In Brief
eCommerce retention marketing platform Yotpo was rapidly expanding their customer base, but they didn’t have a good way to communicate with customers outside of tactical conversations. They wanted to scale customer communications with a digital destination that could not only solve customer issues but foster a sense of community and give customers a feeling of investment in Yotpo’s product. Leveraging Digital Hub (formerly inSided), Yotpo built a robust community from scratch in just six months. This strategy, coupled with a range of effective tactics helped the company increase engagement and support customer retention.
Challenge
Yotpo’s eCommerce retention marketing platform helps brands of all sizes to strengthen their relationships with consumers. With unified, data-driven solutions for loyalty, SMS marketing, reviews, subscriptions, and more, their customers deliver winning consumer experiences that drive loyalty and LTV.
But as successful as their products were, the company saw the potential to connect with their customers even more effectively, and in turn drive increased value. Yotpo wanted to create a dedicated digital space for their customers that would serve as a one-stop-shop for all of their needs. Ideally, this space could be where customers could find value in their products, not only from Yotpo resources, but also from other customers.
The Yotpo team also decided that its main function wouldn’t be just a place to resolve problems or tickets—it had to be more than an extension of Yotpo’s customer support team. To that end, the Yotpo Community initiative is actually part of the Community and Brand Programs team under Marketing. Their goal was to cultivate positive sentiment toward Yotpo, fostering a sense of belonging to the company beyond the product and service.
To build a community space that would help strengthen their brand, Yotpo turned to Gainsight. Yotpo decided to partner with Gainsight because Digital Hub provided the features to manage customer communities and centralize all their content and engagement in one centralized destination.
Solution
Yotpo began onboarding with Gainsight in January 2022. The team impressively had the beta version ready in a mere two months.
“Vish, our onboarding manager and later CSM, partnered with us every step of the way to streamline and get us set up in record time — he really became an extension of our team,” said Ruthie Berber, Head of Community at Yotpo.
After completing a soft launch at the end of April, they fully launched at the end of June. So, in just six months, Yotpo’s digital destination went from idea to reality. Support from the Gainsight onboarding team was instrumental in getting the community up and running so quickly. Once the community was active, they started exploring Gainsight tools that could drive users to the community, like the Ideation module which allows members to submit and vote on product ideas and improvements.
The first success we saw in engaging members in the community was the feature request section—it basically exploded. The response was amazing and it’s still one of the most popular sections.
They also used Gainsight to deliver automated messages that reminded users about the community and encouraged them to participate. Another engagement method was tagging members in relevant posts to showcase their expertise to the rest of the community, which helped promote peer-to-peer interactions. Their monthly digest highlights some of the most impactful conversations and ideas from the community, as well as sharing a roundup of new features.
Support interactions were another opportunity to redirect users to the community. When a customer submits a ticket, the automated response includes a link to the community; support agents have a link within their signatures. Yotpo is also launching a third-party widget in the product admin so that when users search, it can pull up relevant conversations or posts from the community in the results.
Impact
Since the launch of the community, Yotpo has seen a correlation between higher retention metrics and customers with active community users. Having a community has also helped Yotpo with cross-selling. Members often use the community forum to ask about or request other products and capabilities for their specific use cases.
If it had not been for the community and the conversations that were happening there, we would not have known about those requests.
Building a community with Gainsight has helped Yotpo scale its customer relationship management efforts. The success has shown that customers want more than support—they want to be part of the process of building the product they’re using to build their businesses and they want to be part of a community.
