Good morning, everybody, or good afternoon, depending on what time zone you’re in. My name is Josh Hernandez. And today, we are going to take a look at the Flexmls fundamentals class on subscriptions, portals, and contact activity. The first thing we’ll show on screen here are the topics for today. Subscriptions, and if you’re familiar with those, this will be a refresher. And if you’re not, a subscription is just an auto email of listing updates. We’ll look at the portal, which can be used in conjunction or independently with the sub from the subscription. So I’ll show you they work well together. They can work independently, so they don’t have to use both. But the portal is just a website where your contacts can log in and view and keep track of their favorite listings, run their own searches. And you can see everything that they’re doing inside that portal, And you’ll be able to see that inside Flexmls in contact management where you’ll be able to review the contact activity, see exactly what they’re clicking on, when they’re clicking on things, and how many times they’ve gone to a particular listing.
With that, let’s go ahead and move on to the basics of today. And first, everything I do today really begins with a search. So I’m gonna be using the quick search in Flexmls. That’s the most powerful search tool. And when we create a search, I’m just going to create it for a contact. We’ll enter some search criteria. We’ll save the search. And when we save it, we can save it for a contact. We can turn on the subscription, those automatic updates. They’d be based off the search. So then it would start sending updates to that contact. And also if it’s a brand new contact, I’ll point out how you could invite them to the portal when you’re saving that search. I’ll also show you alternative ways how you can just invite a portal a contact to the portal from your contact management screen for those existing contacts. So we’re going to start everything basically on the search page for the subscriptions and the portal. Now with the subscription, I’m about to show you my Flexmls screen. But with the subscription, remember that’s just an automatic email notification of new listings. It always goes to the contact, the recipient as an email. So those will always be automatic emails. And we’ll create a search and save the subscription. And then we’ll get into the subscription settings. And then what the contact must do, they’ve gotta opt in to confirm that are they’re a real person in order to receive those updates, and that’s just a one time opt in. So let’s go ahead. We’ll create a search. And for today’s example, I’ll just be using a contact. We’ll call her Kim Snow, and we’ll create a search for Kim. And I’m just going to turn on the subscription right now. So after this, I’ll show the portal. But first, let’s start with just email updates, the subscription.
So inside Flexmls, I’ve got my dashboard where I’ve landed.
Your Flexmls dashboard may look a little different than mine, but that’s okay because what we’re going to do is go to the quick search. And if it’s not already on your favorites like mine is, you can always click on your menu to go to the quick search. I’ve already pinned mine to the favorites. So let’s just click on quick search and we’ll create a search for Kim.
Now I’m not going to spend too much time creating the search today. But just to give you a really basic search, we’ll do a price range. We’ll do a location, maybe bedrooms or square footage. So I’m going to come in and look for active listings. I want this search to be always looking for active listings for Kim. So then next on my search template, it may be in a different place on yours, but I’m going to put in my price rate. Maybe I know what Kim is looking for, and I’m just going to say minimum of two hundred. She’s kind of got a standard that she’s looking for. And in the locations we’re looking at, Kim can go up to five hundred. Now you don’t have to put in a minimum and maximum. I’m just doing that for today’s example. You could always just put in a maximum or a minimum. Location in this search template up that I’m demonstrating on, they have it labeled as postal city. So I’m just going to put in where we’re looking and I’m going to look for listings in the Fargo and West Fargo location here. So you’ll see that that start zooming in on my map.
And like I said, we’ll put in a little bit of search criteria for Kim. We won’t go too wild. I’ll just say square footage.
She’s looking for something with the minimum of two thousand five hundred and let’s go with four beds and see what that takes us down to and a minimum of three baths. We’ll go three plus baths, four plus beds. And if there is anything else I would like to add, we can always add that to our search criteria. In this MLS, maybe I’ll look at year built as well. So I’m going to just do year built two thousand. So four beds, three baths. And this is the search that we’ve built for Kim. And I can look at the results. I’m going to go over here on my results row where my mouse is hovering. I can look at the results in the list, the detail, the photos. But when I’m confident, these are the type of listings that Kim is interested in. I want to turn on the subscription. So this search, when we save it, will automatically send out email updates to Kim. So it’ll send those listing updates via email and I’ll come in here and come up to my actions. And we begin since we’re on the search, I want to save it to Kim and turn on the subscription. So I’ll click on Save. And the first option under Save is Save Search. When I click on save search, I’ll give the search a name.
