Attentive and Yotpo have forged a strategic partnership, creating a powerful, integrated retention marketing playbook for e-commerce brands. Here's how this collaboration is set to redefine customer loyalty.

We sat down with Itai Bengal, VP of Strategy at Yotpo, to explore the critical strategies and insights that fuel lasting customer relationships in the ever-changing e-commerce landscape. Itai shares his perspective on the biggest challenges brands face, the impact of the current market, and how the Attentive-Yotpo partnership is empowering brands to build stronger, more loyal customer bases through best-in-class, deeply integrated solutions.

Let's get into the conversation!

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Understanding Retention Challenges

What do you see as the biggest challenges brands face when trying to improve customer retention?

In the past few years, most brands and marketing providers have tried to solve fragmented data with more integrations being built between martech vendors than ever before. But with such fragmented tech stacks, most integrations still seem like they are there to check a box—leaving brands with significant data and understanding gaps that are hindering their ability from taking full advantage of the synergies of the two systems.

This is particularly true now with the rise of AI.

AI is increasingly powering the core components of many martech tools, but AI is only as good as the data it relies on, and its understanding of that data. While each provider’s internal data is hopefully categorized and understood to them, data and events from third-party systems is typically still categorized as “custom/unstructured data.” That means that it is generally useless to AI systems.

This is literally what Yotpo→Attentive integrations are designed to fix. They achieve this by syncing reviews and loyalty data deeply into Attentive, utilizing tools like star rating filters and dedicated components within the Attentive UI. This also involves deep collaboration to transform previously contextless data into clear, actionable information. As a result, the Attentive team and systems can fully understand and leverage this data, powering capabilities such as AI topics and sentiment analysis from reviews, clarifying loyalty threshold and property meanings, and driving valuable data science learnings.

How do you think the current e-commerce landscape is impacting retention strategies, and what opportunities do you see for brands to differentiate themselves?

DTC e-commerce has reached a stage of maturity that is making it increasingly hard for brands to stand out. Millions of brands all competing over customer attention on the same channels which haven’t changed for the last several years—Meta, Google, TikTok, retailers, SMS, email—is making it almost impossible to find quick wins.

Brands like e.l.f Beauty, IL Makiage, Lululemon, On Running, Aritzia, Birkenstock, and others who are seeing the highest growth right now, all have one thing in common: they have a deep understanding of their ideal customer profile, the actual needs and perception of their most loyal shoppers and advocates, and are invested in true operational excellence to delight those shoppers.

This also means being wherever their shoppers are, providing a cohesive and identifiable brand experience. This is an extremely difficult task, as it requires optimizing across online and offline channels, DTC, social media, and wholesale marketplaces. Brands must also leverage the right social channels while simultaneously dealing with supply chain and macro-economic challenges. However, those that stay focused on what truly matters—their loyalty shoppers—are the ones who continue to win.

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Retention Marketing Strategies

What are some effective retention marketing strategies that you've seen work well for brands, and how can they be tailored to different business models?

1. Using AI to take personalization to the next level and invest heavily in consolidating and structuring their data.
2. Bridging the offline and online experiences and data silos with account identification is key. Wallet passes are a great solution for this, especially with the right loyalty incentives.
3. Identifying the preferred channel per shopper and leveraging it more, whether it’s email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, etc.
4. Smart data collection—quiz, survey, reviews, search and on-site engagement, identity resolution online and offline, etc—is massive, using loyalty incentives to maximize collection and smart identity resolution technology like Attentive AI or Black Crow AI is a must.
5. LLM Discoverability is quickly emerging as a place brands must be, both to acquire new customers and retain their existing ones—this requires significant investment in deeply technical and nuanced content and a deep understanding of their loyal customers, both for their owned channels, like e-commerce website, and external channels, social and web reputation, retailers, listing, etc.

How important is personalization in retention marketing, and what are some ways brands can create more personalized experiences for their customers?

Extremely important. The best way to do so is to give a personal touch where it is needed and to leverage AI where it can do things that humans can’t. Attentive AI / AI Pro uses first-party data to personalize message copy, send time, and offers to maximize revenue per message.

Yotpo’s latest capabilities allow brands to build multiple tiers and perks per customer segment, Shopify tags, and more, letting brands level up their personalization further. Think specific milestones and perks for subscribers, affiliates, top referrers, paid members, and more.

