We are living in one of the most exciting times as consumers — we are witnessing the renaissance of brands. We are seeing what brands can do for us as consumers, and how they are able to change our lives.
In the beginning, people thought this movement was just about the digital native brands, the ones that started online — the Aways, the Allbirds, the MVMTs, the UNTUCKits of the world. But what’s becoming clear is that it’s absolutely also about the forward-thinking, more established brands like Steve Madden and Bob’s Discount Furniture. They’re all doing phenomenal things.
The rise of customer obsession and the renaissance of brands
When we think about why this renaissance is happening, the number one reason is because these brands today are obsessed with their customers.
The brands that are succeeding today are obsessed with giving their customers better experiences, and that has created a world where consumers are obsessed right back. We see this in the lines outside pop-up stores, in the products selling out and the waitlists, in the packages piling up at the Yotpo office.
The direct-to-consumer approach
This all comes down to the fact that brands are taking a direct-to-consumer approach that enables them to provide magical customer experiences.
The result is that brands have become a destination: Consumers are drawn to check out these cool brands online and offline to see what they’re doing. They want to stay and enjoy experiences with the brand. And they like it so much, they want to return.
One important thing we see from our data is that when consumers are obsessed with the brands that they’re buying from, they want to buy more and more. They want to buy different types of products, and not necessarily the core vertical.
“It’s so freaking hard to succeed”
It seems like a great formula, but the reality is that it’s very hard to succeed as a brand.
The key challenges are that at brands of all sizes — startups to big enterprises — the D2C teams are typically small. They’re using way too many technologies that don’t communicate well with one another. They manage too many channels, and they have siloed data and siloed views of the customer. All of these challenges come together to make it very difficult to create the experiences that make customers obsessed with your brand.
So, we set out on a mission to solve these problems: To provide the technology that enables brands to create magical customer experiences — ones that surpass their own expectations. This way, brands can focus on their products, on making customers feel good, and not so much on the boring day-to-day tech upkeep.
How Yotpo is tackling the challenges facing brands
The next 12-18 months (and beyond) is go-time for Yotpo as we push the boundaries of technology to enable magic for brands. Here’s a taste of what we’re working on:
We know how tough it is to stand out in cluttered email inboxes, so we want to personalize the review content collection process. “Smart Feedback” will allow brands to send review requests that understand the customer’s profile and their purchase history, and then tailor the email based on that data.
Here’s an example: Picture Jane, a loyal Love Wellness customer who has purchased #Mood Pills five times and left two five-star reviews. Instead of getting a standard review request, she would get one that acknowledges her past purchases and sentiment and asks for new types of content.
Consumers today love to express themselves with visuals (photos as well as videos), so we wanted to help you bring that visual expression to life on your eCommerce sites. One of the things I’m most excited about for the future is “Visual IQ.” Photos and videos are great to display, but they’re also a great source of data on the engagement and the users themselves. By combining that data with computer vision, Yotpo can help you dynamically showcase the most relevant images in your on-site galleries. So if I were to look at a brand’s homepage gallery, I might see something different than my wife would see, for example.
We haven’t spoken much publicly about why we made the move into retention. Today, it’s becoming more expensive to run social ads than to open a store on Fifth Avenue. The cost of customer acquisition is rising and the question is, what do you do with that? The answer is retention.
A year after acquiring Swell Rewards, I’m proud to share that we are now the backbone of some of the most creative loyalty programs out there, like ThirdLove’s Hooked and Soko Glam’s Soko Rewards. Taking a step forward, we’re working on applying machine learning to segment different types of loyal customers so they receive loyalty program experiences tailored to them.
“Segments Plus” will enable brands to deliver the right messages at the right time, in a more effective way. Very easily, marketers will be able to segment out the top 5% of their highest-level VIPs and delight them with a surprise gift. Or to make things right with loyalty customers who left a one-star review, as soon as it happens.
Introducing Atlas: Game-changing infrastructure for customer-obsessed brands
The last year has been very challenging from a product and engineering standpoint, because we kept coming back to our mission of helping brands create magical customer experiences, and we stumbled on a huge blocker that makes it so hard for them to do that. The average brand is using up to 15 different applications to do their marketing, so it’s basically impossible to create magical customer experiences.
What I’m most excited to announce is Atlas, the infrastructure we’re building that will help brands enjoy new product synergies and smart experiences across all our solutions. For the first time ever, solutions integrated into Atlas will share data, content, and an analytical engine.
Working on this has been an enormous product and engineering effort, but once brands are able to use it, it’ll be a different world. They will be saving time, energy, and money while creating hyper-personalized experiences for customers.
For example, if Jane is a Beautycounter customer with medium tone dry skin and she’s a power user on Instagram, she would see only products and content tailored to her. On a product page, reviews would be auto-filtered to show ones from other customers who have medium tone or dry skin. It’ll be the same scenario with the images that are shown to Jane. Atlas would also know that Jane is a loyal customer and ask her for a referral after a great experience.
More to come!
Stay tuned over the next few months as we start rolling out new features powered by Atlas. We’re committed to making these dreams into reality so you can laser-focus on what you do best: providing magical customer experiences.
