Today, customers expect personalized content and engagement. With many brands competing for attention, it can be challenging to captivate your audience. Fortunately, platforms like Yotpo vs. Smile.io can help you market and engage effectively. But which one is right for you?
Both apps offer unique features, tools, and prices. To help you choose between Smile.io and Yotpo, we’ve tested their capabilities to simplify your decision.
Yotpo Vs. Smile.io: Overview
Main Difference Between Smile.io vs. Yotpo
Short on time? Here’s a quick overview to help you out:
| Smile.io | Yotpo | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Creating loyalty and reward programs to incentivize customers | Creating email and SMS marketing campaigns, subscriptions, reviews, and loyalty programs |
| Main Features | Loyalty programs VIP tiers Referrals | SMS and email marketing Reviews and UGC Loyalty and referrals |
| Integrations | Klaviyo Judge. me Mailchimp Gorgias | Klaviyo Socials (FB, Insta, X) Zapier Pagefly |
| Analytics | Engagement analytics points account and sales attribution, among others | Yotpo insights, conversion tracking, and points program performance, among others |
| Customer Support | Live chat, email, and Zoom calls via live Q&A webinars | Live chat, helpdesk integration, and community board |
| Pricing | Starting price @ $49/month | Starting price Product review and UGC @ $15/month Loyalty and rewards @ $199/month Email and SMS @ $19/month Subscription price plans are custom |
| Free Trial | Free plan available. Additional charges may apply. | Free plan available |
| Rating | 4.9/5 (6,090) | 4.7/5 (2,507) |
What is Smile.io?
Smile.io is a loyalty management solution designed to boost conversion and engagement rates. Popular among online businesses, it offers exclusive perks to customers and allows merchants to create reward, loyalty, and referral programs without any coding.
The app’s customizable and attractive loyalty programs can be tailored to match a brand’s theme. Trusted by over 50 million businesses, Smile.io is highly rated and one of the leading reward program providers globally.
What is Yotpo?
Yotpo is a leading e-commerce marketing platform designed to help merchants drive repeat shopper sales. The platform provides various solutions like reviews, SMS, email, and subscriptions aimed to accelerate direct-to-consumer growth. Brands can use these solutions to create high-converting shopping experiences that foster strong relationships between them and their customers. Yotpo is committed to helping businesses of all sizes accelerate their growth.
The difference between Yotpo and smile.io comes in the number of solutions provided and specializations. While both platforms aim to foster growth through marketing and better customer experience, each app provides unique solutions to help merchants reach their goals. Let’s take an in-depth look at both.
Smile.io: Key Features
Ease of Use
Because Smile.io specializes in one marketing solution: a rewards and loyalty program, it provides an easy-to-use interface with a gentle learning curve. The platform makes it easy to launch a reward program within minutes. Merchants can set up programs using best practices and easily adjust customer points.
Smile.io dashboard is easy to manage and makes customization trouble-free for non-programmers. You can customize widgets and pop-ups to match your brand theme and identity. Additionally, the dashboard keeps track of all points earned and the referral links and discount codes used. Though limited, its multi-language capabilities also come in handy in improving customer experience. Smile.io supports six languages, but you can improve the number of languages your store supports by integrating other multi-language programs like Langwill.
Easily translate store into multi-languages & multi-currency
Loyalty Points
Smile.io loyalty points program is a robust and well-rounded system designed to leverage customers’ desire for rewards and better shopping experiences. The point system allows merchants to reward their customers with points for anything. You can choose to reward your customers for social shares, account creation, purchases, social follows, or any other action you deem valuable to your business. You can even reward points on customers’ birthdays to show that your brand cares.
Once customers have enough points, they can redeem them for discounts, gift cards, coupons, or gifts.
The programs also offer advanced features such as accelerated point earning, point expirations, and integrations with other apps.
VIP Program
Everybody loves VIP treatment.
The Smile.io VIP program allows you to encourage customers to engage more with your content. By creating tiers that reward your most loyal customers with exclusive rewards, you can leverage people’s desires to be the best for your brand’s benefit. Your customers can compete for exclusive rewards like early access to products, accelerated points earnings, free products, or higher discounts.
