What is Yotpo: using reviews to boost your marketing

Customer reviews matter. A lot. Whether you’re launching a new product or trying to build momentum in-store, reviews help shoppers feel confident and informed. But getting enough of them, especially detailed and genuine ones, is hard work.

That’s where tools like Yotpo come in. Yotpo helps brands collect and display customer reviews, alongside photos, ratings and questions. You can pull that content into your product pages, media, and CRM activity to build trust across the funnel.

But before Yotpo can help you do that, you need something most brands struggle with: review volume. This is where pairing Yotpo with digital sampling starts to make real sense.

What Yotpo does

Yotpo is a platform that helps brands gather and manage customer reviews, star ratings, photos and questions. Most people use it to pull authentic content into product pages, media, and CRM campaigns.

You can automate review requests through email or SMS, customise how the content appears on your site, and analyse what people are saying. It’s designed to make customer voices more visible and valuable in your marketing.

But it can only do that if you already have people engaging with your product, and enough of them are willing to respond.

That’s where most brands hit a wall.

The challenge with generating reviews

Most teams set up a review request email and hope people reply. But if you’re early in a product launch, or don’t have a big direct-to-consumer base, you won’t get much back.

Even with some traction, reviews tend to be short. The more thoughtful ones usually come from people who’ve had a proper experience with the product, and who feel motivated to say something useful. That doesn’t happen by chance.

This is the gap Sampl helps fill.

How Sampl supports better review collection

Sampl runs targeted digital sampling campaigns. That means we send your product to people who fit your audience and have said they want to try it. Once they’ve had enough time to use it, we prompt them to leave a review.

When used with Yotpo, that flow looks like this:

• Samples go to people who match your ideal customer profile.
• They try the product in real life, not just once but properly.
• Sampl prompts them to write a review. It’s a simple, branded experience.
• The review gets pulled into your Yotpo account, ready to publish wherever you need it.

This approach doesn’t just boost review numbers. It gives you detail and context. The kind of comments that go beyond “smells nice” and help shoppers understand what the product is actually like.

What that looks like in practice

Flexitol wanted more reviews for its Rescue Heel Balm. They used Sampl to distribute samples to likely buyers and connected the feedback flow to Yotpo.

Here’s what happened:

• 1,725 new reviews submitted
• An average rating of 4.6 stars
• 93% of reviewers said they’d buy it again

That volume, and quality, helps their product stand out in retail and online. It also gives their team fresh insight into what people notice and care about.

Why it works

Platforms like Yotpo are built to collect and display reviews. But they don’t fix the upstream issue: getting enough people to try the product and feel invested enough to respond.

That’s what digital sampling solves. It gets your product into the right hands and makes it easy for people to give real feedback. By linking Sampl and Yotpo, you make sure that feedback lands where it’s most useful, on your product pages, in your CRM flows, or in retail pitches.

If building reviews is part of your plan this year, and you need a better way to do it, this is worth looking at. Not as a separate piece of work, but as a smarter way to support the tools you’re already using.

Book demo now to learn more