Video Transcription

Good morning, and welcome to another edition of Tech Tuesday, presented by Delta Media Group, where only the catchiest songs get stuck in our heads. Like the theme song to Sofia the First. [Singing 00:04:27]. Sorry.

So today we're going to go in and take a look at how to set up saved searches and how you can send out bulk search emails or bulk search results emails out through the email blast system. So one of those, the saved searches, is a system that's been around for a while, but we've added some different functionality to it, and the other is something that we've just added in. So let's jump into the DeltaNet and take a look.

First off, to set up a saved search for a customer, we're going to go down to customers and customer center. We will find the customer we want to add a saved search to. You can just click from this hot new customer list. This is customers with some kind of recent activity. Or I could go down here to my customer detailed list and just type in the customer I'm looking for, and you can see that it narrows my list down automatically to the customers that match. We'll click on their name and that'll open up their profile page.

So from here we have all their profile information, any notes I've left on their record, anything like that. And as we scroll down, you can see the various things you can do on this page, add safe properties, to-dos, all that. But for saved searches, we'll go down to this saved searches and market watch reports widget. Here, I'll click on add a saved search, it'll kick me into a property search. And now here I can define the area for this property search either by market, and that would be just typing in a name, like typing in a city name or a zip code or a school district. I can do it by radius, where I define the center and then I control the size of the circle. I can go by area, where I draw a box around an area. Or I can go by boundary, where I would actually select a boundary area, like a school attendance zone for example.

So we'll take a look at each of these real quick. If I go by market, you can see it just pops up my locations box down here, and if I type in a location, you can see that it brings up the auto completer, and I can click on one of the results there, and it'll narrow my results. You can see it updates the total results found automatically.

The next thing I can do, we'll go back to profile and come back in here again. Add a saved search. If I go by radius, you can see I now have a big circle on my map. I can type in an address and it will center my circle on that particular address. And then if I want to change the size of the circle, I'll just grab these ... I don't know what to call it ... grabber. I'll grab my grabber and move that around, and you can see I can resize the circle, or I can grab the center here and I can actually move the circle around. And then I would just click next to save my search to results only within those areas. So only 12 results this time.

Next, go on down here to add a saved search again, and we can do by area. So for an area I would draw a polygon. I'll go ahead and zoom in, and let's say for example, I wanted just this neighborhood over here. Everywhere I click, it'll put down a pin, and then I just connect the pins together. There we go. So once I have my box defined, I click on next, and then I'll narrow my results down to just listings within that area. It's only one this time. And this is all test data, so I'm not actually finding the listings in that area.

And then lastly, we'll go down here, add a saved search one more time, and this time we'll do boundary. Now from here, it loads up a map again, but this time I can select a boundary type. So you can see the different boundary types that are available here. School districts and school attendance zones are, I would say the most used portion of this, but I could also do a county, I could do county subdivisions, zip codes, metropolitan areas. And there are some subtle differences between some of these areas. But basically these are actual map boundaries that we've pulled from public record data.

So if I go down here and say ... we'll do school district. And you can see it loads up all the school districts that are within my map area or near my map area, so that I don't have to run through an entire state's worth of school districts or anything like that. So we'll go ahead and go with North Canton. And you can see it loads up that boundary area automatically. So I'll go down here, I can either add another or I'll just click on next, and it loads up all the results within that area.

So that is step one as far as saved searches goes and how I would go in and define those areas. Under location, you can see that the map area or the boundary area I picked is listed there. But I'll go ahead and get rid of that just so that we have more results to choose from. And then the rest of this works just like a regular property search. So under property type I can choose from different statuses, I can choose from different property categories and subtypes, so I can really narrow down the actual property type there.

Under details, I get my standard information, beds, baths, price, square feet, all that. So I'll go ahead and put in a price here. The old tried and true three bedrooms, two baths. Let's see what we get. There we go. So you can see I have six results here. And under filters, I have all the filters that are available to me, the standardized filters, or if there've been any custom filters added at the company level, those will be available in here.