Smile.io also gives you more features to set up your VIP program in ways that make your customers feel more appreciated. You can easily create contests and enter your most loyal customers automatically. You can also choose how long the contests and VIP tiers last, for one year or a lifetime.
Referral Program
Referrals are an effective marketing tool for turning your most loyal customers into brand ambassadors. Smile.io combines its referral program with its reward programs to incentivize referral sharing. Customers who refer your brand and products to family and friends can enjoy added points or rewards.
The platform also makes creating and sharing referral links with your customers easy. You can automatically create unique links for each customer and easily embed them in your email. Merchants can also set up post-purchase sharing reminders in key stages of the customer purchasing journey.
Yotpo Key Features
Ease of Use
When it comes to Yotpo vs. Smile.io’s ease of use, although Yotpo has more solutions and features, it makes up for it with an intuitive interface. Yotpo’s interface does not require any coding knowledge to navigate and utilize.
Since the platform offers different solutions on separate apps, learning to use each might take some time. Fortunately, Yotpo makes it easy to move from one app to another. You won’t need to create separate accounts for each app. You can switch between apps right on your dashboard.
Email & SMS Bump
Email and SMS marketing are made easy with Yotpo marketing features. SMS Bump comes with subscriber growth, flow manager, AI, and budget management tools that make planning, sorting, and engaging customers convenient. For example, the subscriber growth tool allows merchants to easily collect subscribers with creative sign-up forms, pop-ups, and widgets.
Email marketing with Yotpo works more or less like the SMS Bump app, and they usually come as a bundle on one app. All in all, the email marketing tool lets you create captivating and high-converting emails using a flexible drag-and-drop builder. The builder comes with AI recommendations to make personalization easy.
Reviews & Visual UGC
When it comes to leveraging user-generated content for brand growth, few apps are as effective as Yotpo Reviews and UGC. The platform provides many tools for collecting, displaying, and sharing reviews and other user-generated content.
Merchants can collect reviews from customers by sending personalized email or SMS requests. They can also use the Smart Review Prompts and custom questions, which make it easier to collect detailed and high-converting reviews. The two tools help you nudge customers to leave high-quality reviews on a selected topic. The topic can be about aspects of the product or quality of services provided.
You can also increase your review and UGC variety with photo and video review requests. Research shows that visual user-generated content is more impactful than textual content.
Loyalty & Referrals
Yotpo loyalty programs are great at engaging returning customers, while the referral program lets you reach new ones. These programs can help you maximize engagement and turn one-time shoppers into repeat customers.
Both the Yotpo rewards and referral programs also boost the performance of the other Yotpo apps. For example, you can use loyalty programs to create and launch campaigns that reward customers for actions like leaving a review or subscribing to your email list.
Subscription Management
Yotpo subscription management lets merchants create subscriber journeys that engage customers with the brand. This solution gives you expert subscription strategies that foster sustainable growth. For example, you can create passwordless customer portals that allow your customers to engage with you and manage their subscriptions.
Yotpo vs. Smile.io – Analytics
When it comes to analytics in the Yotpo vs. Smile.io debate, both platforms provide adequate reporting capabilities, but their different features mean you’ll get different reports and analytics.
Yotpo Analytics
The analytics you get will depend on the Yotpo solution you’re using. For example, if you’re using the Yotpo referral program, you’ll see points balance and redemption rates, but you cannot get insight into SMS and email marketing performance. So, to see how many SMS subscribers you have, you’ll have to switch to the corresponding app.
Overall, Yotpo provides analytics and insights in all its products. You can easily view the reports and track progress by going to the analytics section of each app. Additionally, the platform provides real-time data reporting so merchants can track and gauge performance in key metrics.
Smile.io Analytics
Since Smile.io specializes in loyalty and referral programs, the app can provide in-depth reports, insights, and analytics on the performance of these programs. The app has pre-built reports that you can instantly access in your dashboard. You can check the number of customers who subscribe to your rewards programs and the points they have collected. This makes it easy to find your top point earners, redeemers, and referrers. You can also access sales attribution, conversion rates, and engagement analytics to help you make data-driven decisions.