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Leveraging Data and Insights

What role do data and analytics play in informing retention marketing strategies, and how can brands make the most of the data they have?

Retention is an analytics problem first: You can’t fix retention if you don’t know cohort LTV, time-to-second-order, and repeat purchase rate by acquisition source.

Smart benchmarking and inspiration can be particularly useful.

Consolidating data together and showing it across channels and systems, is still something many brands lack, at least the ability to put that data to use. Things like sentiment analysis from reviews.

But brands can’t overthink it either. There are unsolvable blind spots in attribution and incrementality. Don’t only think about the science and forget the art of e-commerce.

How can brands use customer feedback and reviews to improve their retention marketing efforts?

• Turn reviews into segmentation, not just social proof: Segment by rating (promoters vs. detractors), themes (fit, quality, value), and user-generated content (UGC) presence to drive different journeys.

• Close the loop with detractors: Automatic “sorry, let’s fix this” flows via email/SMS when a review less than four stars comes in, with support and loyalty recovery offers.

• Activate promoters for referrals and UGC: When someone leaves a five-star review with photos/video in Yotpo, trigger Attentive SMS asking them to refer a friend with a unique referral link and loyalty bonus.

• Feed product team real insights: Aggregate review themes (e.g., “waistband too tight,” “pump leaks”) to inform product iteration and proactively communicate improvements via campaigns. Yotpo Insights is the best tool for this.

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Partnership and Collaboration

As our new partner, we're excited to work together to help brands with retention. What are your thoughts on the importance of collaboration between different marketing teams and platforms in driving retention success?

Retention is cross-functional by design. Lifecycle, paid, CX, and product all influence repeat behavior—retention fails when each team owns a separate tool and no one owns the customer journey.

You need shared north star metrics. Everyone should be aligned around LTV, repeat purchase rate, and NPS/CSAT, not just channel revenue.

And a tight feedback loop between CX and marketing. CX tags (reasons for returns, quality issues) should feed into segmentation for suppression, proactive education, and surprise make-goods.

How do you see the partnership between Yotpo and Attentive enhancing the retention marketing capabilities for brands, and what benefits do you think this will bring to customers?

• Best-in-class focus on what each does best: Yotpo is doubling down on AI-powered reviews, loyalty and referrals and visual UGC, while Attentive becomes the most advanced AI layer for SMS and email.

• Deeper, exclusive integrations: Smooth migration and integration was where we started, but we are going far beyond that basics—meeting repeatedly between product teams to innovate together and solve customer problems as if we are one.

• Customer service collaboration: Our teams are communicating like they are one to solve issues without requiring customer involvement.

• Shared values and AI: Our tools complement each other more than most other tools I can think of in the market. We saw this firsthand from our customers, and spent years building one cohesive platform for this goal, but the introduction of new technologies like AI has made it clear that the bigger opportunity was to give our customers an unfair advantage in the products where we lead. We saw the same mentality from Attentive—going first and hard at new technologies with AI, so combining two innovators that are obsessed with taking their customers further seemed natural, and continues to be.

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Future of Retention Marketing

Looking ahead, what trends do you see shaping the future of retention marketing, and how can brands prepare for these changes?

Yotpo Atlas, one of our recent innovations in Yotpo Reviews, allows brands to see their biggest opportunity pockets, from products with not enough reviews, lacking reviews on specific topics and more.

Creating powerful engagement loops leveraging AI such as review collection on the topics that are found to be most important for conversion in chatbot and other CRM communications.

Experiential loyalty will continue. Brands will start to think of Loyalty as an ecosystem and community, not a widget. Expect deeper integrations between loyalty, store credit, memberships, and messaging.

What advice would you give to brands just starting to explore retention marketing strategies, and what are some key things they should keep in mind as they get started?

There is a ton of knowledge, from experienced CSMs at companies like Attentive and Yotpo, to agencies, to communities of professionals (check out Eli Weiss’s CS newsletter) to quickly get up to speed on the basics.

But retention truly starts from understanding your customers. This involves watching them, talking to them, and experimenting with their preferences. However, don't assume they have all the explicit answers; instead, focus on understanding their pain points and gaps. Then, leverage experts in each problem area to discover available possibilities and solutions that fit both your customers' persona and your brand.