And then next, what you don't see here is that there's MLS-specific information here also. So for every MLS connected to your website, if we're getting some specific criteria from them, there will be a drop down for each of your MLS's. You can click on that and go down and select options that are specific to your MLS. And you can get really fine grain there, stuff like handicap-accessible countertops and ramps and fireplaces and first-floor master bedrooms. So you can really get specific there, and basically any information that's available at the MLS, or just about any information that's available in the MLS, is going to be available in those drop downs to narrow your search results by. So you can really get fine tuned with these.

Now the next thing you can do is you can see each one of these, I have a quick view button. So if I click on that it brings up a little more information about that property, and then full detail would actually take me through to my website where I could see the detail page on the public site.

Now I can also go through here and I can remove specific listings from this email. So if I click remove from email, what that's going to do is ... I just got rid of the stuff with no pictures ... but what that'll do is when this email kicks off to the customer, assuming that I have it do that, it won't include those listings in the results set. And that way if you see some things here that are obvious that your customer is not going to be interested in just based on what you know about them, you can just remove those from the email so that it better fine-tunes that email to the stuff that your customer really wants. And it's that kind of connection that's gonna help you maintain that relationship with the customer.

So once you have that set up, we can go over here to search summary. Now, if I had created a template for this saved search, and I'll show you where you can create those here in a minute, I would be able to select from that template here. The idea for that is if I'm always looking for properties that are between 150 and 250 and three bedrooms, two bathrooms, 2,000 square feet, and it just seems like every search that I pre-create I'm using that criteria over and over again, I can save that as a template, and then I would be able to click here and just select that template instead of going through and picking all those options on every search I make.

Now the other things you can see here is just a summary of your search itself and a reset button. So if I wanted to just start over, I can hit reset and it'll clear all the options I've selected. Otherwise, I can look here and I can see the actual options I've chosen without going through each menu one at a time and seeing what I've selected there. So it's just a convenience measure there.

And then the next thing I can do is, first I can either just click save this search and be done, so it'll save this search and nothing else will happen with it at this point, or I can go into these saved search settings, I can give this search a name, I can choose whether or not it will send emails to the customer. So with email notifications on, what it's going to do is send updates, or basically it's going to run the search at whatever interval I have selected here.

So if I select instantly, then the search is going to be running all the time, and every time it finds new listings it's going to kick off an email to the customer to show them what those new listings are. If I turn email notifications off, then none of the rest of that matters. The search will be saved, they can come into the website, they can log into their account and run the search and see the results, but they won't get any notifications over email. So we'll leave that on.

My next option is I can choose whether or not to send the open house email. And what it'll do is, on Thursdays I believe, for a saved search that's set up, even if there are no listings, no new listings that match the criteria for the saved search, the system will find any open houses for listings that match the criteria of the search and kick that open house email off to the customer. That way, even if there aren't any new listings that are what they're looking for, but there are open houses coming up that weekend that match what they're looking for, they'll get an email to notify them of those if you turn this on.

And the last thing you can do here is you can select that you want to send those search results now. So what this will do is if I select that, I can type in a little custom message here and then hit save and send. And what it'll do is fire off an email immediately ... or really it'll go through the mail queue, so it might not be instantaneous, but it will be right away ... and it'll send that message off that just includes all of the listings that are currently in this result set.

So the difference there is if I don't tell it to send the results now and I just save this search and let it send on its own as new listings come on the market, they won't get this initial result set, they'll just get new listings every time new listings come up that match. It just depends on how you want to set this saved search up and how you've been communicating with this customer as to whether or not you want to send this initial result set right away. So this gives you the option of doing so. If you want to, you just check the box, type in a message and hit save and send, and it will fire off the email with all this initial set. So there you go.

And then lastly, if I have removed listings and I want to get those back, I can click clear removed listings and it'll pull my removed listings back up.

So there you go. That is how you set up a saved search for a customer, and that is everything you can do as far as sending out those emails and the criteria you can get down to on those.

Now next ... and I'll go ahead and save this one. I didn't pick any locations. Nevermind, because I removed my location.