So I can just say this Kim residential four plus beds. Whatever I want to put in there for that name. You are limited. I think you’ve got about twenty characters for that space. You can type in a description of the search as you’re saving it. Kim wouldn’t see that description. I can always look at my search and see what it’s looking for. So I’m just going to skip that for right now. And then as I’m working this search pop up top down, I see am I saving it for a contact? And, yes, I want to save it for Kim. So if Kim is an existing contact, I get a search box here and I could type Kim’s name in.
Now I don’t have a Kim yet, so I’m just going to click to add a new contact, give the contact a name, and, of course, give the contact an email address since we’re about to send them email updates.
Once I’ve got that email address in, you will see as I’m adding a contact, a brand new contact and saving the search, there’s an option right here that talks about the portal. Would you like to send an invitation to the portal to Kim right now? So you could do that, when you’re doing this. I’m just pointing this out right now. I’m going to do this separately since I’m kind of showing these features separately right now. So we’ll come back to the portal invitation. I’ll show you another place to do that from contact management. So I’m just gonna leave this off for right now. We’ll just focus on saving this search and turning on the automatic update subscription. So I’ve named the search.
I’ve added Kim as a contact with her name and email address. And then I’m going to click on this button right at the bottom that says save the search and add the subscription. So Kim’s been added to my contacts. We’ll go in to see her in contact management in a moment. And now the search is saved to her. And this is the subscription page. This is who is getting the updates, how frequently they do they go out. That’s what this page is. So it names it after the name of the search. You can change that if you would like. Maybe I’ll call that updates for Kim or listing updates or something like that. So I could change the name if I would like. Who receives the subscription? Who gets the updates? If I want an agent only copy so I can see all of the private information that only MLS members can see. I can check this box and that sends me a copy of the update. Every time Kim gets an update, I get an agent copy of that update as well. Selected contacts, that’ll be selected by default, and then my contacts appear beneath that. If you had multiple contacts selected, it’s a blind carbon copy. They would not see the other recipients receiving these updates. But for today, I’m gonna take that one off, and we’ll just send this to Kim.
Send me an email when the contact, Kim, clicks the link. If I have that checked, when Kim gets an update and views the listing, as soon as she clicks to view the listing details, this checkbox would send me a notification and I’d get that notification in my Flexmls messages and in my member profile email address. So it’ll also send a copy to my regular email address. So if I want to know exactly when Kim clicks on that, I can check that box. Now that can be a lot of updates, so I’m just going to turn that off for right now. And lastly, there is an option for preview mode. I will not turn that on today. In fact, it’s off by default and that is because the preview mode, when I click that box, I get a box that explains what it does. And what it does is will send Kim the updates. Excuse me. It will not send Kim the updates. It will send me Kim’s updates. So I would get an email that says Kim search turned up new listings. And when I click the link, it would open up to those listings kind of in like where my mouse is scrolling in the background here. And each listing would have an approve or reject button next to it. So I can preview the listings, inspect them. If I approve it, it goes on to Kim. If I reject it, Kim never gets that via the automatic subscription update. So that is a great feature if you kind of need to act in a concierge mode for your contact. However, it’s a lot of extra work depending on the client. So I’m going to keep that off for today. And in this case, Kim will get the update automatically. I’ll also get a copy.
And underneath that, the most important thing here, the schedule. Now by default, you’ll see it’s set at weekly, and every day of the week is selected. So with the daily, this is actually daily, not weekly.
And if there are three listings that come on market that match Kim’s search that we just saved, she gets one update. Now the timing of that update will vary from MLS to MLS. Some MLS’s send that single daily update in the mornings. Some send it later in the evening. So you can always reach out to your association to get the timing on that. However, it’s just one update per day. Now if the market is something that Kim doesn’t need a daily update, maybe she’s looking for an investment property and just wants monthly updates to see what’s out there. We could say monthly or ASAP. And this I think is the most popular. So I’m gonna do ASAP for Kim.
So now if a listing comes on market after we turn on this subscription, it comes on market in ten minutes. Kim gets that as soon as it goes live on the MLS. If thirty minutes later, a new listing maybe changes price to match her search now, Kim gets that one. So it goes one at a time as soon as the listing matches Kim’s search. So ASAP just goes one listing at a time as quickly as possible.
And lastly, after the schedule, we have the actual email. And with the email, you’ll notice there is a subject and a body. This email goes out not just once, but every single time there’s a listing update. So ASAP, every time there’s a new update, this is the email that goes out. So I want to make sure it’s direct and to the point.
So I can say, new listings to consider. I can type in my message here.
