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

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 and highly competitive e-commerce landscape. As one of the key architects of this new partnership, Itai shares his perspective on the biggest challenges brands face, the state of the current martech industry, and how the Attentive-Yotpo partnership is empowering brands to build stronger, more loyal customer bases through deeply integrated, best-in-class reviews, loyalty, email, and SMS 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?

For the past several years, e-commerce brands and their marketing providers have been obsessed with this idea of solving data silos by adding more and more integrations. But the reality is that most integrations are still miles away from living up to their potential. Most don’t go very deep because of different technical mismatches, and require going back and forth endlessly between two different solutions.

Any data that is actually passed is almost always “unstructured” and generic. This reality leaves brands with costly underutilization and hinders their ability to truly reach those magical customer moments that integrated marketing technologies have promised to deliver for years.

With the rise of AI, this is more true and critical than ever.

AI is increasingly powering the core capabilities 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 typically categorized and understood to its team and AI systems, data and events from third-party integrations is “custom/unstructured data”, which means it is generally useless to the other’s AI systems and models.

This is literally what Yotpo→Attentive integrations are designed to fix. They achieve this by syncing reviews and loyalty data deeply into Attentive profiles, and allowing Attentive users to utilize tools like star rating filters and other unique components directly within the Attentive UI. Our teams are constantly collaborating to transform previously “contextless data” into clear, actionable information, to both humans and AI systems.

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

DTC eCommerce has reached a stage of maturity that is making it increasingly difficult for brands to stand out and grow responsibly. Millions of brands all competing for the same customers’ attention, on the same channels, which haven’t changed much for the last several years—Meta, Google, TikTok, large retail marketplaces, SMS, email. This is making it almost impossible to stand out, let alone 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, while constantly providing a cohesive and identifiable brand experience. This is an extremely difficult task, since it requires optimizing across online and offline channels, DTC, social media, and wholesale marketplaces. All while simultaneously dealing with supply chain shortages, tariffs, inflation, rising ad costs and now LLMs disrupting search and choosing new winners and losers in a blink of an eye. Only those that obsessively listen and delight their most loyal customers, speak their language, and build communities that foster word of mouth, are able 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?

Here are a few:

1. First thing has to be experimenting and finding the right ways to use AI to do things that were previously impossible. From mass experimentation, to deeply specific content creation, all the way to always on agents that can see, research and help visualize results for each user. 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.
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2. Identifying the preferred channel and tone per shopper, and leveraging it to avoid feeling spammy, whether it’s email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, etc.
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3. Smart data collection, whether it’s through quizzes, surveys, reviews, site search, on-site chatbots or human interactions like service & clienteling is massive. Using loyalty incentives to maximize collection and smart identity resolution technology like Attentive AI or Black Crow AI is a must.
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4. LLM Discoverability is quickly emerging as a place brands must be, both to acquire new customers and retain their existing ones—this requires truly understanding your reputation, authority and presence across the web. Early movers are investing heavily in creating deeply technical and nuanced content at scale, both on their own site and blog, but also leveraging their top shoppers, loyalty members, reviewers and affiliates to help them form an authentic and trustworthy representation in UGC, social and media sites, that are defining how LLMs “see” the world.

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 has done a great job at enabling this with Attentive AI / AI Pro, which uses first-party data to personalize message copy, send time, and offers to maximize revenue per message.

Yotpo's latest capabilities enable brands to create sophisticated, multi-tiered loyalty programs tailored to different customer segments. Using customer tags and various data sources, brands can deliver highly personalized experiences across multiple programs simultaneously—all while keeping the system simple and intuitive for shoppers.

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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 eCommerce.

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), AI extracted and user inserted topics (fit, quality, value), and visual user-generated content (UGC) to filter and run different campaigns.

• 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.

• Add social proof in product blocks and recommendations: not just star ratings, but also top review sentences and summaries leveraging Yotpo’s AI.

• 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 shopper 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 CX & Retention 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.