I’m excited to announce that Swell Rewards is joining Yotpo.
The acquisition of Swell brings us into one of the most significant chapters in Yotpo history. Enhancing our complete customer content marketing platform with Swell’s industry-leading loyalty and referrals product suite is a bold, definitive step towards our greater vision to provide brands with the essential technology they need to win in a customer-centric world.
Swell has created the technology to re-invent traditional loyalty programs, allowing brands to meet business goals in a more meaningful way. By combining loyalty with referrals, they help brands both maximize the lifetime value of existing customers, and leverage customer love to accelerate growth through word-of-mouth.
The results speak for themselves: In just under three years of operation, they’ve amassed hundreds of customers, including many of the most successful emergent direct-to-consumer brands.
With Swell on board, Yotpo will be better positioned to build a streamlined platform that alleviates martech stack overload. With Yotpo’s suite of solutions for customer reviews, visual marketing, loyalty, and referrals, brands can accelerate growth by leveraging social proof across the buyer journey, enabling advocacy, and maximizing customer lifetime value.
The evolution of the eCommerce industry towards loyalty
In recent years, we’ve seen a complete upset in the eCommerce industry. As emergent brands increasingly rely on word-of-mouth and customer advocacy to rise above the noise of traditional retail, they have naturally turned to social channels like Facebook and Instagram to strengthen their customer communities and reach new audiences.
However, as acquisition costs continue to rise on social and search, and micro-segmentation creates demand for more ad creative than ever before, these fast-growing brands are now struggling to scale profitably. To counter that trend, many brands are turning to customer content as a constant, fresh, and relevant supply of creative, while also shifting their focus from acquiring new customers to maximizing lifetime value in order to ensure a profitable payback on user acquisition.
Fostering customer love and loyalty is no easy task in an oversaturated market, where a better price or shipping option is always a click away. And while many upstart brands have done an impressive job at cultivating diehard communities, many are behind when it comes to investing in the technology that will both grow those communities past the initial stages and keep them exceptionally loyal over time.
But brands can no longer afford to ignore adding these capabilities to their tech stack: Referral programs have proved to be an effective user-acquisition channel, showing 3x higher ROI than paid user-acquisition. At the same time, marketing to existing customers typically shows 2X higher ROI than acquiring new customers.
Swell + Yotpo’s shared vision
First and foremost, Yotpo and Swell share the belief that in the increasingly competitive commerce landscape, the only way to stand out is to build and leverage a loyal base of customers who serve as brand ambassadors.
With our mutual experience working with the leading commerce brands and our shared investment not only in technology, but also in a passionate team that is dedicated to the success of its customers, we’re now able to provide the essential one-stop technology stack for commerce businesses to build and grow brands that customers truly love.
The best part? Yotpo’s and Swell’s solutions are integrated and synergistic, making them easy to use and promoting better business results.
We’ve already seen that customers are 75% more likely to submit a review when incentivized with loyalty points. And as they earn more points, the incentive drives 125% higher propensity for repeat-purchase and over 9X ROI — a win-win for the customer and the business.
What’s next? Strong apart, better together
Moving forward, Yotpo and Swell will build on a joint product roadmap. The potential for a combined UGC, loyalty, and referrals solution is enormous, and as one company, we’ll be able to tackle it and pass the value on to customers effectively and efficiently.
In combining our technologies, we aim to alleviate martech overload with adjacent technologies that are fully integrated and accessible via one platform. Brands will be able to more easily and effectively manage customer-driven activities, turn customers into advocates, and get a unified view of results and opportunities.
More than anything, growing our Yotpo family will be about bringing you better value by deepening the integration between our products, including shared management and reporting tools, and helping you further elevate customer experience, drive more acquisitions, increase conversions, and boost CLTV.