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Marketing Reviews…And Marketing With Reviews with Yoav Aziz, VP Growth @ Yotpo


Posted on Sep 14, 2020

Episode: S02E08

Podcast Guest: Yoav Aziz
Role: VP Growth
Company: Yotpo


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In this episode, Yoav Aziz, the VP Growth at Yotpo and former growth manager at Fiverr, lays down how reviews have evolved (hint, it’s really not about having a trabillion reviews on Yotpo). He also lays down how Yotpo, which is hot off the heels of raising $75 million dollars, structures growth, why making onboarding LONGER improved activation rates, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Eytan Buchman: [00:00:00] In 2012, I appeared at my first YouTube video. I was promptly demolished reviews online, especially on YouTube can be a harsh cold place. But they’re also key to transparency and more elusively to trust. So I was really pumped to interview somebody who is the go to expert for reviews, for marketing and for marketing with reviews. In this episode, we talk about how growth teams can align with both R&D and brand, how making a customer onboarding longer brought installs of a widget to nearly 90%, how to draw inspiration from everywhere, how the review expert actually thinks reviews should be used and more. But before we get to this five star guests – see what I did there – you’re listening to marketers and capes with GMO. I’m your host Eytan Buchman. And you already know that this episode is going to end with a corny joke about reviews. The first meet you laugh and not to steal his thunder but his company just raised $75 million. Yoav Aziz: [00:00:59] Hi, I’m Yoav Aziz, VP Growth at Yotpo, I joined the company five years ago, joined from Fiverr, originally joined the product team to lead all the signups, onboarding, activation. monetizaion of the product and from there was, the postion started to grow more and more towards performance marketing, paid acquisition, customer marketing, inbound marketing, et cetera. I’m in charge of both the performance marketing at Yotpo and the entire self service journey from the way customers are installing us and until they pay self service. Eytan Buchman: [00:01:33] I think when somebody throws the whole funnel and all the tools to deal with it at you, it’s very easy to fall back on a one size fits all approach, but avoiding that was one of the Yotpos biggest lessons, right? How did you guys deal with different segments?\

Yoav Aziz: [00:01:45] We are, targeting three different segments. So we have the very small businesses, the SMBs and the mid-market, so I think each one of them is like almost a complete different persona in terms of what they are looking for, what’s interesting for them, what will make them happy and what will make them use Yotpo. The big challenge was like to a) understand it. B) react to it. . To understand, hey, we need to speak very practically to the very small businesses and midmarket less care about the practical stuff, they more care about I don’t know security, stuff like this. Eytan Buchman: [00:02:15] How do you actually let those different segments shape different marketing behavior? Yoav Aziz: [00:02:19] We debated a lot how to to do it. And eventually we split responsibilities on people. So for example, there’s one person that’s in charge of the very small businesses segment. So every quarter, he’s coming with areas of focus and then he’s guiding all the channels. For example, the demand generation, send the email, the paid acquisition, the content, et cetera, what to do and how to do it. And he’s making sure that everything is, written and done in the right way for this segment. Same for SMB and same for midmarket. So each one of them is like in charge of this entire domain and for the entire quarter. Eytan Buchman: [00:02:54] Wait so does that mean that your head count basically has teams of specialists managing PPC or content and then three other people on top of that, each one owning a specific segment Yoav Aziz: [00:03:04] So it’s on top of the things that he’s doing on his day to day and every beginning of quarter, he’s taking ownership on this segment and coming up with a plan of like, that’s what you’re going to do and that’s how we’re going to do it. And then towards the quarter, he’s working with it, designers, content, making sure that everything is going on the right fit.

Eytan Buchman: [00:03:20] So I know growth has taken on a different meaning for a lot of different companies. I’m curious, what is the Yotpo’s approach to growth marketing and what specifically does your department own? Yoav Aziz: [00:03:29] So at Yotpo we took it to the more analytical parts of the marketing. Almost every analytical aspect besides the marketing operations and analytics and stuff is sitting in our team and the rest of the marketing are usually doing more the creative stuff and they are more coming with the ideas and content and the brand PR events, et cetera. We are supporting KPIs obviously, but the three KPIs for the team is like paid acquisition revenues, product revenues, and website revenues. Eytan Buchman: [00:03:57] Okay. I’m sure you guys, aren’t the only people at Yotpo that own those KPIs i’m sure like the product team who also are involved. How do you cooperate with that product team to make sure you’re not stepping on their toes? Yoav Aziz: [00:04:09] Every quarter, we’re coming up with a plan PRDs to the R&D developers to like come up with initiatives that bypass the core product roadmap, for example, and know you want to make a coupon codes when you pay. That’s A. B) We’re stakeholder in the product roadmap. When every quarter, when the product is coming in and starting to prioritize their, their initiatives, we are a stakeholder like CS and sales, and then you come and say like, we need ABC because of that and that.

