Roots Uses Yext to Manage Brand Information and Drive Foot Traffic

Outdoor lifestyle brand Roots decided to roll out an initiative to make sure all listings were unified across its 120+ North American store base. The name needed to appear solely as "Roots" across listings, rather than as a combination of "Roots" and "Roots Canada." The brand knew the work required to make this a seamless transition across the digital universe would be intensive — and they needed to accomplish this while increasing search views and customer actions, without losing business in the shuffle.

"In order to bring in customers, we need to have accurate brand and store data everywhere, as well as the ability to consistently update that information and guarantee uniformity," said James Connell, Chief eCommerce + Customer Experience Officer. "The manual process to manage all of this was difficult and time-consuming. With our North American "Roots" initiative happening to support our US expansion, we knew we needed to make a change in how we manage our store listings."

With Yext, Roots is able to update essential business information like store name, address and operating hours across more than 150 publishers, including Google, Facebook and Amazon Alexa — all from a single dashboard.

"Yext made the process completely seamless," Connell said. "We're no longer seeing the same level of concern from local managers when it comes to their store data being inaccurate. We're also not seeing consumer complaints coming into our call centres around out of date data. In the end, Yext didn't just help us with the one project. It helped us create a better customer experience overall — and we'll be able to continue providing that great experience since we can update all our business information from one hub at any time."

With Yext, Roots was able to update its store names seamlessly from "Roots Canada" to "Roots" across 5,400 listings on more than 150 publishers — all from a single platform. Since launch, Roots has experienced a 22% year-over-year increase in listing clicks. This includes a 12% year-over-year increase in direction clicks, a 34% year-over-year increase in website clicks, and a 35% year-over-year increase in phone call clicks.

"Working with Yext helped us to drive a stronger integration between stores and digital," Connell said. "Now, accurate information is available to customers 24/7, and we're seeing the impact of that in search views and store visits."

"Traffic to our website coming from store listings is up compared to this time last year," Connell said. "We're expending less effort to maintain our brand data, and we're getting better results."

What began as a way for Roots to unify its brand seamlessly across digital discovery services is now a way for it to continue to manage its listings presence and make a positive impact on search and discoverability. With unified, comprehensive and correct listings, Roots is surfacing in Google Search results more often when customers look for outdoor apparel.