Here are some listings I think you might be interested. Let me know what you’d like to do. If you would like to schedule a showing, whatever I want to say, I’ll keep it very short and to the point because this email goes out every time there is a listing update. And if you normally say the same thing in the emails as you set up your subscription updates, you can notice above the subject line where my mouse is there’s templates. And I could say, let’s save this as an email template.
I’ll just call it new prospecting email.
And the next time I come in to start a subscription, I can just grab that email or grab any of my other ones. So I have those templates. So you do have the option to create an email template. If you use a template, you can always customize the template and I can put in, Hi, Kim. Customize that for Kim if I would like. Keep it short, direct to the point.
This email will also have a preview photo of the listing that she’s receiving as well as my contact information. So we’ll take a look at that in a moment and see what Kim would receive. So I’ve named it, set the schedule, set my email that goes out with every listing update, and then I click on save. Now two things just happened. Number one, you’ll see that I did get this pop up that says, would you like to email any of these listings now? And that pop up is just because the subscription goes from this point forward to eighteen my time forward. So if something comes on market or changes price or changes status to back on market because it was off market and it matches Kim’s search, Kim gets that update immediately because we set that to ASAP. But these thirty listings that already match her search, if I want her to receive those, I could manually email those listings or choose the listings I want to email. That’s why this pop up came. The other thing that just happened, I’m gonna click that x. Gonna come back over here.
Is Kim automatically received an email that asked her to opt in to receive listing updates. And so what that looks like, I’ll show you what Kim received in her inbox in just one moment, but Kim needs to confirm that she’s a real person who wants to work with me and receive updates. So the very first time I save a subscription for a contact, they do get that email. So let’s look. I’m gonna go into contact management, and we just added Kim. Here she is in my contacts list. And if I look at Kim’s record, I can always come in here and edit contact, give her a phone number, spouse, whatever it is, whatever notes I need to make. But as I look at the contact email for Kim, it has a status of pending. And that means I turned on the subscription updates, but she hasn’t said yes. I’m a real person. Please send me those updates. So this status will change to confirmed when she does that. So let’s take a look from Kim’s point of view. And you’ll see I changed my header color from that dark blue to a lighter green. So what I’m going to show on screen right now is what your contacts received. They received an opt in confirmation. When I turned on that subscription, they received an email. So let’s look. Now I set this up before class. This is Kim’s email inbox. You can’t see your clients inbox. I set this up just so we can see what Kim is receiving right now. So this is actually Kim. If you pretend right now, I’m Kim. I just opened my email. This would be from your name. Right now it just says Flexmls trainer rather than Josh Hernandez. But it would say your name via Flexmls. And when Kim clicks to open the email, would have your name, would like to email listings to you. Excited to be helping you meet your real estate needs. Click yes to send me listings. So and then it has your contact card. So this goes out just one time. Once click, Kim says, yes, please email the listings to me.
She’ll get a notification that as soon as listings match the search I’ve set up for her, then she’s going to receive those listing updates.
Now back in Flexmls, I’m just gonna move that off screen again.
Back in Flexmls, you’ll see Kim, her email address was pending. And if Kim says, oh, I never received that.
You can always manually resend that request that we just saw in her inbox. Maybe it went to spam or maybe she deleted it. We can always resend that right here with that action next to the status. But I’m just going to reload my contact management screen. And now when I click on Kim, you’ll notice that she was just in her inbox. We just saw we just pretended we were Kim. We were in the inbox. We said, yes, send me listings. And now that status is confirmed.
So Kim did receive that opt in confirmation and now she is getting updates. One last thing with the subscription. I’m gonna go to my menu.
And if you would like to see who is and is not receiving those updates, maybe you weren’t aware of how that opt in process worked.
There is on your menu under preference or under contacts, an opt in status report. I’m just gonna hover over that. I’m gonna pin that up to my favorites so you can remember what it’s called today. So it’s the opt in status report. I just pin that to my favorites, and it tells me who’s getting updates, who’s pending. I’d see any contacts here if they’re pending, how many days pending, I could resend that opt in. If it’s undeliverable, it tells me why. And then confirmed. Who’s getting the updates, And then you’ll see how many days until it goes inactive. If they never check that this is actually thirteen months. If they never check that subscription for thirteen months, they never open any of the listing updates. In that case, that will, go inactive in thirteen months. But actually, it keeps going and going and going. Every time Kim, for example, clicks to get those listing updates and she views an update, it extends thirteen months. So it can go indefinitely. And, unless they don’t check that for thirteen months, then it would go into inactive. And then I’ll see my inactives here. These contacts haven’t checked anything for over thirteen months. If they get those listing updates and they say I don’t want to receive updates anymore by law, they always have an opt out option. So you would see who is opted out there. Number one question for if they opt out, are you notified in any way? The answer is no. The only place you’ll see who’s opted out is in this opt in status report.
