How I used Yelp to drive tones of traffic and sales

This month, I’ve been working with a great brand that offers same-day iPhone repair services in NYC. The best part is that you don’t have to go anywhere—just request a technician through the app or website and they’ll come to you and fix your phone in 30 mins. (I wish we had this in Europe as well—someone out there, get to it!)

This has been one of my favorite work experiences recently; it required me to go out of my knowledge “comfort zone,” and I came out of it with pretty good ideas about growth in a platform I’ve never used in my life—Yelp.

The Problem

The startup I was helping had just launched its service and very few people knew about it. When deciding on a strategy, my first thought was to put myself in potential customers’ shoes. What would I do if I just broke my iPhone and had no idea how to fix it? Well, I would google “iPhone repair New York” and choose what would seem to be the best service. So that’s what I did. It turned out that Yelp company pages showed up among the first organic results, so it was instantly obvious that the brand should take actions to come out as the first and most recommended Yelp iPhone repair service in Google searches. After having a call with a Yelp representative, it was clear how to get to first place—page optimisation and getting as many positive reviews as possible. Cool…but how do you get people to give you reviews when you’re just starting out? Well, you leverage what you already have: a product and current customers. Did you know that most Yelpers tend to write reviews in the first 24 hours after a service has been provided to them?

The strategy

24 hours after a customer get their iPhone repaired, they should receive an email (if they’ve used the website) or a notification (if they’ve used the app) encouraging them to share their experience with the service by writing a review on Yelp. This way, within a month, the company can grow their Yelp reviews to hundreds and be positioned as a preferred iPhone repair service in NYC. It’s a simple and easy hack to reach new customers and increase sales🙂

The result

The company had about 200 customers per week, and we managed to encourage 60% of these clients to write a Yelp review. This helped the brand get over 800 positive reviews in a 6 week period time and position itself as the first organic result when searching for iPhone repair services in NYC. In about a month and a half, the leads coming from Yelp tripled—and revenues as well!

Bonus

I also did some research on Yelp Events, which seem to have a lot of hidden potential for many types of businesses. No matter if you’re an iPhone repair company, a restaurant, a band or a museum, just think of a cool event that your potential customers would love to attend—and make it happen. Reach out to Yelpers that could be interested in joining and invite them. Create buzz around the event. If you’re a restaurant, for example, you could create an “eat the biggest burger contest” where participants are encouraged to come to your place, compete, have fun and win a cool prize. You will bring new customers to your location and will have given them something to talk about.