However, the drawback of Yotpo vs Smile.io analytics is that most of Smile.io’s in-depth analytics are only available on the Smile Plus plan.
Yotpo vs. Smile.io – Pricing
Smile.io vs. Yotpo pricing plans vary in affordability and features, but they are almost all segmented by the number of orders. So, the plan you choose will depend on your monthly order volume.
Smile.io Pricing
Smile.io offers four pricing plans, including the free plan. All plans do not have long-term contracts or hidden fees. However, additional charges may apply to the free plan.
Free Plan
This plan is great for budding stores that are starting their loyalty and rewards programs.
- 200 monthly orders
- Referral program
- Points program
- Basic branding
- Analytics overview
- Data exporting
Starter Plan – $49/month
This plan is great for small stores looking to grow and increase engagement rates.
- 500 monthly orders
- Points and referral program
- Customizable emails
- On-site reminders
- Basic reports
- 2 integrations
Smile.io Growth Plan – $199/month
This plan is great for merchants looking to level up their programs with VIP tiers
- 2,500 monthly orders
- VIP program
- Free products as rewards
- Unlimited integrations
- Point bonus events creation
- SEO-friendly loyalty page
Smile Plus Plan – $999/month
This plan is great for enterprise stores with a large customer base and merchants with multiple stores.
- 7,500 monthly orders
- Dedicated launch plan
- API access
- Priority support
- Multiple stores
- Specialized reports
Yotpo Pricing Plans
Since Yotpo features different solutions, pricing will mainly depend on your chosen Yotpo marketing app. Here’s an overview of every plan available on each app.
Yotpo Review and Loyalty
Yotpo Free Plan
- 50 monthly orders
- Automatic review requests
- Review moderation
- Design emails from templates
- 24/7 chat support
Yotpo Starter Plan – $79/month
- Up to 500 monthly orders
- Additional charges apply on exceeded orders
- Google rich snippets
- Google shopping ads
- Photo and video reviews
- Review sharing on Facebook shops
Yotpo Pro Plan – $169/month
- Pricing may change based on order volume
- Additional charges apply on exceeded orders
- Reviews of GST
- Product and shopper attributes
- Shoppable media galleries
- Shopper insights
Yotpo Premium Plan
- Custom pricing
- No order volume restriction
- AI tools
- Smart segmentation and collection flows
- Dedicated optimization strategist
Yotpo Loyalty & Rewards
Free Plan
- Available to stores with fewer than 100 monthly orders
- Reward sticky bar
- Referral program
- Points for purchases and account creation
Pro Plan – $199/month
- 500 monthly orders
- Additional charges apply on exceeded orders
- Ways for customers to earn points
- Points redemption at checkout
- Klaviyo and ReCharge integrations
Yotpo Email and SMS
SMS
- Starting at: $0.0072/SMS
- Billed monthly. Spend commitment: Required. Rates exclusive of +Carrier Fees
| Estimated Annual Spend | SMS Rate | MMS Rate |
| $0 – $ 25,000 | 0.0072 | 0.0291 |
| $ 25,000 – $50,000 | 0.0062 | 0.0256 |
| $50,000 | Custom Rates | Custom Rates |
- Free for 0-10 K of emails/month
- Billed monthly. Spend commitment: Required. Charges are based on the total email sends.
| EMAILS/MO | RATE |
| 0 – 10K | Free |
| 10K> – 0.1M | $1.50 |
| 0.1M> – 1.0M | $1.00 |
| 1.0M> – 5.0M | $0.55 |
| 5.0M> – 10.0M | $0.45 |
| 10.0M+ | $0.35 |
All plans include:
- Automated two-way SMS conversations
- AI segments
- Dedicated CSM
- Onboarding Specialist
- Everything in the pro plan
- Campaigns and automation
- Emails and SMS subscription tools
- 24/7 support
- A/B testing
- SMS chat
- Advanced form targeting
- Custom short URL
- Click to buy
Yotpo Subscriptions
- Yotpo free plan
- Paid plans start on exceeding $500 in monthly subscription sales
- No monthly fees
- 1% per additional transaction
Yotpo vs. Smile.io – Alternatives
Yotpo vs Smile.io aren’t the only apps that can improve customer purchasing experience and engagement. Consider the following apps and platforms if you’re looking for cheaper alternatives to Yotpo and Smile.io that deliver the same features.
