customer experience retail

Yelp Comes to an Inbox Near You

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As you may have read here on Street Fight, Yelp announced earlier this week that Mailchimp will integrate its Fusion API to bring local reviews into the email marketing mix. The thought is that multi-location brands make good use of both Yelp and email marketing… why not bring them together?

Before diving into the details, what is Yelp Fusion? First launched in 2016, this is essentially Yelp’s formal API program that brings its content to various third-party products. Thousands of brands and developers participate, bringing Yelp to a range of local search, mapping, and discovery apps.

With Mailchimp now in the mix, Yelp can be a central component of brands’ email outreach. This helps brands generate content that can be featured in their newsletters (think “review of the week”), which is always welcome to ‘content-starved’ brand marketers or time-starved franchisees.

And that’s just the thing with multi-location brands. Some have centralized marketing, and others are decentralized in terms of marketing empowerment for far-flung franchisees. In either case, time is a factor, and direct integrations between go-to marketing products can be a win.

Yelp Is Making It Easier to Add Review Content to Email Campaigns

The Art of Integration

Going deeper into the integration, what does it offer and how do marketers activate it? New Yelp content blocks are now available in Mailchimp where businesses compose email blasts. After syncing their Mailchimp and Yelp accounts, they can then pull in content directly — everything from reviews to photos.

This saves marketers time — again, a big factor — through the art of integration. To compose a comparable email without integration is doable but onerous. We’re talking downloading media and content from Yelp, then uploading to Mailchimp… or cutting and pasting highlighted reviews.

In addition to streamlining workflows, the Yelp content blocks in Mailchimp can offer inspiration for email content. Having all that personalized content gives brand marketers a handy repository of building blocks for a given email blast or newsletter, potentially sparking ideas or relevant themes.

For example, restaurants can feature photos that customers have posted to Yelp. This can help brand marketers or franchisees populate their emails with genuine content from their customers. The idea is to capture the pulse of their communities for a local touch: a key tactic for multi-location brands.

The New Face of Local Businesses: A Conversation with Yelp

Real Estate and Road Trips

Yelp Fusion’s latest integrations don’t end with Mailchimp. Coupled with this announcement, Yelp has highlighted a handful of other integrations that similarly breathe new life into third-party products by tying them directly to Yelp Content. Here they are, with Yelp’s verbatim descriptions.

Realtor.com: Yelp Fusion is helping potential and existing homeowners learn more about their neighborhoods with Yelp’s reliable data on local businesses. Prospective homeowners can discover great local businesses near the homes or neighborhoods they’re interested in, which can also be searched for by category using Realtor.com’s “Amenities” filter.

Roadtrippers: Travelers using Roadtrippers will see Yelp’s trusted content and data while planning their trips and throughout their road trip journey, helping them find unique local businesses and plan the best possible adventure.

MetLife: Yelp Fusion is bringing Yelp’s content to the healthcare industry by powering MetLife’s new “Find a Dentist” feature to make it easier for consumers to find great local dentists and make informed decisions about their health.

These integrations similarly make sense in terms of the use cases that could be unlocked from direct Yelp integration. And all of the above follows a long list of Yelp Fusion partnerships such as Uber. We’ll keep our eyes peeled for more integrations as Yelp continues to fuse itself to fitting products.

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Mike Boland has been a tech & media analyst for the past two decades, specifically covering mobile, local, and emerging technologies. He has written for Street Fight since 2011. More can be seen at Localogy.com