How Businesses Get the “People Love Us on Yelp” Sticker

Picture this: you’re bopping down the city street, following your heart and your feet, when suddenly your stomach takes the wheel. You need to chow, and pronto, says el estómago. So where do you go?

You reach for your phone and remember that you hit the town in your sexy pop star pants, with pockets that could never contain anything more than a credit card and an ID. But without Yelp, where can go, where can you turn? The world starts spinning around you in a hunger-induced vortex. When suddenly you spot it, in the glass storefront of a local restaurant” a window cling reading “People Love us on Yelp.” Salvation at last.

So Can You Trust It?

The short answer is YES. Unlike the “Find us on Yelp” stickers, which any business can apply for (though the pandemic has paused this), for a business to get a People Love Us on Yelp sticker, they must actually be loved, as defined by Yelp’s secretive definitions of love.

Here is how Yelp describes it on their own Support Center:

The "People Love Us on Yelp" window clings are sent in an automated direct mail batch twice a year to businesses that qualify for this program. We don't issue (or re-issue) these window clings upon request, but if your business qualifies next time around you can be sure you'll be receiving one.

Somewhat cryptic, eh? I guess that is the manner of love. You’ll never really know when you cross the threshold of “qualifying” for it, but one day it’s just there!

Well, we do have a bit of insight, thanks to a Quora answer from Brad Porteus, Yelp Marketing VP ('06-'08), who explains how the program came to be.

Brad came to the Yelp team in the early days, and his team began looking at ways to expand Yelp’s influence beyond its home city of San Francisco. Yelp existed in other national cities, but was not at the forefront. The team “saw the sticker program as a potential way to get the Yelp name out there in the cities we were looking to activate, by letting the businesses themselves get involved.”

Here’s even more straight from Brad:

We knew we needed something that business owners would actually put up in their window, even if Yelp itself was still obscure at best, and totally unknown to them at worst. We realized that the message had to promote Yelp, but yet really be a "badge of honor" compelling enough for the business owner to actually display. We also needed to convey that Yelp ratings were not like others (professional reviews) but rather opinions of real local people – their actual customers. The design had to convey that their customers were providing an endorsement of their establishment, while provoking interest more broadly in Yelp.

So from the beginning, the idea was to honor those business that had a large impact on Yelp, while still getting the Yelp name in the public eye. The stickers were designed to fit in standard envelopes and mailed out to businesses that qualified. Also included was a short letter explaining the program and congratulating the business.

Some businesses disregarded the letters and threw the clings away, but soon word would get back to the Yelp team that clings were being stolen by competing businesses, cementing the power of the sticker. Around the same time, Yelp Elites were now being recognized for using the platform, and both Elites and Loved Businesses became a yearly cycle of recognition.

But how did they qualify?

Well, here’s what Brad says:

We scrubbed our database and I created a list of worthy recipients in Excel including only businesses who had a minimum number of trusted reviews and averaged a high enough score (some things shall remain secret).

Unfortunately for Brad, the internet is the internet, and nothing remains secret for very long, at least not entirely, because people post a lot. Yelp users even more so. And people proud of their Yelp achievements? They’re more than ready to show off.

That’s right, thanks to the same rampant posting that makes Review Party Dot Com possible, we can do a bit of data mining ourselves to figure out what it really takes to get a “People Love us on Yelp” sticker. Why? Because people post pictures of their letters.

While there are likely many factors at play - what type of business you run, the level of competition in your area - we can glean some general numbers from all these letters.

Of the 15 letters I found online (one isn’t pictured, don’t come at me), the lowest number of reviews a business had was TWO, then three, then four. The highest was 196. The lowest review score was around 4.2 and the highest was a crisp, even 5.

So now you know. These are the ballparks you need to find yourself in. And again, obviously it’ll be easier to stand out in Boulder than in Little Rock (because Little Rock is quizzically twice the size), and easier to stand out if you’re in a more specialized business like solar panel installation, rather than just another restaurant.

But taking what you’ve learned here, you just might be able to be loved on Yelp. And we Yelpers will know we can trust you.