Wi-Fi Marketing for Yelp
A rapidly growing company that is under the radar at the moment is Zenreach, a company that helps physical businesses market themselves through providing free Wi-Fi. The potential to utilize this technology for restaurants is huge as it has never been easier to combine online and offline dining experiences. Upon doing some simple research, it appears that Yelp has already made some moves by acquiring Turnstyle. This article will explore a possible Turnstyle integration that could greatly benefit both Yelp and its partner restaurants.
The Problems
Quick searches on Google yield thousands of results for why restaurants should offer free Wi-Fi. In one research, it is shown that 62% of businesses claim that Wi-Fi led to customers spending longer time in shops and around 50% of their customers ended up spending more money.
Yet, most restaurants today don’t provide free Wi-Fi. More importantly, there isn’t any perfect marketing solution for restaurant owners to harness the power of Wi-Fi marketing whilst better understanding their customers.
For Yelp, the problem is getting more users to register and write reviews to make the platform more useful and sticky. At the same time, Yelp also wants to increase the amount of partner restaurants on the platform as well as the adoption of Yelp Wi-Fi when going up against other Wi-Fi companies.
User Profiles
Below we explore some user profiles for this feature
- Sandy is an active Yelp user. She is an aspiring Yelp Elite who loves to eat out all the time. However, she often forgets to leave reviews. Because she eats out so often, leaving reviews also tend to take up a lot of time making it harder for her to reach her goal
- Ben has the Yelp app installed. He would use it twice or thrice every month to look for high end restaurants. He thinks leaving reviews is a waste of time as he works 14 hours a day as an investment banker.
- Nora knows what Yelp is but has never used it before. She is in her mid 40s and has two teenage kids. Though she is not very tech savvy, she likes to scroll through Pinterest looking at beautiful pictures and read breaking news while she is bored.
- David has been running his family restaurant for 15 years. He recently started hearing many customers (especially frequent ones) ask for internet connection at his restaurant. He searches for best ways to setup Wi-Fi and lands on multiple products. He realizes that he could get a lot more out of providing free Wi-Fi and begins to pick and choose. He cares a lot about his customer’s experience at his restaurant and always wants to improve. Though Yelp’s account executives have reached out multiple times telling him to claim his restaurant, he never really made the move because there were only 2 or 3 reviews on his page and he can’t be bothered going through setting up this technology just for a few people.
The Feature
This feature adds a survey component to the sign up flow for free internet at partner restaurants. After using the Wi-Fi for about 30 minutes, continued Wi-Fi usage brings up some more questions. It then automatically generates reviews based on these responses and prompts users to give review on Yelp. Restaurant owners can also incentivize users to share reviews. The responses are collected regardless of whether reviews are shared.


Bored users mostly go on Wi-Fi before and after they eat their dishes. This approximates to 30 minutes but should be adjustable by the restaurant owners. This feature would be exciting for David who will not only be able to better understand his customers but also get more reviews on Yelp. He could also tailor his questions and their choices to manipulate his user through pointing out good things at his restaurant. Yelp reviews naturally drive more traffic making it more convincing for him to utilize the platform.
Sandy will love this feature as it makes her climb to elite status a lot easier. She won’t forget leaving reviews and the actual review process is simplified. Though Ben initially felt this was all a waste of time, having the review ready at his finger tip makes it almost trivial to leave a comment. Nora who probably eats out with her kids might end up signing up for Yelp and leaving the review to get the free dessert.
The Risks and Damage Controls
Main risk for this feature includes process being too annoying for customers as well as a possible increase in the amount of bad Yelp reviews for the restaurant with Wi-Fi. The former can be mitigated by A/B testing drop off rate when replacing the input question with multi-choice questions. After-all, multi-choice and rating questions are very easy to click through. The annoying process can also be justified since users are electing to get the free internet, which is an added bonus for most restaurants. If the restaurants put some effort into making interesting and savvy questions, they can actually make the process entertaining for bored users waiting for food.
Bad review can be learnt through user’s choices and ratings as well as performing sentiment analysis on user inputs. If a review is likely to be bad, only collect the response and don’t show the share screen. Finally, there may be some users who feel that the multi-choice questions are rather bias. Monitor for this type of feedback and maybe give users additional ability to input feedback for multi-choice questions.
The Technology
This is a feature that would take up fair amount of engineering hours. The UI changes for the survey is rather trivial but setting up the ability for restaurant owners to ask their own questions may take up more time. However, this feature really gives Yelp Wi-Fi a competitive edge over its competitor. It also helps to increase the stickiness of Yelp’s core product through increasing the amount of reviews left on the website.
Iteration 1: Yelp pre-configures the questions and builds survey front end to test out the feature.
Iteration 2: Add flexibility for restaurants to ask their own questions and determine the number and types of questions being asked. Create dashboard for restaurant owners to understand the responses.
Iteration 3: Utilize basic targeting and machine learning to build out question bank helping restaurants with asking the “right questions” to really understand their customers. Automate by automatically choosing the questions from a set of questions the restaurant owner configures to optimize for highest amount of positive reviews.
Metrics loosely ranked by importance level
- Increased number of Yelp Reviews per restaurant using product
- Percentage of users who filled survey after trying to connect to internet
- Total Yelp reviews through this channel
- Total feedback submitted. (Count initial and 30 minute feedback as two)
- Total up votes on reviews created through this channel
- Total user sign up through this channel
- Average restaurant owner’s satisfaction level
- Percentage of users who filled out first survey but not second
- Average restaurant rating of reviews through this channel
- Percentage of restaurants contacted that are interested in Yelp Wi-Fi with vs without this feature
