Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
in Local Search
Yext – List your email everywhere
We recently embarked on a clean up campaign across the internet for a client that had serious NAP issues. We used a corporate email address that forwarded to me. Somewhere along that line whether by hook or by crook or an errant check box, Yext picked up our email address.
And started spamming me.
7 days, 5 emails showing me exactly how problematic our listing is. While in some senses, this client is a qualified prospect, it is totally unclear how we managed to get subscribed to Yext’s email list and unclear why I now get almost one email a day from them.
I did send an inquiry off to Yext but they have not yet responded. Howard, whaz up?
© Copyright 2024 - MIKE BLUMENTHAL, ALL RIGHT RESERVED.
Comments
13 Comments
I’ve seen emails listed on claimed manta profiles, not sure if this is where they got it from. Marketing automation at its “best” hopefully with an unsubscribe link.
@J
There is an unsubscribe link but we were careful to NOT opt into anything.
Our clients get these too. I think they come from sites such as MerchantCircle, and a slew of others. It’s really annoying. We try to get our clients to set up a new email address that we can use specifically for directories because of all the spam that they end up getting – which causes confusion to the small business owner.
@Justin
I guess its one more thing to caution the client about although using a new email address would solve the issue.
Just annoying to me that they would be so aggressive about it.
I’ve been doing SEO Off-Page NAP Clean-Up for our clients (for past 2yrs). This is something that always happens to us.
We get an email created at the client’s domain, claim/optimize their online profiles & then get these spammy marketing emails either once a day or once a week from various sites. Now when we get them, I just unsubscribe from each one.
Just wanted to throw my 2 cents in the ring.
In the past I’ve had a lot of experience doing NAP cleanup for various clients onsite and off… and while my involvement with Yext may have started out as legit-ish, a bunch of red flags were quickly raised.
My experience with Yext lately has been purely unintentional but I recognize that their “marketing strategy”- read spamming- has become much more aggressive.
Careful, if you even THINK about editing the NAP of a client on one of Yext’s Publisher Network affiliates your client will get emails and calls.
It’s not just emails. We warn our clients they’ll get a barrage of phone calls too. The more visible they become, the worse it gets. I had one client complain she was getting an average of 3 phone calls a week!
The worst offender of unsolicited phone calls (and false advertising) is still Yelp.
@Pashmina
Yelp, local.com, Manta – all bad with calling. 3x per week is the worst I’ve heard so far! And for a lot of these Yext affiliates there is no other way to change/edit/delete NAP information other than through Yext.
Annoying. But it characterizes much of web marketing.
It is astonishingly easy and cost effective to send out millions of emails. Hence the explosion of spam. By the way do you recall Back in January 2004 Bill Gates predicted the END of SPAM…within a couple of years??? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3426367.stm
It turns out he was wrong.
Anyway you can send out millions of these emails at an incredibly low cost ; fractions of a penny. So even with incredibly low conversion rates, when you have a service such as Yext, wherein every sale is worth $100’s or thousands…an infinitesimal response can have a positive payback to the spammer/ mass emailer/ and in this case–Yext.
Dang. Annoying. Its one of the problems associated with technology.
There have been periods when I’ve been inundated with Yext sales pitches. After a while they stop. Hope you get to the stop point soon.
Meanwhile I’m subject to one irritating remarketing message that has been going on for over a year maybe 1.5 years. Its from a restaurant. I’ve been there once, maybe twice. Actually pretty good.—> BUT I’m not going back. The remarketing messages are TOO Persistent, and ultimately TOO annoying and they have gone on for interminably TOO long.
I wonder if I should click away on the remarketing ads to just spend their money???? 😀
I’m tempted to sign up a client (who is willing) just to see how much their service – or lack thereof – sucks…
To be fair, maybe not sucks but certainly not worth what they charge for soon to be listings extortion!
Yahoo, Manta, MerchantCircle (as previously mentioned) are the ones I see pitching the Yext affiliate deal most, but ExpressUpdateUSA also is “Powered by Yext” which seems totally weird to my small brain.
Glad to see you put this out there Mike, Yext has been doing this for years, annoying.
Cleaning up Yext directory listings (there’s a slew of them) is frustrating, confusing, and time-consuming … I’m thinking they make it intentionally so … I certainly hope they don’t ‘purposefully’ create listing errors and then solicit businesses to fix them … that would be like doctors giving people an illness and then charging good money to heal them, no? … that would seem illegal. Was really disappointed to see Yahoo! team up with Yext … Grrr. I hope Yahoo! dumps Yext sooner than later. I get that making money as a directory is probably pretty tough business, but I hope ethical business practices are never compromised. I guess the people at Yext have to live with themselves … “is this how I would want to be treated as a business?”
We have a client who uses (and is trying to get out of) using Dex (where they login at account.dexknows.com). The client told us that they were informed that Dex feeds a bunch of sites (including YP.com, Bing, etc)… AND Yext. Talk about a nightmare.
Comments for this post are closed.