So the next thing you can do here is go down to listings and then property search. Now you'll see this loads up the same property search, only now it's not associated with a specific customer. So we'll go ahead and do by market just in the interest of having a location this time. There we go. So it loads up my result, everything here is exactly the same. And you can see I have some different options here under companies if I want to set up this email a certain way, but I have all the same filters in addition to these company options. And I would have the MLS filters here also. Again, it's a test site, so there is no MLS attached to it, but yours will, so you'll have drop-downs, or most likely will. So you'll have drop downs for each of the MLS's also.

Now your additional company options allow you to return listings specific to certain offices. So if you wanted to return ... say you put in Canton for the area, so you put in a city name, you put in all your criteria, but you want to see only listings that match that criteria that are in a specific office, you can go here and you can select that office, and that'll narrow the results to just that office's listings. So that's the first extra thing you can do here.

The next thing you can do is you can save a template. So this is where you would save that template. You would go and put in all your search criteria down here, you would then give it a name and then hit save, and that'll save a new template. So if I wanted to do that, let's say I want just residential, single family, and I want to do 150 to 250 and that old three bedrooms, two bathrooms. There we go. So that loads up my listing results, and now I can go over here to search summary and go down to name this template. There we go, hit save. So now I have a template saved. So I can go in here and I can select from my template, and when I'm creating a search for a customer, I can also select from this template here so it'll automatically fill in that criteria and just save me a little time.

Now the last thing you can do here that is part of our new functionality ... we've already seen that you can remove specific listings, you can do that here also. So if I go to customized results, I can remove, remove, remove. We'll just get rid of stuff with no picture. Well there's a lot with no picture, we're not going to get it all. So with customized results, I can remove that the same way I could if I were setting up the search for a specific customer. But now I have the option of emailing these results also. So if I click on email these results, you can see it loads up a new page and it actually loads me into the email blast system.

So from here, I can set up an email blast just like I would set up any other. So I can set up a send date, though it'll set the current date by default. I can go down here, and under the two field I can start typing in any of my group names or any of my individual customer names, and it'll bring up the auto completer, and then I can select those groups or customer names. So if I want to send to group A, and then I also want to send to my good buddy, Bruce Banner, I can type that in.

Man, I can't type at all today. Standby. There we go.

So I can load up any list of specific users or specific groups there. I also have a carbon copy and a blind copy field here, so I can do the same thing with those, those will also auto complete. And then I can customize the subject here, so I'll say check out my listings. My listings isn't good. These listings.

And as we scroll down, you can see that it has created a template or basically pre-built an email template that filled in with all the listings that were among the search result set that I brought up. Now one thing to keep in mind here is that you've got this template, you have the basic information, this isn't showing every listing in the result set.

So let's say that I ran a search and there were 100 results. This isn't going to load up 100 results. What this is gonna load up is the results that were on the page you were on when you clicked the email results button. So if I just put it in my criteria and the first page updated to results, and then I click email this button, it's going to take all the results that show up on the first page and put them into this email template. If I have moved on to the third page of results before I clicked email these results, it would be the third page results that show up in this email. So that's something to keep in mind when you set these up.

So it has all those in it, and then if we scroll down here, you can see it will also have a view all link. So if you did get 100 results and you say email these results on the first page, it'll put the first page in this template, and then it'll include this link to view all. And then when I send this out, I would just click on send, that fires it off to all the recipients I've said above, and then in that email, they can click on any of these listings to go through to your website and view the listing detail page, or they can click on view all and that will load up a results page with all the listings from that search. There you go.

And just like any other email blast it, it'll set up down here in the history when you send those out, and you'll be able to see how many people have actually opened and clicked through, and all the same metrics you can get from all the rest of the email blast emails that go out.

So there you have it. That is the saved search platform on the DeltaNet. As always, thanks a lot for joining me. If you have any questions, concerns, comments, feel free to comment on any of our videos on Facebook or YouTube, send in an email to support@deltagroup.com or give us a call. Thanks a lot, and I will see you again next week.