In this episode of Tech Tuesday, Harley Wolfarth covers how to opt your clients out of the email and SMS subscriptions in DeltaNET 6.

Video Transcription

Harley Wolfath:

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Tech Tuesday, presented by Delta Media Group, where we think that if Jimmy just didn't take things too far, he would have a really successful legal career ahead of him. But alas, what are you going to do? So today, we're going to take a look at the email opt-out system in the DeltaNET. We get a lot of questions around this, and so we just wanted to put this video together to kind of create some clarity around that and help you understand where you can go to see customers that have opted out, and how you can see kind of their individual opt-out status.

Harley Wolfath:

So first off, we're going to take a look over here, and we're in DeltaNET 6, so we're going to go to the email reports page, and that'll just give us a quick rundown of customers that have unsubscribed or opted out of various systems in the DeltaNET. So to get there, I'm just going to type "Report" up here into the quick action search box, and you can see down here we have email, traffic reports, seller reports, so we're going to go to marketing email activity report.

Harley Wolfath:

So here we're on the activity report, you can see there's a breakdown at the top that lets you pull up just the activity reports for specific systems, but the main thing we're going to look at this time is this customer opt-out or bounce report widget. So here you can see it is broken down by different types of things that customers can be opted out of, so you have email campaigns, email blasts, E-cards and MCFL. And you can see it just gives you a breakdown of how many of those have bounced, or how many people in your customer database are in our bounce table, so a message went to them and it bounced back, and how many total customers have opted in versus how many have opted out.

Harley Wolfath:

The graphs in this, as it is a test account, are going to be very skewed. You won't have nearly as many bounced, and you'll probably have more opted out than this, whereas most of the customers attached to this account don't actually have real email addresses, so those would all have bounced, but this allows you to see that information. Now, if you want to see how many have opted out, you can see that there's a little sliver of opt-out here, that'll be a green part of the pie chart on yours.

Harley Wolfath:

Now, the next thing you can do is click up here on this little hamburger menu up at the top, and you can view your opt-out list or view your bounce list. So in this case, let's click on "View opt out list," and you can see it opens up a new window for us, and then just gives us all the customers that have opted out of that particular thing. So that is one way that you can get to these customers, and from here I could click on "View" to take me through to that customer's profile page, and that'll allow me to further look into the things they've opted in or out of.

Harley Wolfath:

Now, I can do that from any customer's profile page, so I have one kind of set up for this that has a few things that'll work well for our example here, so I'm going to go to that customer's profile page by just going back to our quick actions box, and I'm just going to type in their name, or part of their name. And you can see, they come up under the heading "Customers," so I'm going to click on "View customer info," and that is going to take me straight to their profile page.

Harley Wolfath:

Now keep in mind, you can get to a customer's profile page in a number of ways. Depending on how the tiles are set up for your company, you may be able to get there from the dashboard page, you would just click on "Dashboard" and you might have a tile here for "View customer." If I click on "CRM," there may be a "View customer" or "Manage customer" option here, so you can see in this particular case I have a "Manage customer" tile, so if I click on that, it lets me put the customer's name in here. And you can see, that brings them up also, and we're back on that same profile page.

Harley Wolfath:

And then also, I can get there straight from the Customer Center, so I can go to CRM and down to Customer Center, and this would also work in DeltaNET 5 if you're still on DeltaNET 5, you would just go to CRM... Actually, in DeltaNET 5, you'd go to customers, and then Customer Center. So we'll go to CRM and Customer Center, there's our main Customer Center page, and I'm just going to scroll down to the customer detailed list section, and I can type their name in here. And you can see, it filters the list down to just them, and if I click on their name, again, same place, takes me to their profile page.

Harley Wolfath:

So from here, right up front and center we have this section that has the customer's profile information, all their contact information is stored here, any family members, and this interface is trimmed down a bit based on the information that's entered for this customer, so if I click on "Edit profile," there are a lot more fields in here that I have the ability to fill in to add more information to that customer, so just keep that in mind for this particular page.

Harley Wolfath:

So, go ahead and close that out, and you can see right up front and center we have an option or a field here that says "Global email opt-out." So what this is doing is this is telling me if the customer has opted out of everything. Odds are, most customers won't have opted out of all things, though some will have, and that'll kind of be indicated here. So even though this has "Opted in," I know this customer is opted in overall, so kind of globally opted in, but they could be opted out of some individual functionality. So to see that, I'm going to click on "View subscriptions," and it's going to give me some details about what exactly they're opted into.

Harley Wolfath:

And we see that opens up in a new page also, or a new tab in this case, and these are all of the various things they are signed up for. This "My home finder" and "Market watch" will actually label out all of the home finders and market watches they're set up for, but those sections will only appear if the customer is indeed signed up for a saved search, which would be a home finder, or a market watch report. So don't worry if those sections aren't there, that just means that customer's not signed up for any.

Harley Wolfath:

Now, we'll just go ahead and run through this page and give you an idea what each of these things are. So first off we have "My home finder," and like I said, that is a saved search, so if they wanted to opt-out of all of the saved searches that they have set up, they could just check that box, or uncheck that box rather, and that would opt them out of those. I can also click this arrow and this will expand that section, so if they were signed up for more than one saved search, I would see them all here, and that would give me the ability to unsubscribe to individuals.

