I’m proud to announce that SMSBump, the leading SMS marketing solution for eCommerce brands, is joining Yotpo!
The acquisition of SMSBump is an historic moment for us. SMSBump’s visionary founders, Mihail Stoychev & Georgi Petrov, and their team, have built a category-leading product in just a couple of years, demonstrating their technical expertise at scale time and again. Not only do they have the most advanced growth and flow builder tools, but they are also constantly leveling up. We were deeply impressed by both their product and the team’s dedication to innovation, speed, and customer satisfaction — making them ideal partners for Yotpo.
When we started Yotpo in 2011, we ultimately built what would become a content engine that helps brands collect and display social proof — reviews, ratings, photos, videos, and Q&A — at every customer touchpoint.
In 2018, we acquired Swell Rewards, now our Loyalty and Referrals solution, using our reach and customer sentiment data to enable brands to create tailored, optimized loyalty and referral programs. Now, powering more than 1,500 programs for forward-thinking brands like Steve Madden, Soko Glam, and MVMT, and yielding results including a 400% uplift in loyalty program account creation, we’re thrilled to have become the fastest-growing loyalty and referrals provider on the market today,
I am beyond excited to add SMS to our platform and to offer our customers new possibilities to combine UGC and loyalty seamlessly to create powerful experiences on a channel that consumers interact with constantly.
A single-platform approach to eCommerce marketing
Yotpo is now the only eCommerce marketing platform to provide integrated solutions for reviews, visual UGC, loyalty, referrals, and SMS, all in one place. We believe in a world where brands that successfully create and sustain direct relationships with their customers will win. Our mission is to provide forward-thinking brands with the technology stack that helps them create the experiences that spark those relationships.
Today’s brands face the challenge of creating cohesive, personalized experiences while having to manage upwards of 15 separate eCommerce marketing solutions. With Yotpo’s single-platform approach, they will be able to bring many of those solutions under one roof, saving time and increasing efficacy with shared data and content.
Going forward, we plan to continue adding solutions to make it easier for eCommerce marketers to create the experiences that allow them to stand out. Given the shift of the industry towards mobile commerce, we chose SMSBump because we’ve seen that more and more of these experiences will be happening on channels like SMS.
SMS marketing: The opportunity
Direct-to-consumer relationships rely on direct communication channels. While the modern shopper is everywhere, jumping rapidly between channels — from social to search to brick-and-mortar and back — they don’t go anywhere without their phones.
Mobile is steadily dominating eCommerce: 53.9% of online shopping is expected to take place on mobile by 2021, and in Q3 of 2019 alone, 81% of all traffic to Shopify stores came from mobile.
In today’s eCommerce landscape, only the brands able to meet consumers wherever they are, on their own terms, are able to succeed. The rise in mobile traffic is certainly a challenge — but more than anything, it presents a powerful opportunity. Mobile shoppers are more engaged — especially when it comes to SMS. Click-through rates on the channel reach 35%, and as a result, ROI is upwards of 25x.
SMSBump identified this critical channel early on and they have become a category leader in just a couple of years. Their founders share our obsession with innovation, and they are the number one app in their category on the Shopify App Store, with more than 28,000 customers.
SMSBump has developed the industry’s most advanced flow builder, smart segmentation capabilities, robust growth tools for SMS list collection, and powerful performance data and analytics, empowering brands to drive engagement, improve retention, and increase lifetime value. They can custom-build campaigns with SMSBump’s flow builder or choose from existing cart abandonment, welcome, shipping notification, birthday giveaway, back-in-stock, or winback campaigns.
SMSBump + Yotpo’s shared mission
As we pursue our mission to ease the pains of tech bloat among the world’s leading brands, Yotpo and SMSBump are hyper-focused on developing time-saving, revenue-driving product synergies.
Doubling down on our pledge to help brands meet their customers wherever they are, SMSBump’s integrations with Yotpo’s Ratings & Reviews and Visual UGC solutions will enable brands to collect customer content — including reviews, photos, and videos — via SMS, taking advantage of the channel’s higher engagement rates to generate even more UGC.
The flow will look something like this:
A customer purchases a pair of shoes. They receive a review request via SMS message, enabling them to write a review and snap a photo of the new shoes right on their phone.
Similarly, SMSBump’s integration with Yotpo’s Loyalty & Referrals solution will enable brands to engage loyalty program customers via SMS marketing campaign workflows that include loyalty data, status updates, and referral promotions.
The flow will look something like this:
A brand wants to encourage loyal customers to redeem their points. They send out an SMS notification to customers when they reach a certain reward point balance, reminding them of all the new products they can now purchase using those points.
And that’s just the beginning…
What’s next?
We are thrilled to be working with SMSBump’s founders and entire team to maintain leadership in the SMS space and to continue to unlock new ways for brands to engage with their customers. We are dedicated to building out deeper synergies with SMSBump based on your needs as our customers. As we do this, we’ll also be exploring new solutions to expand our eCommerce marketing platform.
Here’s to a future where brands are empowered to create the customer experiences that set them apart efficiently, effectively, and all in one place.
