Potential To Increase Yelp Reviews With Incentivized Check-ins

Yelp’s influence continues to grow, with the company feeding content and reviews to Apple Maps, Bing, Yahoo and others. However, the company’s strict “no review solicitation” policy has caused a great deal of frustration for marketers and local business owners who struggle to improve their presence on Yelp. Additionally, the company’s “review filter” practices have come under great scrutiny and have been the subject of many lawsuits.

So, what can marketers do? Marketing Land has reported that Yelp’s Luther Lowe offered a number of “white hat tips” on reputation management and reviews at the recent LSA-SMX West Local Search Advantage Workshop. One valuable tool that was discussed was “incentivized check-ins,” which can help businesses to generate Yelp reviews.

On Yelp.com it describes the check-in offer by saying, “A Yelp Check-in Offer is a bonus or discount you create for people who ‘check-in’ to your business via Yelp’s mobile application. Examples include ‘free dessert’ for a restaurant or ‘20% off oil change’ for an auto shop. Check-in Offers provide a measurable way to reward your most loyal customers while attracting new ones.”

Unlike with reviews themselves, Yelp allows for incentivized check-ins (check-in offers). Marketing Land explains the following trick: if users check in to receive an offer, they are prompted by Yelp to review that business when they return to the site or mobile app. For this to work, users must be signed in.

Although Yelp doesn’t allow marketers to offer rewards directly for reviews, this method does provide an indirect version of that concept, as the company is allowing businesses to create a pre-review reward for users, who are subsequently asked to review that business.

Considering the fact that these reviews are being written by consumers who have just received an incentive or offer, it seems that the likelihood of the reviews being positive would be very high. For businesses who don’t yet have many Yelp reviews, this could prove to be a very valuable method for securing favorable reviews on the platform. However, Marketing Land explains that this is only speculative as there is no statistical data to illustrate whether or not this is true. Regardless, for marketers who are seeking new methods to improve their presence on Yelp, this strategy could prove to be very successful.

For Yelp, having business owners encourage check-ins helps it prove value and usage. For marketers and businesses, having a legal method to get more Yelp reviews could provide great benefits. It will be interesting to see if this little-known strategy will grow into a popular method as more marketers become aware of its existence.