Harley Wolfath:

[inaudible 00:06:17] the cool thing about that is I can see each of the ones they're signed up for, and this is the same page that they would see if they click on an unsubscribe link in an email, so they would have the same option here and see each of the ones they're signed up for, and when they opt out of them, they're not really opting out of a saved search, they're just turning off the email notifications for that saved search, so it'll still be saved, it'll still be attached to their account, you can still go in and see it, they can still sign into their portfolio account and see it or re-run it, they just won't get the email notifications anymore when new listings come on the market that match, so...

Harley Wolfath:

So that is how that is set up, and that is how I would opt out of those individually. And you can see that it also will show this for multiple agents, so if this customer had more than one account with this same email address assigned to different agents, it would show all of those reports here, so you could go down and turn them off individually.

Harley Wolfath:

So, we're going to go ahead and collapse that. The next one we have here is market watches. Just like the home finder one, I can expand that, so I could unsubscribe from all of them together by just unchecking the box there, or if I have multiple in here, it'll tell me what agent they're being sent on behalf of, and I can individually pick and choose which ones I want to turn off, which ones I want to leave on.

Harley Wolfath:

Next, we have the SMS option. So this one kind of works in the opposite way, it will be unchecked by default, unless when the customer created their account, they indicated that they would prefer to receive or allow the receipt of SMS messages through the system. So as we've done in our past couple of weeks' videos, we went over the SMS functionality, how to set up a virtual phone number, how to send out individual and bulk text messaging, that text messaging will only go out to customers that are opted in to the receipt of SMS messages. So if you wanted to go in and opt a customer in that you know wants to receive those messages, you could go to this page and then just check that box, and that opts them in for all SMS messaging.

Harley Wolfath:

Now, optionally they can be opted in to direct text messages that you would send to them individually, so if you went to their profile page and actually sent a text message from there, but be opted out of the automated ones. And you can see the second one here, "Receive automated messages and notifications via SMS," if I uncheck that one, I'll be able to send messages to them directly and they'll receive those, but if they're set up in an email campaign that contains an SMS message for example, that one won't go out to them. So that is how that is set up and how that works.

Harley Wolfath:

Now, the next thing you have here is the actual individual email system opt out stuff, so this is... So far, these two are just about turning off individual reports, more or less. Text messaging, whether or not they want to receive SMS or text messages. This one is the one that actually opts them out of individual types of automated email sent from the DeltaNET. So, the way these are labeled has to do with labeling it out in a way that describes to the customer as well as possible exactly what these things are, what they're opting out of. We didn't want to put "Email blasts" and "Email campaign system" and "My Customer For Life system" as the labels in here, because that doesn't really mean anything to the customer directly. That means something to you because you work in the DeltaNET, but to the customer, that's... They're not really going to know what they're opting out of.

Harley Wolfath:

So, just to give you an idea what each of these mean, first off if I just uncheck this box, that would opt me out of all of those things, but individually, "Get our weekly homeowner information email" specifically relates to email blasts, so opting out of that would opt out of email blasts. Opting out of "Get notified when your saved listings have updates" is specifically the listing activity email. What that has to do is when a customer saves listings, the system will automatically email them when a change happens to one of their saved listings. If they just didn't want to get those emails, they could uncheck that box.

Harley Wolfath:

Next, you can "Get info on how to use this website to make your home search more efficient and stress-free," that specifically is talking about email campaigns, so if they uncheck that, they won't get any more of your campaign emails. Next we have "Get holiday greetings from your realtor in your inbox." That has to do with E-cards specifically, so unchecking that will prevent them from getting any E-cards. Next is "Moving to another area? Our relocation news and tips will help make a smooth transition." This specifically relates to MCFL, or the My Customer For Life system, so if I uncheck that, I won't get any more MCFL emails, or this customer won't, rather.

Harley Wolfath:

And then lastly, we have "Get our weekly report for price reductions on listings you've viewed," so this is one where the system will automatically send out an email when a price reduction pops up on a listing that this customer has viewed, or that we've seen that they viewed on the website, which really just means they were logged into their account, they came to the website and they viewed the listing, so the system will keep track of that. If they don't want to get those emails, they would uncheck this box, and then they wouldn't receive those. So, I'll check them all again.

Harley Wolfath:

So that's what the system does, or this portion of the system. You can go in and individually opt-out of different types of emails, instead of being a kind of all or nothing sort of thing. And then lastly, we have the "Unsubscribe from all communications," this option is the full unsubscribe, so you can see I check that and it unchecks the rest of the boxes. By using this option, it's just a quick way that agents... Or not agents, that customers can go in and from this unsubscribe page, unsubscribe from everything, so this is basically the global opt-out.

Harley Wolfath:

Now, the other piece of this is that you can opt your customers out. So let's say a customer doesn't use the opt-out link in the email, but rather they contact you and say they want to opt-out of all emails, this is how you could do that. You would go in, go to this page for that customer, and then use this "Unsubscribe from all" option and click "Change subscriptions," or as you make any changes here, you'll always have to click "Change subscriptions" for them to be saved, and that would be all you have to do, and that would have the customer completely unsubscribed.

Harley Wolfath:

So there you have it, that is the unsubscribe, or the email opt-out system in the DeltaNET, kind of how that works and how those pieces work together. As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, please send an email to support@deltagroup.com, or feel free to give us a call and we'll walk you through whatever you need. Thanks a lot for joining me, and I will see you again next week.