Yelp announced today that it’s coming to an inbox near you. This comes about through a partnership with Mailchimp that brings Yelp Fusion into the email-marketing mix. The thought is that several SMBs reach their customers through newsletters and email blasts. This lets them pull in their Yelp content.
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 local businesses’ email outreach. This helps SMBs generate content that can be featured in their newsletters (think “review of the week”), which is always welcome to ‘content starved’ SMBs that are chefs and dentists… not marketers.
“We’re thrilled to bring Yelp’s trusted local business content to even more platforms,” Yelp SVP Chad Richard told Localogy Insider. “We’re especially excited to integrate Yelp content into Mailchimp’s email marketing platform to help millions of businesses leverage their reviews, photos, and other Yelp content.”
Sparking Ideas
Going deeper into the integration, what does it offer and how do SMBs 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 essentially saves SMBs time (a big factor) through direct integration. To compose a comparable email without such integration is doable but a lot more time-consuming. We’re talking downloading media and content from yelp, then uploading to Mailchimp… or cutting and pasting highlighted reviews.
In addition to streamlining things, the Yelp content blocks in Mailchimp can offer inspiration to SMBs that sit down to compose a given email. Having all that personalized content gives them a handy repository of building blocks for a given email blast or newsletter, potentially sparking ideas or relevant themes.
For example, restaurant owners can feature photos that customers have taken and posted to Yelp, along with reviews if applicable. This can help business owners populate their emails with genuine content from their communities… capturing the pulse of their customers through all the content they’re sharing.
New Life
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 tieing 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 adventure possible.
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 are each logical in terms of the use cases that could be unlocked from direct integrations with Yelp content. And all of the above follows a long list of Yelp Fusion partnerships such as Uber. We’ll keep our ear to the ground for more integrations as Yelp continues to fuse itself to relevant products.
“Through integrations with brands like Mailchimp, Realtor.com, MetLife, and Roadtrippers, we’re able to bring Yelp’s rich content to even more consumers, said Richard, “and further achieve our mission to connect people with great local businesses.”
