San Francisco, CA – January 7, 2013 – 500friends announced today the integration of
the 500friends LoyaltyPlus platform with the Bazaarvoice solution suite. The technology
partnership enables leading global retailers on the Bazaarvoice platform to apply proven
loyalty marketing strategies alongside the submission of authentic word of mouth
content to nurture customer engagement, promote brand advocacy, and increase sales.
On average, retailers using LoyaltyPlus are seeing a nine-fold increase in social sharing
and up to a 500 percent increase in the rate of submission of customer reviews. Leading
eCommerce retailers like Run.com – one of the first to leverage the integration – can
now easily deploy a comprehensive loyalty solution including social features such as
badges, leaderboards, and exclusivity to create a seamless customer experience that
inspires the creation of product ratings and reviews, which are widely considered among
the strongest influencers on purchase decisions.
“The combination of 500friends and Bazaarvoice offers us innovative ways to maximize
the value of our customer relationships and drive customer acquisition in a compelling
way,” said Run.com VP of Marketing, Lucy Diaz. “With this integration, we have
increased the ROI on our marketing efforts by encouraging, rewarding and measuring
the quality and quantity of social conversations taking place with our brand.”
Additional leading eCommerce retailers including Build.com and Ice.com are expected
to launch the integration in the coming weeks. “The ability to integrate our social
loyalty efforts with our Bazaarvoice implementation was a key criteria in our loyalty
vendor selection process,” said Brandon Proctor, VP of Marketing at Build.com. “We
prefer to work with industry leaders and the Bazaarvoice partnership with 500friends
made it easy for us to adhere to our best in class approach to marketing software
vendor selection.”
“From our standpoint, this is a very compelling partnership,” said Ice.com CEO, Shmuel
Gniwisch. “The ability to enhance our Bazaarvoice implementation with LoyaltyPlus
increases the likelihood of customer engagement with our brand. As a retailer, we
know there is a direct correlation between the level of engagement and the propensity
of the customer to buy and refer.”
“Recognizing and rewarding valuable customer behaviors should be a critical
component of the overall marketing strategy for retailers,” said Jim Petty, Vice President
of Business Development, Technology Partnerships, for Bazaarvoice. “The integration
with 500friends makes similar improvements in marketing effectiveness attainable to all
of our joint clients.”
“We have tremendous respect for Bazaarvoice. The opportunity to partner with them is
a win-win for our joint clients and represents a significant opportunity for retailers to
drive real business results by combining the power of our respective solutions to
increase loyalty, advocacy and the lifetime value of their customer relationships,” said
Justin Yoshimura, CEO of 500friends.
About 500friends
500friends is pioneering the next generation of loyalty marketing with its award-winning
white-label social loyalty software-as-a-service platform, LoyaltyPlus™. Flexible,
scalable, and lightweight, LoyaltyPlus helps retailers deploy new loyalty programs and
upgrade traditional purchase based loyalty programs with a comprehensive solution set
designed to move customers up the loyalty curve to advocates. Founded in 2010 and
based in San Francisco, the company works with more than 40 of the world’s top 1000
retailers and is funded by Crosslink Capital, Intel Capital and Y-Combinator.
For more information, please visit http://www.500friends.com, read the blog at http://blog.500friends.com, and follow us on Twitter @500friends.
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