La Poste Group Improves Digital Visibility and Operates More Efficiently With Yext
With Yext's Platform, La Poste automated updates for 35,000 of its contact points — including post offices, pick-up locations, and more — resulting in a remarkable 550 million views on Google. This not only extended La Poste's reach but also helped them deliver a better customer experience — leading to an 11.5% increase in customer satisfaction.
increase in Get Direction clicks
more site traffic from unbranded queries
estimated* work-hours saved per month using Yext Content features and Connectors
Putting the customer at the forefront of their business is La Poste's goal, and they aim to consistently adapt to the needs of their French customer base. Because people today rely on digital channels more than ever, La Poste wanted to streamline the digital journey, giving customers the most comprehensive information wherever and whenever they search. But seamlessly blending the physical and the digital world was a challenge — especially with the number of digital touchpoints La Poste knew they needed to manage.
Local presence is crucial for La Poste, and the proximity that our customers experience daily at our 35,000 contact points needed to be extended to the digital arena. Notably, every month, a staggering 162 million searches are conducted on Google related to our retail and parcel collection locations. This is substantial, and it spurred us to provide dependable information to our customers, including location, opening hours, and services available.
To help customers access important information about La Poste in real-time, the group needed a secure and robust tech platform capable of automating the process of making updates across all of its contact points and various services. At the same time, La Poste wanted to make a positive SEO impact, improving the search ranking of its contact points and services across Google and other third-party applications. Finally, to better meet customers' expectations, La Poste wanted a solution that would help the group quickly deploy local pages and service pages — in an automated manner, at scale.
La Poste's digital transformation project was carried out in several stages. To better manage their essential information across third-party publishers like Google, La Poste implemented Yext Listings over the course of four months. This automated the process of updating 495,000 online contact points across 10 publishers, including 33,000 Google Business Profile (GBP) listings —while deploying a new locator on laposte.fr.
Additionally, to help highlight lesser-known services and gain market share, the group chose to add more information to their listings (including photos, service details, news, accessibility, and more). Ultimately, this led to the creation of dedicated intent pages for remote assistance and parcel delivery —currently representing nearly 14,000 pages.
Finally, in 2022, approximately 110,000 mailboxes were added to the laposte.fr locator to help the French population find them more easily. Starting from early 2023, La Poste began gradually rolling out an appointment scheduling function in post offices, accessible both via the locator and Google.
We were able to implement 10 major SEO optimizations on our locator (on linking, structured data, page load time, etc.), and since then, it has ranked on the first page of Google for 15,000 non-branded keywords. We have recorded an additional 1 million clicks per month via Google since the beginning of 2022.
In addition to impacting La Poste's online discoverability and search ranking, the partnership has also saved them time.
In the end, with over 272,000 entities spread across 18 different types of entities (including sales points, parcel pick-up or drop-off points, and mailboxes), La Poste has made over 93 million content updates in Yext since the beginning of the partnership in January 2021.
These updates are distributed to three times more digital access points. This translates to an average of 2.7 million content updates per month in Yext and 11.7 million updates per month to digital access points such as Google, Apple Maps, and Amazon Alexa. Thus, by using Yext Content to push data from a single source of truth to multiple digital endpoints, making bulk updates in Yext Content, and using Yext-provided Connectors and APIs, La Poste saves in aggregate over 1M work-hours per month versus a more manual solution of the same scale.
Thanks to these real-time schedule management capabilities, La Poste has increased their discoverability, reaching over 550 million views on GBP in 2022. This visibility directly translates to actual customer actions: La Poste saw a 53% growth in clicks to driving directions since the initial deployment of Yext***. At the same time, Yext-powered Pages experienced strong growth (over 77% of clicks from search terms like service+city.); this growth resulted in a 53% higher click-through rate.
We aim to capitalize on what has been implemented and explore new strategies to generate more online and in-person traffic through the deployment of intent pages. We are currently testing two themes (remote assistance and parcel delivery) with 14,000 published content pages. If this test is successful, we plan to generalize this approach to other areas in the coming year.
Overall, thanks to the availability of more robust, accurate data online, the average rating of the La Poste group has improved. Customer satisfaction indicators are up – as well as visits to the locator on laposte.fr with 2 million visits per month, up 11.5% in one year.
Yext and La Poste aim to further optimize the customer experience by focusing on proximity, convenience, and understanding customer needs — but also by increasing the digital visibility of new services offered by La Poste in its physical contact points. To achieve this, the group's next step will focus on structured indexing to optimize the local SEO for offers and services provided by La Poste in competitive areas.
*Assuming 3 minutes per update in Yext or similar platforms and 5 minutes per update in the variety of publisher-specific interfaces. ***Apr 2023 - Sep 2023 compared to Apr 2021 - Sep 2021.
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