Eytan Buchman: [00:04:38] Experimentation can be so deflating because even when you do it well so many experiments are just inconclusive. Is there any example that comes to mind when you really blew it out of the water ? Yoav Aziz: [00:04:48] I think three years ago, we, we said, No, I think, I think it was, I think it was the biggest win. A few years ago, we decided that’s we want to invest in our self-service experience and we took for one quarter, seven R&D developers and we just said, we want to do two things that will change the way we acquire customers. A, we want rebuild the sign up and installation experience; b) We want to create a homepage that tells them do A, B, C, and D. We were in a declining mode of installed widget back then, since then, the number of activated customers went up dramatically. I think this was the biggest win we ever had with R&D and product. I think we didn’t understand the persona of the very small businesses and people that are just installing that they are not willing to go to help center, find the code, copy paste, go to there. They want one click install. They want to sign up ,quickly understand the what are you doing, what’s this product and implement it. They want to do it like in one minute. and we actually done something nice in the installation, we added steps but we increased the number of activated usesr dramatically. Eytan Buchman: [00:05:57] That’s crazy do you have any idea why adding more steps actually improved activations ? Yoav Aziz: [00:06:02] We felt that people don’t understand exactly what the product is doing so we added two steps that one is like, edit your email before you’re sending a review request so they will feel kind of connected. And they feel that, um, and the, of it’s part of their and creation. And second is customize your widget to your colors. So it creates some kind of an emotional experience that like, Hey, I created this it’s mine. It’s my colors, it’s my text, I want to continue. So we added those two steps and then we added like automatic install in one click. I think that our completion rates right now with onboarding is like around 88%. That’s huge. Eytan Buchman: [00:06:36] Okay. So Yotpo owns a huge chunk of the reviews on the internet and I don’t want to miss this opportunity from your perspective, how have reviews evolved over the past couple of years? And what does that mean for marketers? Yoav Aziz: [00:06:47] Five years ago, when I joined Yotpo, reviews was a nice to have thing. Now it changed to, okay, we all understand that we need reviews so it shifted from like, Oh, wait. I’m not sure that I need to review. Is that okay? I need refills, but I need a lot of reviews and from, Hey, I need reviews and I need a lot of reviews, it’s shifted to, I need a good quality of reviews. Let’s be real when we are going to buy to buy something online, we don’t care if it’s like 2000, 3000, 4,000, you care about the things that matters for you. So for example, if you care about item shipping and it’s a big pain point for you, you want to look for shipping. If you care about speed or quality, you’re going to search for sped and quality and you want to have reviews to speak about it. So reviews shifted also from our end as a product we shifted from like generating a lot of reviews to generating better quality and more interesting and more meaningful reviews that will actually help people to get better decisions. And so it’s a big, big, big change. Eytan Buchman: [00:07:42] Okay something really interesting came up before when we were talking about new channels and major shifts. Uh, you mentioned text messaging and as someone who sees my cell phone as sacred, like there’s basically text messages from my doctor and my, I don’t know, bank. What do you think is the significance of text messages as a marketing channel? Yoav Aziz: [00:07:58] Consumers now want their brands to speak with them via SMS. I was surprised personally, I wouldn’t lie, and, but we see it growing more and more and more. And we recently done a survey and 41% of the consumers said that they want to get SMS from the brands they love. There is a discount. There is I’m out of, they have a birthday and they want to know about their loyalty benefits, what they’re getting in their birthday. They want to get to an SMS and not do an email. Eytan Buchman: [00:08:23] In order to not anger, the marketing gods. I do want to stress here that you have just said from the brands they love, this is not something you want to abuse but seriously I’m a little skeptical that two out of every five people want their cell phone pounded by marketers Yoav Aziz: [00:08:35] But they care about the brands They really want it. , it’s not spam. They gave their phone because they said like, okay, email is like, I have so much spam in my email. I won’t see it. I want to give my phone number to the brands I love. Like I’m giving my phone number to the people I love. Eytan Buchman: [00:08:47] I feel like there’s probably like the highest level of like brand trust. Sure, send