2011 IDX Broker Office Newsletter

Welcome to another Office newsletter!

Over the past 6-9 months, traffic to our client pages has grown exponentially. More search crawler traffic, more indexed IDX pages, and higher visitor engagement has forced us to make some radical changes to our server infrastructure:
  • Short-term: We have replaced 16 of our servers with newer, faster servers that contain more RAM and better hard-drives. We have also moved our client databases to higher performing servers to allow for the thousands of concurrent connections required to quickly serve IDX search results and details.
  • Long-term: We are moving our services to a large, reliable cloud-based computing vendor. This way we can add new servers on-demand, to meet the growing need for fast search results. We expect this process to take approximately 4-8 weeks.
Nobody said managing 400 MLS datasets would be easy. Yet we are doing it, and building it to scale so that we can maintain the same high quality service and support that makes IDX Broker unique. Thank you for helping us reach these new milestones!

This month's newsletter will discuss lead capture settings and recommendations, a detailed look at email updates, and several overlooked contact routing settings.

Best regards,
The IDX Team
@idxbroker


Customizing Your Account For Lead Capture

Your IDX Broker account includes a set of Lead Managementfeatures that allow you to capture more leads. These settings may be found in the Lead Registration Preferences area of your control panel.

image5

IDX Broker gives you a few teaser options; you may "force" or "request" user registration for a number of pages. For property detail pages, you may also specify how many listings a visitor may view before they are prompted to register (either forced, or requested).
  • The force setting requires the site visitor to fill out and submit a sign-up form before navigating past that page. For example, if you force users to register after seeing two details pages, they must fill out and submit the sign-up form before they are able to see additional details pages.
  • The request setting will prompt visitors to sign-up, with the alternative option of clicking on a link to bypass the registration and view the listing results or details.
With so Many Choices - Where Should you Start?
While these lead capture options provide a lot of control over your IDX search pages, they don't give you information about where to start. We chose to do some of that homework for you. We reviewed aggregate lead capture settings for all accounts, and cross-referenced those settings against the average leads generated per day. While this is not a true scientific analysis, we have heard from several clients who have had very good results after modifying their previous or default settings, to those described below:
  • REQUEST registration on the Photo Gallery page.
  • REQUEST after the 1st or 2nd Detail page view.
  • FORCING registration after the 7th or 8th Details page view.
It may take some time and experimentation to find the lead capture settings that work best for your website, and your market. Test these settings, and you may be surprised at what IDX information can do for your business!


Customize Email Updates

Automatic email updates are a very popular feature. These emails go out to leads when new MLS listings match the Lead's saved search criteria.

Did you know that you can customize some features available via these updates?

Global Preferences Options
In the Global Preferences section of IDX Broker, you may specify a custom "From:" address for your email updates. Use this field if you want to keep your Primary Account and Email Update addresses separate. If you enter nothing here, your leads will still receive their email updates, but with your account's Primary email address in the From field.

image4

Most clients choose to receive a Summary of All Daily Mailings. Note that until you add a Carbon Copy email address and select Summary or All from the dropdown, you will not receive a copy of emails being sent to your leads. The daily summary includes each lead's name, email address, and a link to the search results featured in their email update.

Agent Bio Options
Your Agents may also CC themselves on emails sent to their leads. IDX Broker does not force you or your Agent's to enter an email address in the Agent's Bio, but we highly recommend that you do so. Your Agents may also add a custom Page Header to emails sent to their leads, and may test these settings by hitting the "Send!" button at the bottom of this form:

imagw2

Email Updates Sub Header
Use a sub header to add your Franchise or Brokerage name and logo information to all email updates.

Under Customize -> Sub Headers -> Lead Pages, we've entered some simple HTML links to the banner image. Note that you cannot upload this banner into your IDX Broker account. Use an image hosting service such as Flickr, or host the file on your own website.

This sub header will display your banner at the top of every email update:

Office Roster Page


Signature & Contact Information
The contact information displayed in the footer of your email updates is pulled from the information you have entered in the Account Management -> Contact Info page in IDX Broker. Please check to be sure this information is accurate.


Agent Languages

If you are working with a web designer, the email updates may be customized further using a Page Wrapper. The Page Wrapper for email updates can be used to display custom HTML email stationary in your email updates. For more information on using Page Wrappers, please see this article in our online Knowledgebase.


Contact Routing Tips

Many Offices use the Contact Routing options available in IDX Broker. These may be found under Lead Management -> Contact Routing.

In addition to routing leads to agents based on rules or via round robin (randomly), IDX Broker provides several ways to customize contact pages to help you optimize the process for getting leads to your agents:

Set a Carbon Copy Address for Lead Notifications
Use this option to set a carbon copy address for ALL lead notification emails that are sent out from your account. This option is very useful if the office Director or Manager would like to know when the system generates a new lead to any Agent.

image6
Agent Dropdown Menu Options
  • Show Agent Dropdown Menus: If you select yes, the system will display an agent dropdown menu on your contact pages. If the visitor is a lead that has already been assigned an Agent (and the lead hasn't deleted their browser cookies), that lead's agent will be pre-selected. If the visitor is not yet a lead, the Agent selected in the dropdown list will receive the contact information. Note that if you choose to enable the Agent Dropdown Menus, visitors will have the option to OVERRIDE your lead capture, or current lead assignment settings.
  • Force User to Select an Agent: By default, visitors have the option to NOT select an Agent. If a visitor selects this option, then the lead will be set to "unassigned." Clicking this option to Yes will eliminate that blank option in the agent dropdown menu, ensuring that leads will always be assigned via IDX Lead Routing.
image3
Agent Contact Link Options
Agent Contact Link options give you control over how leads will contact your agents via your roster and bio pages.
  • Agent Contact Link Behavior: This gives you the option of bypassing the IDX Broker Lead Management system for email links. Note that if you set this to use direct email, any direct contact with those Agents via the contact link in the email WILL NOT be recorded in IDX Broker Lead Management.
  • Agent Contact Link Text: Specify whether you want to display generic "Contact this agent" text on the Agent's Bio page, or prefer to show the Agent's email address.
image1