Having Trouble with My Account
We're sorry if you are having issues with your account. Let's see if we can identify any of the common issues you may be having.
Registering Your Account
If you are having trouble registering your account, please view the troubleshooting steps specific to that. Or you can view the help documentation specific to using Quick Codes during registration.
Logging in to Your Account
For difficulty logging into your account or authenticating as a user, please view the page for helping with the log in process.
Account Profile and Settings
Your account profile and settings are the core areas of setting up your experience with Yodel services just the way you like them.
Be aware that the profile page has a view and edit mode. If you don't see input boxes to change your information, you will need to switch to the edit mode using the toggle button at the top of the page or the "edit" link at the bottom.
If you are having trouble changing your email or phone, or verifying them, then please be sure you are using valid information with no typos or incorrect formats. Your email and phone will remain private and will not be shown to sends or receivers, though your email will be visible to others in your sending groups if you belong to any.
As you type your phone number, it will not allow you to enter special characters such as parentheses, dashes, or spaces. Often times phone numbers are prefixed with a plus sign (+), and if you type one the field will automatically expand that to a double zero (00). Once you save the non-formatted phone number, it will display with better formatting based on the input you provided. If you exclude a country code, Yodel will assume it is a one (1) for the United States.
Verification for email and phone will come via the matching method, out of necessity. Yodel will email you an email verification with instructions on how to verify. For phone numbers, we will use SMS text to send you a code for verification. If you do not receive the verification information, please check to make sure there is no spam blocking, privacy filters, or do-not-disturb settings that may be blocking the verification message.
If you are having trouble changing your password, please review our page on resetting your password.
Your primary address is also available on your profile page. If you need to set up or change your primary address, you can add a new receiving location and check the box to use it as your primary while creating or editing a location. You can only have one primary address, so if you mark a new address as your primary, then it will replace your current one.
The settings page allows you to set preferences for formatting, units of measure, and other controls. It also allows you to set an alternative receiving address if you need to modify where Yodel sends physical mail. You will need to watch your entry here for typos and proper formatting.
On any of these pages, don't forget to click the update buttons to save your changes!
If you are still having difficulty with your profile or preferences, please contact our support team using our contact form.
Notifications
On your notifications page, you can check boxes for how you prefer to receive notifications for specific types of events. This can be email, SMS text, or in some cases postal mail. Some checkboxes are grayed out which means they cannot be changed.
There is also the option to unsubscribe from all messages, and you can learn more about that with our help documentation about unsubscribing.
Make sure you save your notification settings.
If you are still having difficulty changing your notification preferences, please contact our support team using our contact form.
Receiving Messages
Yodel is still in limited beta release so it is likely that there won't be many, if any, messages for most people right now. We'll be rolling it out to more senders as quickly as we can.
The messages you see in your receiving inbox are based on the receiving locations you have set. You can increase the number of messages visible to you by adding locations, and you can reduce the number of messages by reducing them. Receiving areas are a great way to increase the messages you see because area matches provide a larger geographic region to match the senders selected audience. Any overlap of areas between the sender and receiver will be viewed as an audience match.
If you have not created any receiving locations, you may still receive a message sent through Yodel. This is because your street address is still recognized as a valid recipient, even if it isn't attached to you as an individual. In these cases, Yodel sends the message to "current resident" and we don't know that it is you who lives there until you create an account and add that address as one of your locations. Once you do that, then you can control how you receive messages for that address.
If you aren't seeing messages you think you should, you may check the archived area of your receiving messages. Yodel provides automatic archiving settings that you can change, which helps keep your active messages inbox cleaner and easier to use. You can also manually archive messages. Keep an eye on the paging of results, depending on how many messages you have and your selected "show" count, there may be more than one page of results you can navigate to. Otherwise, you should consider setting up a receiving area where you may have a greater chance of being recognized as a valid recipient for the geographic audience the sender selected.
Maybe you're seeing messages you don't think you should. Certainly, that could be an error on the sender's side, if they selected too large of an audience or made a mistake while setting up their sending areas. You could always check to make sure your receiving locations are accurate, and you could shrink any receiving areas you have if you want to reduce message matches.
