Foursquare may have pioneered the idea of rewards and specials associated with checkins, but everyone from Facebook to SCVNGR has followed suit. Today, Yelp joins the fray, giving business owners the ability to add “Check-in Offers” to their venues.
With Yelp Check-in Offers, business owners can incentivize repeat checkins and reward patrons with three different offer types: percent off, free or fixed price offers.
Businesses are able to offer one check-in special at a time, and patrons can redeem earned rewards by presenting a special mobile certificate showing they’ve unlocked a particular offer (as seen below).
Yelp business owners can navigate to the “Offers” portion of their business dashboard to specify offer type and checkin terms — a 25% off discount for three checkins, for instance. Patrons can work to achieve an offer with each venue checkin via the just updated Yelp iPhone (awaiting approval) and Android apps. After redemption, users can start earning the offer again. The approach is not dissimilar to SCVNGR’s system for unlocking rewards.
The following YouTube video created by Yelp, does an excellent job of explaining Yelp's new Check-In Offers:
Yelp's Blog also has a blog post titled:
I'm a Business Owner: What's a Yelp Check-in Offer?
that does an excellent job of explaining their new Check-In Offers service and is an excellent supplement to their YouTube video.
Offers are certainly nothing new in today’s location-based mobile app landscape, but Eric Singley, Yelp’s director of mobile and consumer products, believes the company has a unique opportunity to marry the venue search intentions of application users with offers that influence behavior.
“Thirty percent of all Yelp search traffic is happening on our mobile apps, which means people are using the Yelp apps to search for businesses around them … [the apps] are an opportunity for businesses to get in front of users, and checkin offers can help influence their decisions,” he says.
Check-in Offers were introduced, for business users, in last week’s revamped Yelp for Business Owners release. The update brings with it new navigation, the ability to manage multiple business listings and additional mobile tracking and analytics, including stats around redeemed offers.
It should be interesting to track how both business owners and application users respond to the addition of offers. Currently, Yelp reports that — on average — checkins have grown 50% month over month. While the metric doesn’t tell us much about the overall adoption of checkin features — and Yelp won’t share specifics — it does indicate that interest is growing amongst Yelp’s mobile user base.
COMMENTARY: Yelp had no choice, but join the caravan of location-based check-in services that are offered by Foursquare, Facebook Places' Deals and Gowalla, to name a few. Yelp has quite a competitive advantage over its competitors because its platform is ideal for merchants that have given it good customer ratings, and it can target its Check-In Offers service to those customers.
Yelp can leverage its 38 million members as of October 2010, up 15% from 33 million in June 2010. Yelp is currently ranked #93 by Quantcast with 17. 1 monthly visitors and 11.1 million unique visitors at the end of October 2010. The latter is a decrease of 12.6% from its peak of 12.6 million unique visitors in mid-August. At the start of 2010, Yelp had 7 million unique visitors, so their current website traffic is quite impressive. Yelp's website traffic is skewed towards females (55%) when compared to males (45%) and visitors are better educated and more affluent than average Americans.
In June 2010, Yelp claimed its iPhone app had 1.4 million unique users. That’s a small percentage of total traffic to the service, but the amount of activity and interaction from those users is significantly more than on the normal website:
- A whopping 27% of all Yelp searches come from that iPhone application.
- Over half a million calls were made to local businesses directly from the iPhone App, or one in every five seconds.
- Nearly a million people generated point-to-point directions to a local business from their Yelp iPhone App last month.
Yelp also needs to protects its flanks from competition. Google added Places so that merchants create online offers during searches. It's a cool idea, since they already know what we click on. Google is also trying to acquire the social group buying service Groupon. Could become final as I write this.
Courtesy of an article dated November 23, 2010 appearing in Mashable/Business
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