Introduction

If you have a lot of new leads every day, it may be troublesome to manually set up property alerts for each of 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
• FAQs

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 on Automated Property Alerts, check the box 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 the 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 "Apply" button so that your changes can take effect.

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

• "Source." This setting allows users to deactivate Automated Property Alerts, Market Snapshots, and Market Reports, based on the lead's Source. Checking the box next to the source will deactivate that Source for these automated alerts. That is, leads from that Source will not receive the alert emails. The user can select different Sources for each of these three types of alerts. That is, if a Source is excluded from Property Alerts, it will not automatically be excluded from Market Snapshots or Market Reports.
• "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, it 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 on the "Inquired City" or "Inquired Zip Code." If you choose "Any," the system will trigger based on both city and zip code. This information is typically gathered when the lead is imported via email parsing and the city or zip code is provided in the email or, if the lead registered on a Chime website, their activity will be recorded for this purpose.
  Note: For Canadian clients, the option under "Inquired Zip Code" is intended for Postal Codes, we just don't change the name from "zip code" to "postal codes".
  
• "Schedule." There is no exact time for an alert email, due to the large number of emails that are to be sent out. Usually, AM is a time range from 8:00 am - 10:00 am and PM is from 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm.

*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 on "Search Criteria" and Auto Market Snapshots are based on "Properties":

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

Auto Property Alert (Buyer)

1. The lead has at least one 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.

Auto Market Snapshot (Seller)

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

Auto Market Report

1. The lead has at least one email address
2. If it's a Seller lead. . .
   • The lead has data in the "City" or "Zip Code" fields of a property (Engagement > Properties).
3. If it's Buyer lead. . .
   • The lead has data for the "City" or "Zip Code" fields in the search criteria (inquiries) on the lead profile.

So, an auto property alert will not be triggered if the information above is not provided or valid. If importing leads that have blank information in these fields, no auto alert will be sent.

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 are hot and actively responding to you, a manual alert can be created for "Daily" or "Instantly" frequencies.

Frequency Reduction for Property Alerts

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

1. 1. If the lead is set to Instantly get a property alert, and the number of alerts sent in the last 7 days is greater than 6, the alert frequency will adjust to Daily. 
   2. If the lead is set to receive a property alert Daily, and the alert's creation time or last time it was downgraded was more than 7 days, and if at least one alert email has been sent in the last 7 days, then the sending frequency will be set to Weekly.
   3. If the lead is set to receive a property alert Weekly, and the alert creation time or last frequency adjustment time is more than 7 days, and if one alert email has been sent in the last 7 days, then the sending frequency will be adjusted down to Biweekly(every two weeks.)
   4. If the lead is set to receive a property alert Biweekly, the alert creation time or last frequency adjustment time is more than 60 days, and at least one alert email has been sent in the last 7 days, then this will trigger an adjustment down to a Monthly sending frequency.
   5. If the Lead opens an email, the frequency will revert back to the original setting, no matter which frequency the system had is moved to due to its previous inactivity. 
      • Example -If the frequency is reduced from instantly > daily > weekly > monthly and then a lead opens an alert type email that they receive then it will go back to instantly.

*Note this applies to Automatic and Manual Property Alerts. 

FAQs

• Do auto property alerts go out to multiple family members if connected?
• Do auto property alerts update automatically based on lead activity on my Chime-built website?

Do auto property alerts go out to multiple family members if connected?

No, auto property alerts will only be sent to the primary lead and at their primary email address. Auto property alert emails will not be sent to family members.

You can set up manual property alerts to go out to family members and multiple email addresses. For more information see Property Alerts & Market Snapshots (Lead Engagement).

Do auto alerts update automatically based on lead activity on my Chime-built website?

• For (buyer) property alerts, if the lead continues to browse the Chime-built IDX website, their activity will be monitored and their auto alerts adjusted accordingly.
• For (seller) market snapshots, if additional properties are added under Engagement > Properties, the auto market snapshot will adjust accordingly.
• For auto market reports, these will only trigger based on any initial criteria that existed when the auto market report was set up. In other words, if a lead was imported with inquiries (search criteria) or property information that served to trigger an auto market report, that will be the only information used for auto market reports, and they will not adjust based on additional properties or search criteria added based on profile activity.

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>, by phone at 1 (855) 981-7557, or by a chat with us through your Chime CRM.