Setting Up and Using Auto-Property Alerts

Introduction

If you have a lot of new leads every day, it may be troublesome to manually set up property alerts for each them. Chime can help to automate this process! The Chime Auto Property Alerts feature not only sets up property alerts for new leads based on their initial inquiry but also updates according to their search criteria and behavior on your IDX website.

For best results, the Auto Property Alerts feature is turned on by default for Buyer Property Alerts and Market Snapshots, but off for Market Reports. You can turn these off or change the settings anytime.

Summary

• Settings Location
• Turn On / Off, Deleting Existing Auto Alerts
• Other Settings
• Reviewing Auto Property Alerts on Leads
• Requirements for Auto Alerts
• Frequency Suggestion
• Frequency Reduction for Auto Property Alerts

Settings Location

First, click the gear icon to go to Settings. On the left side of the page under Features click Auto Property Alerts. This section will show you the current settings for your auto property alerts.

Turn On / Off, Deleting Existing Auto Alerts

To turn off Automated Property Alerts, click the toggle button next to "Enable" and then click "Apply" on the bottom right. If you are a Team Leader/Admin and you want the settings to be applied to all the team users, check the box next to "Apply for team" before clicking "Apply."

*Important: Auto Property Alerts for buyers and sellers need to be turned off separately.

If you disable the auto property alerts by unchecking the box, you will have the ability to delete existing alerts. Note that if you choose to do so by clicking on the hyperlink, you will only be deleting all existing auto property alerts--manually created property alerts will not be affected.

Other Settings

In this section, you will see all of the settings for Auto Property Alerts including the status of the listings that you want to go out, the frequency setting, and the schedule setting. These settings are similar to the ones you see when you finalize a manually-created property alert. After changing these settings, don’t forget to click the the "Apply" button so that your changes can take effect.

Two important settings to pay attention to here are the following:

• "Exclude Pipeline." Adjusts when auto alerts are APPLIED to new leads in the system.
  This setting does not remove auto alerts. In other words, if a lead is imported to the database or added directly to a pipeline stage that is on this exclusion list, they will not have auto property alerts applied. However, if a lead already has an auto property alert applied, it will not remove that property alert.
• "Location Criteria." You can set the auto alert to only trigger based off of the "Inquired City" or "Inquired Zip Code." If you choose "Any," the system will trigger based off of both city and zip code. This information is typically gathered when the lead is imported via email parsing and the city or zip code are provided in the email or, if the lead registered on a Chime website, their activity will be recorded for this purpose.
• "Schedule." There is no exact time to an alert email, due to the large number of emails that are to be sent out. Usually, AM is a time range from 8:00am - 10:00am and PM is from 2:00pm - 4:00pm.

*IMPORTANT: Any Auto Property Alerts that were already created will not be affected by changes to any of these settings.

Reviewing Auto Property Alerts on Leads

On a lead’s profile page, Auto Property Alerts will be marked as "Auto Alert" among the property alerts that are manually created. You can edit the settings of Auto Property Alerts to better fit the lead’s criteria, but this turns it into a normal/manual property alert and this type of alert will not adjust to the lead’s activity (on your website) on its own.

Requirements for Auto Alerts

Auto Property Alerts are based off of "Search Criteria" and Auto Market Snapshots are based off of "Properties":

Note that Auto Property Alerts will only work on leads that meet the following requirements:

Property Alert (Buyer)

1. The lead has at least one an email address
2. The lead has valid data in the “Location” field of the "Search Criteria" section. If nothing is found in the "Search Criteria" section, an auto property alert email will not be sent until "Location" data is available based on lead behavior on your Chime IDX website.

Market Snapshot (Seller)

1. The lead has at least one an email address
2. The lead has data in the “City” or “Zip Code” field of the Detail or Property Info section

Frequency Suggestion

Based on feedback from many of our users, we understand that most leads will be annoyed by receiving too many emails in their inbox and therefore may mark your emails as spam. This is harmful to your email reputation and will influence your future email delivery. With this in mind, we suggest that you set the frequency of auto alerts to "Weekly." If you find out the leads is hot and actively responding to you, a manual alert can be created for "Daily" or "Instantly" frequencies.

Frequency Reduction for Auto Property Alerts

In order to improve email deliverability, auto property alert email frequency will be adjusted for leads who never open them. Chime will automatically adjust the frequency of auto property alerts by doing the following: 

1. If auto alerts are set to “Daily” or “Instantly” frequencies, auto alerts will be sent out for 30 days daily/instantly per the settings.
2. If a lead who is set to receive these auto alerts does not open even one alert for 30 days, the frequency will be adjusted for that lead to “Weekly.” 
3. If, after the auto property alert has been adjusted to a “Weekly” (per #2), a lead opens the auto property alert email, the frequency of their emails will revert back to the frequency set up in Settings > Auto Property Alerts, daily, instantly, etc.

*Note that this only applies to auto property alerts. Manual property alerts are not affected.

Questions?

If you have any questions regarding this topic or any others, please reach out to our Support Team via email at <support@chimeinc.com> or by phone at 1 (855) 981-7557.