This article is part of our first-ever 2021 Partnership Leaders Awards, highlighting influential professionals in the partnerships space. Learn more about the awards and check out all the winners.
We recently named Yotpo as our first-ever, Most Innovative Partner Program 2021. We were lucky enough to speak with Moran Khoubian, the Director of Partner Marketing at Yotpo, about their growth this year and plans for 2022.
Ten Years of E-commerce Marketing
Yotpo, an e-commerce marketing platform headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. Over the past decade, Yotpo has begun to spread globally, now employing over 800 professionals in offices around NY, Austin, Tel Aviv, London, Bulgaria, Australia, and Germany.
Yotpo started with a reviews solution to help e-commerce brands collect reviews, run loyalty programs, and sell more by using their customers as their most loyal marketers. Yotpo began its partner program about four years after starting the company. After working to create an agency program, then trying to recruit partners to the program. The Yotpo team realized they weren’t marketing the program well enough. So, they invented the Partner Marketing role and started marketing to and with their partners.
Moran has found a lot of enjoyment working at Yotpo over the past few years. She shared, “We have a pretty large group of people who have been here for over five years. It enables people to grow and develop their skill set. If they’re passionate and have an idea, you can really build something as long as you back it up with data. I had an idea, built a plan, and they gave me everything I needed to run with it. The partner program is a great example of an idea the team had and acted on. Today, a large portion of the overall company revenue is driven by partners.”
Growing the Yotpo Partner Program
Yotpo launched a new agency program last May, which was the first time showing external tiering. With that program, Yotpo worked with partners based on how much impact they brought. Moran explained, “We wanted to let partners get more from Yotpo. We have three tiers of partners and have recently launched a partner portal to mimic a mile club. We wanted to demo the Yotpo loyalty program perks and make it easy to see how they’re doing in their partnership and how far until the next tier. We’re trying to be super visible with partners, so they know what it takes to get more value from us and at the same time gain access to all the materials and enablement they need to become experts in eCommerce marketing and by that growing their business.”
Another innovative education campaign Moran supports is their holiday gift initiative. “We believe that in Partnerships it’s super important to constantly show appreciation. Every year, around the holiday season, we send partners a locked box. To unlock the box, which has an awesome present, they have to watch a video summarizing our joint work in the past year or educating about a product. It’s very fun and gets people excited. We take a creative approach to how we educate partners. Don’t want to be like the other vendors.”
Outside of initiatives on the Yotpo side of marketing, they also have a smooth co-marketing process with partners. “We try to always say yes to our partners when they propose co-marketing. We always want to make sure we can give our top-tier partners exposure to our audience, thought leadership opportunities, and a chance to generate more business. In addition, we incorporate partners in almost every marketing campaign we run.”
The 2021 Most Innovative Partner Program
It was really great for the Yotpo partner team to know they’re doing something right in their partner program. Of the award, Moran shared, “We get support from the industry and our partners, but getting that recognition with an award was a great way to celebrate the hard work the entire team had put in over the years. It was very meaningful to get that recognition from the outside — we’ve been focused on constant growth for the past few years and have a couple of surprises coming up for partners, this award is a reminder that we are moving on the right track.”
This month, we’re celebrating all of the incredible partnerships professionals and teams who took home our first-ever Partnership Leaders awards. Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn so you don’t miss any updates.
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