Another option you have is to use the blocked senders feature of Yodel. If you have received a message from a sender that you are not interested in, then you can block them so that you no longer receive messages from them.
If you are still having problems with your received messages, please contact our support team using our contact form.
Sending Messages
There are a lot of help documents on the various aspects of sending messages and creating audiences. Check there for instructions on how to get a message ready to send.
The body content of your message uses a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text entry box with basic formatting such as font size, font color, bold, italic, and underlining. You can also use the "more" menu (...) for text alignment, indents, or bulleted lists. The amount of characters and lines are limited to optimize display in all of the sending formats such as postcards, email, and online views.
A message can take an uploaded image file to be included with your send. If you are having trouble with this, please make sure the file format is one that is accepted (JPG, GIF, or PNG), it is smaller than the maximum size (1500px by 1000px), and is below the file size limit (2MB). It's best if you use a DPI setting between 150 and 300. Most people upload RGB color space. You may need to ensure that unnecessary data is not saved in the image file, such as layers, clipping paths, extra channels, etc.
Alternatively, you can create a map-based image file to use within Yodel's message creation page. Be sure to keep your shapes and map pins simple. If it takes more than a few minutes to create your shapes you are probably being too detailed. Zoom and pan the map until you have the desired view.
The message settings tab contain the target date selection. This one can be tricky for new senders. Your target date has to allow the lead time for Yodel to review and approve, you to confirm the final price, and still allow postcards to be printed and mailed. Typical lead times are 10 business days or more. When selecting a target date, Yodel's calendar picker will prevent selection of dates that will not work. This helps make sure that lead time is allowed for and U.S. postal holidays are not used as a target date because the postcards cannot arrive on those days. If there are any delays in the process, a new target date may need to be selected. Target dates cannot be guaranteed, but we use them as our goal for trying to get all postal mail and digital sends to arrive on or near that date. Individual messages may arrive on different dates. You can learn more in our Terms of Purchase.
The "Quick Save" and "Save & Exit" buttons allow you to save your changes as a draft. When all your message settings are final, the "Finish & Schedule" button is there to submit your message for Yodel approval. If your target date is far enough in the future, Yodel may not review your message right away. This intentionally allows you to make additional changes if something comes up, and also helps get a better final price for the message send since our address data may receive updates at any time.
Drafts and sent messages get broken out into different lists on your sending messages page. You can view anything "In Progress", "Delivered", or "Archived." If you can't find a message you created, don't forget to check these other lists.
If you are still having problems with sending messages, please contact our support team using our contact form.
Groups
You can use a sending group to mask your personal name in favor of a name of a business, company, or organization. They can also allow you to create teams with roles to manage your message sends.
When creating a new sending group, you need to provide a group email address. This can be the same or different from your own email. It will need to be a valid email address and must be verified before the group can send messages. The group's email will be private and not shown to anyone outside the group members.
Optionally, you can provide a group phone number with extension and/or a group website. These will be shown to recipients if either is entered as contact methods for your organization.
A group can upload an image file such as a logo. If you are having trouble with this, please make sure the file format is one that is accepted (JPG, GIF, or PNG), it is smaller than the maximum size (1500px by 1000px), and is below the file size limit (2MB). It's best if you use a DPI setting between 150 and 300. Most people upload RGB color space. You may need to ensure that unnecessary data is not saved in the image file, such as layers, clipping paths, extra channels, etc.
If you continue to have issues with groups, please contact our support team using our contact form.
Payments & Billing
It is free to set up an account with Yodel! You can create your profile, control settings and notifications, and start replying and reacting to messages sent to your locations – all at no cost!
When you are ready to send out your own local message, you can set up your message details before you ever have to enter any payment information. Once everything is ready, you'll be given a final cost to send your mailing.
When approving the final cost, you'll need to have your billing info entered. You can enter one or more credit cards. Or if you are messaging on behalf of a sending group, then you can enter payment options for the group too, which must be set up by a group admin or owner.
You also have access to your billing history via your account or group pages. Which includes helpful export options.
If you continue to have issues with payments and billing, please contact our support team using our contact form.
Archiving or Deleting Your Account
There is full help documentation on archiving or deleting your account. Please view that page for assistance with this.