me a message on Facebook. After that, there’s a send me an email after that. There’s like, here’s my home address? Like send something to me if you want. But like, I feel like phone is like the most personal I’m like the most intimate. Yoav Aziz: [00:08:58] Yeah, people love it. And, um, the open rates obviously are crazy and almost no one unsubscribes ,because it’s a true relationship when you, when you give your phone so it’s going amazingly well. Eytan Buchman: [00:09:12] That’s cool. Um, back to reviews for a second. When you look at a brand that does reviews really, really well, how do they differ from companies that use it but are kind of eh? Yoav Aziz: [00:09:21] They customize everything. They understand their customer, thet understand the tone of voice they understand what’s interesting to the customers, where should I put what and they’re using reviews everywhere. So I think using reviews only on site is like kind of a miss. They’re integrating with Google, they’re looking at their reviews and finding inspiration for an ad copy. So kind of like the squeeze the lemon until the end. You have a lot of content. You have authentic content. Don’t use it in the old way of just putting it in the product page, but you can use it like everywhere connected to your search, connected to your loyalty program connected to your email vendor. So those are the people that really succeed with this. Eytan Buchman: [00:09:58] So a lot of people that we speak to on this podcast come from a brand building perspective which sometimes kind of feels diametrically opposed to growth marketing and performance. How do you ensure that somebody was writing copy for an ad on google stays on brand? Yoav Aziz: [00:10:12] We have a content team under the brand team, but we have a content writer in the team. So the content in the team is like dedicated for all the performance marketing, for example, content on the website paid acqusition, et cetera, but she’s also have a weekly and daily meetings with the content team. So she’s still staying on brand because she’s meeting with them. She has the guidelines she’s with them on, on everything. But the final like decision is in the team. Like go, no go. So it’s kind of creating a good balance between like, hey, we appreciate the brand we need to write in the brand voice of tone, but you need to stay on this and that there are goals and things that we need to achieve in this team. Eytan Buchman: [00:10:48] Are there any core tools, that you use on a regular basis that you feel like you could not do your job without Yoav Aziz: [00:10:52] Well, we have a lot. So, um, for the product we, we use a lot AppCues and FullStory, . And also we use for the website Drift. 30% of our website leads are coming from the chat box. We are constantly optimizing and it’s working well for us, I hope it won’t be saturated and people will ignore it in the future, but currently it works great. Eytan Buchman: [00:11:13] I just want to end this with an idea that I heard and that I absolutely love that’s so built around the idea that we don’t need to create things from scratch. Yoav, can you tell us a little bit more about finding and integrating strategies from the best of dbreed companies out there. Yoav Aziz: [00:11:27] We have an Excel sheet with like 50 companies that everything that we are doing, we’re going and checking what those companies are doing. I’m changing my inspiration based on the project I want to make. So if it’s like something brand-oriented, we’re looking at Shopify. If it’s more creative we’re looking at a company like Drift, they’re very creative and their stuff. If it’s more data driven. I’m looking at Segments, I think they are doing cool stuff. Like there is almost no company that we didn’t take inspiration from. I took from everyone, something. For example, we can add the Intercom and say like Intercom has a great blog design. And then when we are tackling a new thing, we’re like, okay, let’s check what they’ve done and how they’ve done it. And then you take the ideas from everyone and try to mix it with your own brand and your own ideas and it really opens your mind to like, Oh wait, we can take these elements from here and we can take this approach from here and I tried to create something unique. Eytan Buchman: [00:12:22] Not to get too sappy, but that’s exactly what this podcast is about. Great marketing isn’t suddenly born with a click. It’s built on the seeds of ideas that you come across, things that you read and ads in bus stops. And maybe just maybe the remarkable once in a lifetime podcast, like the one you just heard right now. Like always, you can grab more information about Yoav and Yotpo and learn how he markets in the show notes at buchman.co.il/yotpo or you can jumpstart your own creative ideas about reviews by diving into yotpo.com. I’m Eytan Buchman, you’ve been listening to Marketers in Capes with GCMO and I hope you found this episode worthy of a glowing review on the podcast platform of your choice or a subway, bathroom wall.