Introducing Channelwill: An Even Better Option for Your E-commerce Loyalty Program
Channelwill is an all-in-one e-commerce platform that provides effective and affordable apps to cater to every stage of customers’ shopping journey. Whether it’s customer acquisition, engagement, support, or post-purchase service, Channelwill has the right app.
In the Yotpo vs. Smile.io debate for which Loyalty program app is best, Channelwill brings in Loloyal. This highly-rated loyalty and reward app lets you delight customers with personalized gifts and exclusive perks. Loloyal offers dynamic points and reward programs that are easy to integrate and customize. The programs are also flexible enough to ensure smooth experiences across all devices. Unlike Smile.io, which gives you a maximum of five languages, Loloyal comes with 11 of the world’s most widely spoken languages. This ensures you can personalize your reward programs and maximize customer engagement benefits.
When it comes to Yotpo vs. Smile.io review programs, Channelwill offers Trustoo.io as a worthy contender. Trustoo.io lets you easily collect authentic and high-converting reviews with automatic custom requests.
Easy to customize your brand loyalty program
Omnisend
Omnisend is a powerful email and SMS marketing platform that makes it easy to collect, convert, and keep subscribers. The platform offers tons of customizable templates and pre-built automation that save you time when creating personalized messages. Recently, the platform added product reviews to its features.
Stamped
This is another great loyalty and reward app for eCommerce merchants. Stamped offers both loyalty and review program functionalities. With the Stamped free plan, you can create points and referral programs free for life.
How to Choose the Best Loyalty Program for Your Business
Customer Reach
A good Loyalty program app should provide you with tools to easily reach your customers. For this reason, you should consider apps that integrate with other platforms, especially marketing platforms such as Klaviyo and Pagefly.
The right app should also have multi-language capabilities, which make it easy to personalize content for a diverse customer base.
Customization
Check if the loyalty program you’re considering integrates with your store and is customizable. For example, Smile.io only integrates with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Wix stores but does not currently support WooCommerce merchants.
The Loyalty program should also be easily customizable to match the brand theme and identity. Ideally, you should not consider a program that requires a lot of technical knowledge to customize
Reporting and Analytics
Partnering with a loyalty program platform that offers data-rich reporting is essential for optimization. Without knowing which key metrics to examine, optimizing the program to maximize engagement can be difficult. The app you choose should provide real-time tracking, comprehensive reporting, and valuable insights into your loyalty program performance.
Fast and Easy Cashout
To customers, reward is the most important part of signing up for a loyalty program. They should be able to redeem points almost instantaneously and get their rewards on time. Therefore, you should choose a platform that offers quick points redemption and allows you to leverage different reward types.
Final Words
Loyalty, rewards, reviews, and subscriptions are modern forms of marketing that have been proven highly effective. Thus, the Yotpo vs. Smile.io debate is understandable since merchants need to know which platform to choose. However, they are not one-size-fits-all solutions. Online stores are not the same, and each requires different tools to cater to different customers.
FAQs
Note: This blog was originally written in English and translated using an automated tool to make the content accessible to a global audience. We believe in sharing valuable insights with everyone and apologize for any inaccuracies. If you spot any errors, please feel free to contact us for corrections. Your feedback helps us improve and ensures the content’s value is fully realized.
Abby Zeng
Content Specialist
I’m deeply passionate about SEO and creating engaging content. My initial goal is to deliver high-quality, informative, and entertaining content that stands out in the digital landscape. By merging analytical insights with creativity, I aim to boost traffic for websites.
