Extole vs. ReferralHero vs. Yotpo

Anyone that has a business with a high NPS score should take advantage of this acquisition channel. If your business isn't promotional in nature (i.e., doesn't offer discounts), this type of program may not be as effective. It is important for both the advocate and the recipient to get something out of it. If only the advocate gets rewarded, it will likely diminish your returns.

If you need an excellent mechanism to collect and publish customer reviews, Yotpo is the best that we have found. We love the feature set that is provided, even if you are using the basic membership to get started. Where it is really good is the collection and managing of reviews. The email request setup is simple and easy to use. The publishing and commenting on reviews can be managed easily in the backend. It syncs up nicely to our website providers, and we have used it on a few different platforms without any problems. The pricing on it is also very competitive when you price it out against so of the other big-name players in the space.

Incentivized

• Track advocates and reward friends.
• Fraud prevention/Abuse of incentive program.
• Reporting is easy and provides good insights.

• Yotpo alerts us by email when a new review comes in which encourages us to log in and check the Yopto dashboard to see if anything needs tending to.
• With one click we can publish a Yotpo review to our website, than another click and it pushes the review to Twitter, and Facebook.
• Even the free version has lots of useful features.

Incentivized

• Lacks geo filtering capabilities (i..e, ability to serve refer a friend only to visitors from specific countries). Our team had to put that logic in place on our side instead of relying on Extole.
• Platform requires assistance from account manager for some actions/features that should be in the hand of the client.
• Quality Control has been an issue at time. Our program has gone down because a new global platform update went out and affected our implementation. Extole has been responsive in these types of incidents, but that should not happen.

• The customer photos are too small. We'd like to be able to display the photos that customers upload as much larger. They're almost thumbnails.
• Yotpo widgets slow down site speed so we can't use any of them. The only one we can use is the reviews page.

Incentivized

Our organization is very lean and agile and does not have the resources to staff either a Marketing or Customer Service Team member on reviews full time. We know and understand the value of such an individual but are unable to staff a position at this point. This reduces the value of the tool in our eyes.

Incentivized

I think the platform back end could be easier and more intuitive, but we are able to get around and accomplish what we need to with minimal training or guidance. Specifically, we had complications with trying to do something as simple as sending ourselves test emails and adjusting image sizes pulling from our product catalog so that the review request email images would be clear.

Incentivized

Live chat is always ready to help. Even when they do not have an immediate answer, we hear back from them within a reasonable time frame. Communication from the account manager is great as well. The team has been very supportive in listening to new ideas, needs, and updates based on real-time on-site data.

Incentivized

More robust on fraud side. Good support.

I have only used one other service prior to Yotpo (I don't remember what it was) and Yotpo outperforms them. Yotpo is really intuitive and easy to navigate/install from a Shopify user perspective. When Pixel union releases their customer review service I may try it out since they are my theme provider and it may integrate more seamlessly.

Incentivized

• It took a few months to become ROI positive with Extole, but the ROAS has been good since. It probably represents about 2% of our new customers per month.

• We got complaints about not having enough pictures of projects. Yotpo completely negated that complaint with the UGC implementation on our website.
• If my memory serves me right, 98% of our customers directly interact with some Yotpo widget on our site. That's a lot.

Incentivized