That’s the easiest, fastest way to see if there’s anybody who opted out. And you’ll see that on the summary page. Anybody who’s opted out in the last seven days would be right down here.
So the last thing I want to show you from Kim’s point of view is what does it look like when they’re getting listing updates. They’ll see a preview of the listing. They’ll see your contact information. So let’s take a look at that. Now Kim’s not getting any updates yet, but I did set up another contact, Megan, to receive a lot of very frequent updates. So I know her inbox is filled with these. So we’ll look at Megan’s in a moment. And then just click and look at what that interactive listing looks like. So I’m gonna come here. This is Megan’s inbox that I just brought to the front of my screen. And again, you can’t break into your clients inbox. I set this up beforehand. So this is Megan’s, and Megan’s getting updates. It looks like about every three or four minutes, I created a very general search for Megan just so we could look and see these listing updates. So when Megan comes into her inbox and clicks on something, this is the email that she received from me. So it has whatever we’ve called that listing the subscription name. The message I typed in for her is here as well. A preview of the listing, and if there’s this one, it matched price because it dropped in price to match her search. Shows the listing, shows the price drop in this case. There’s my contact information. So that’s the email I set up, and this goes out with every listing update. And then when Megan clicks to view the listing, she’s going to come to the interactive listing screen.
Now the nice thing about this interactive listing screen is that if Megan’s on a laptop computer or something like this, this is what it’s going to look like and she has the ability to see this, right here. But if she opens that up on a mobile device, this is optimized for whatever screen size they’re using. So it just opens up that listing. If she opened this up on her phone, then it goes into that mobile view. So she can go through all of the photos, click to view those full size, go into the description, the listing details. All of that is available here. And you’ll also notice there’s a little previous and next at the top. I’m gonna just close out from here. This lands in her news feed. The news feed I’m just gonna move this off to the side. The news feed is going to be all the previous listing updates that she received. So Megan does not have to, in this case, I’m gonna make this a little wider so we can see her inbox again.
Megan does not have to go and go through her inbox and scroll through to see all of the updates that she’s received. Maybe she wants to see the listing that I sent last Wednesday. She will always have those links here in her inbox. However, when she looks at any of those listings, I’ll click on another one. Click it right here. It will go to that listing, but it’s showing it. I’m gonna she’s just gonna close this in her news feed. These are all of the listing updates all in one place. So that subscription will always have the news feed available for it. So you do have that news feed in conjunction with the subscription. Now as Megan’s looking at these, she could always look at the details. She could click on the dots. You’ll see it says save and hide. She would actually have to log into the portal to use that functionality. So we can take a look at what that looks like as well because that kind of takes us to the next part here. We’ve set up the subscription. We talked about how they need to opt in once. We I showed you what it looks like in their inbox when they get the update, what the listings look like. So now let’s move into the second part of today, which is the client portal. Now the portal, like I said, it can work in conjunction with the Constrict subscription or independently. The subscription is always just going to be an email listing update opens up to an interactive listing. If they use the portal, they do need to sign in to the portal. They just need to sign up once for it. That will have their news feed, but it also gives more. Any search that I’ve saved for Megan, Megan can see that search with real time results. Megan can run her own searches and mark listings as favorites or remove them so they don’t appear in search results.
And so this is similar to what somebody does probably before they’ve reached out to an actual, Realtor or somebody in the real estate industry. And that is they’ve gone online to those third party sites like Zillow or Realtor dot com or something like that. They’ve created an account. They’ve made searches. They’ve saved favorites. And that’s very similar to what the portal does inside Flexmls. So if you explain that to somebody, they’ll say, oh, I’ve already signed up on this other app or other site. Why would they want to use your portal? Number one. It’s got two big key event advantages over third party apps that your prospects may have used previously.
And number one is real time listing data that’s direct from the MLS. There’s never any outdated listings. When I see a price change in Flexmls as an agent, when I log into Flexmls and see a price change, when my contact, Kim, for example, is in the portal, she will see the same price change at the same time. It goes out with real time information. There’s never any outdated listings. Number two, it they’ve already made contact with you. You’re already establishing a relationship and this connects them directly to you. They can message you from any listing. They can they have got questions. They can run their own searches. You’ll see what they’re searching for. You’ll see what they’ve marked as favorites.
