2018 acquisition of Swell Rewards, Yotpo is also the only provider to marry customer content marketing with rewards and referrals, unlocking synergies and innovation that take customer advocacy and loyalty to the next level. Finally, Yotpo has been named a Magento Premier Technology Partner, making us the first and only customer content marketing and loyalty solutions provider to be natively integrated into the Magento platform.

Where do you see Yotpo in five years?

Yotpo’s future is very closely tied to the growth and evolution of our brands’ customers, making the quest to add new solutions to our commerce marketing cloud, and tap into synergies between those solutions, a thrill ride into the future of commerce.

In five years, Yotpo will continue to fulfill its mission to provide brands with everything they need to win in a customer-centric world through the most cutting-edge technology, strategic expertise, and innovative solutions developed in partnership with our customers.

Any success stories?

Medelita

Founded in 2008, Medelita is the first direct-to-consumer, elite medical apparel brand offering impeccably tailored, hand-embroidered lab coats and scrubs via Medelita.com. Given that medical communities tend to be tight-knit, Medelita needed to find a solution that would allow them to better engage and appeal to customers and their comrades.

To this end, Medelita partnered with Yotpo to collect and display user-generated content, in particular, customer photos that would showcase ardent fans of Medelita’s medical uniforms. The caveat is that the images must be high quality in order to put their apparel in the best light. In addition, the brand needed to be able to collect a wide array of photos that represent multiple product lines and categories, for both men and women.

Using Yotpo’s Visual Marketing Suite, Medelita is able to collect shopper photos from multiple sources, including curating images from Instagram and requesting photos along with reviews through an on-site photo contest. Medelita is also able to manage and moderate all of its content, ensuring only the best and most relevant are published on the site, including on the homepage, product pages, category pages, and even a dedicated photo collection page. Category-specific galleries showcase unique collections; for example, their ‘Lab Coats for Women’ gallery displays female medical professionals and the eponymous apparel.

After less than a week using Yotpo’s Visual Marketing Suite, 100+ customer photos were uploaded to the site, and Medelita saw a fast increase in conversions. Further, Medelita site visitors are 160% more likely to make a purchase when interacting with customer photos versus those who don’t. Dan Stepchew, Chief eCommerce Officer, Medelita, said “Since adding the new…galleries, the conversion rates on our top-five key category-specific landing pages increased approximately 15% within 30 days of implementation.”

If you’d like to learn more about Yotpo, feel free to reach out to Blue Acorn iCi here.

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