Yelp: Check Out their New Check-in Offers

For about a year you’ve been able to ‘check-in’ to businesses on Yelp using your smartphone and its respective app.

Up until now there’s been no real incentive to do this as a customer unless you truly adore the business in question, or the business in question is owned by your Mother.

Over at Yelp’s official blog they’ve made the following announcement regarding ‘Check-in Offers’:

Today, we’re excited to announce Check-in Offers. This new feature within the business owner dashboard allows you to reward customers with a coupon when they “check-in” to your business. It provides a measurable way to reward your most loyal customers while attracting new ones.

Check-in Offers is available in the countries we offer our free suite of tools, Yelp for Business Owners, which is the US, Canada, UK and Ireland and while the vast majority of businesses on Yelp can take advantage of Check-in Offers, we have restricted a few categories from participating. These are the types of businesses you’d expect — plumbers, limousine drivers, locksmiths, etc — where a service is provided on the go, rather than at one physical location.

What happens when a consumer unlocks your offer? If a consumer chooses the “Use it Now!” option for his Check-in Offer on that visit, it will disappear automatically from his device in a few hours time. The user or the business owner can also tap a button on the phone to mark the offer as used, expiring the timer immediately.

If a consumer chooses to “Save it!”, that Check-in Offer will be saved several places on their device: the “About Me” page; at the top of the business page where they earned that offer and on the Check-ins tab on the Yelp app. The user can then redeem the offer anytime, following the same process above.

To learn more about how to set up a check-in offer, watch this video and download our Check in Offer How to Guide: