[webmaster]

Lead Management (Admin facing side again)
This one is WAY more complicated. On the side there are quick links to "Todays leads, Assigned Leads, Unassigned Leads, Pending Leads, Accepted Leads, Rejected Leads, Closed Leads Each of these quicklinks has a number (57) denoting how many actual leads are in each class. Clicking on a quick link takes you directly to the main management screen for leads and preselects from the filter options whatever you clicked (For instance all closed leads)

Also under the Manage Leads tab is "Search leads" "Email Leads" and "Add new lead (Manual lead entry)"

Search leads (For now) is pretty easy, search all leads by first name, last name, email address or phone number.

Email Leads
This is a mass mailer function where you can email tons of leads (all of them if you like) a single message, pick just one group, set the from name, the from email, the subject select a pre-written message from your document manager (Will talk about afterwards) select either html or plain text email and there is a wysiwyg editor for composing your message. There are also variables that can be used to personalize for each lead such as {first_name}, {last_name}, {email} - We call these lead tags.

Click "Email leads" and BAM! You are emailing folks

Add new lead, just opens the standard lead details form and you fill in the info and save it.

[RonnieG]

Originally Posted by webmaster

Lead Management ... Click "Email leads" and BAM! You are emailing folks ...

Some SMTP servers limit the number of daily emails that can be sent via SMTP forwarding. GoDaddy's email setups default to 50 per day for example, but that can be increased to whatever the email administrator wants. They just need to remember to do it if that email address will be used for mass emailings. Tutorials, setup procedures and customer support procedures for the new system may need to address this email setup issue. Otherwise, mass email sending could be limited in some cases, and the client/agent may not even be aware of the limit being enforced. This may not be an issue when REW email servers are using aliases to send mass emails, but the SPAM/Spoof filtering that I mentioned in the prior post could still severely limit the effectiveness and deliverability of mass emails when email aliases and non-REW hosted email addresses are used.

Scenario 1: REW website and all email addresses used in a drip campaign are hosted on same server and REW IP address. No problems.

Scenario 2: REW website is hosted on one server, and email is via a different SMTP email service (as mine is). These issues may come into play, depending on how emails are sent by the system.

[webmaster]

Group management
Our system allows admins and agents to set up "Groups" these are basically categories that your leads may fit into - perhaps you may have a "relocation" group and anyone who indicated they are relocating would be assigned to this group. You might also have a group called "high end" for 1million+ customers - Your relocation guy might fall into the high end group as well, so you can assign any lead to as many groups as they fit into.

Creating a group is as simple as clicking add new group, giving it a name and a description and hitting submit. (Editing and managing is a similar process)

[webmaster]

Campaign Management
Oooooo Drip email! I am still not quite happy with this yet, but the premise is this. Each drip email campaign you want to set up, you click "add new campaign" give it a name, a Senders Name, Senders email, A description (used internally) and assign as many groups as you like to the campaign. You can then click to activate it, or leave it in pending.

Once you have a campaign created, you then must add documents to it, and give them send delays. So you click "Add new email to this campaign" give it a send delay (Amount of time after the lead signs up to receive this particular document) Give it a subject, and then select the document (Discussed later) that goes with this particular email.

A big change here from the original drip campaign is that previously you had to compose the emails during this campaign and if you wanted to use that same email again in another campaign you had to basically find a copy of it, copy paste and do it over again. Now because of centralized document creation and storage, this has been eliminated, so all you have to do is select the document for this particular mailout from a dropdown.

[RonnieG]

Originally Posted by webmaster

Campaign Management
... Each drip email campaign you want to set up, you click "add new campaign" give it a name, a Senders Name, Senders email, ...

And for each sender's email, do you also provide setup forms for that sender to specify applicable SMTP server and email user login info, so all of the emails go out from the proper domain? It seems to me that user (agent) setup should cover this, so all of the appropriate email address and SMTP login info is stored in the agent setups, and does not need to be re-defined in the drip email campaign setups. The drip system, and IDX email process as well, should allow external email servers to be used, and should not require REW hosted email services to function. Cross-checking IP addresses of servers that originate emails to the IP address of the domain used in the email address is a frequently used SPAM/Spoof email filtering technique that could prevent many drip emails from reaching their intended recipients.

[webmaster]

Document Management
Woot! again -

Create categories for your documents by clicking add new category (To organize your stuff

Click "Add new document" to create and save a document - Here you give the document a name, assign it to a category so you can find it later, tell the system whether it is an html document (email) or plain text, and then compose the document in the wysiwyg editor and hit add document (Or just copy paste from word, click clean the code, then add document.

You can of course edit and delete these documents as well.

What Steve and I are currently working on is this part. I am having the designers create me some nice / clean and simple html email templates that you can choose to put your "documents" into. Users will be able to select a default template, or have a custom one designed and use that one as well or in place of a default.

[webmaster]

Reports: From an admin perspective this is just a report on leads, or a report on money.

A report on leads will give you an agent by agent breakdown of leads in particular statuses (Pending, Accepted, Reject, Closed) and you can drill down by a particular agent, and choose a start or an end date to run the report.

From the money side - We have fields in the lead details page for "Potential value" << This is a guess as to how much potentially the lead is worth, and closed value << When an agent closes a deal, how much did they actually close them for?

Once again, pick a date range, select all agents, or individuals and run reports.

[webmaster]

Ok so that is a very brief (Admin facing) summary, however the details (Such as what can one do with an individual lead, what data do we capture on that lead, how can one classify and filter etc I have left out, frankly because I am late for dinner

I will try to post some more later tonight.

[webmaster]

Incidentally, I do want to launch this soon but I may be forced to do it in our current ugly UI (Because the new one is not done yet) - nothing will change about the features or functionality, just an uglier skin.

Screen attached of ugly old UI

[webmaster]

Oh yeah and in that screen, you will not see the familiar saved favorites or saved searches etc that many have in their IDX sites, that is because I don't have an IDX so I Don't need them - but don't worry they will be in there