So it is a way to strengthen that relationship and build that relationship that you already have started with that contact. So that’s why they would want to use your portal, direct line directly to you, and always up to date listing data.
Now, in order to get a contact into the portal, they do need to receive an invitation. And so since they need to log in, we’ll send a portal invitation. And I showed you when we were saving the search and added Kim as a brand new contact, there was an option that said, do you want to invite Kim to the portal when you’re adding her on the fly like this? But I said, I’ll do it later from contact management. So let’s do that now. Let’s go to Kim’s record. In contact management, I’m back in Flexmls. I’ll click on contact management and I’ll click on Kim and I’ll see on her contact card searches and subscriptions. Here’s the search that we made for her. We can always go in and edit that search if we need to. Here’s the subscription. But next to that is the portal. Now if the portal says off, you just need to turn it on.
Even if it already says on, but Kim’s not using the portal yet, you do need to take this second step here, which is coming down to the bottom and clicking invite to portal. Now there are individual portal settings that I won’t get into today, but I am going to circle back to that at the end because we do have upcoming additional training talking in more detail about portal settings. So for today, I’m going to keep it very simple and direct. We’ll just click on invite to portal. When I click on invite to portal, I can see see myself if I want to receive a copy of that invitation. I don’t need to. And then I’ve got my subject that I’m about to send to Cam. This message is already preprogrammed in for you.
You can modify it, but it is already in here for me. I’ll show you how you can get into or I won’t show you. We’ll actually show you next week. There is a webinar on portal preferences. So we’ll talk more about customizing that permanently if you would like. You could change that. But the nice thing about this invitation is it has a short video that shows Kim how to use the portal. It tells her that she can download an app version of the portal. So if Kim has an iOS device, an iPhone, or an Android device, she can actually download an app, with the portal. And the nice thing about the app rather than just the mobile website is if she’s using an iPhone, for example, she can get push notifications. So those listing updates don’t have to come out as an email. The app for iPhone, for example, will give push notifications so she’ll get that notification directly on her phone screen when a new listing comes in. So this just gives her that information. So I am going to just scroll to the bottom. I’ve got my business card in here. If I’ve got another one that you can change business cards here, but I’ll just send that to Kim. And now Kim has received an invitation to the app portal. So just to show you, what does your contact receive? Here is Kim’s inbox again and this is the email we saw first seventeen minutes ago, but now we have a portal invitation. That’s what we just sent just now. So when Kim is in her inbox and she clicks on this, she sees that email that we just sent to her.
She can watch the video. She can click sign up. And when she signs up for the portal, her username is her email address. It’ll ask. Now as Kim enters in this information, this is not shared with any third party sites or anything like that. So Flexmls doesn’t share that with anybody. So Kim creates a secure password. You won’t even know what your contacts passwords are. I’ll show you how you can see what they’re doing without using a password and breaking into their portal.
But Kim creates her own password, confirms that she’s a live person, and let’s see There we go. I must have mistyped passwords earlier. So now Kim is in her portal. Now I’m actually going to go into Megan’s portal because Kim’s portal is is a little bit lax right now. There’s not much going on inside here. So I’m going to move this off screen again.
And I’m going to just show you Megan’s portal because with Megan’s portal, here’s her inbox.
If she signs into her portal, so maybe Megan is looking at her news feed from her listing updates. I’m just gonna log in for Megan’s portal.
And when Megan is logged into her portal, you’ll notice she’s got this kind of expanded menu at the top. And what it’s probably going to look like, I’m gonna shrink that screen down, is like this because Megan is probably on a mobile device. And in the portal, there’s the news feed. So if she’s getting updates, still has the news feed from all of those automatic subscription updates. Agent saved searches. I’m gonna go click right here from news feed and go to the star section. And this is Megan’s saved section. These are searches that I, as an agent or member of the MLS, have saved for Megan. And it says she subscribed. So Megan sees she’s getting updates for these. She can see the search that I’ve created for her. She can see it in real time information right here. She can go view that on the map. She can look at quick statistics for that, see how many listings are in that current search, what the average list price is, that sort of thing. So I’m gonna come back here. She can also come in and she could modify that search. Now she can’t permanently change the search. This is the search that I saved for her. But maybe Megan comes in here and wants to change that list price that she’s looking at. So maybe she’s gonna start looking at million dollar listings.
And as she’s viewing those search results, she likes a listing. She’s in the details. She can save a listing. Oh, that one is already saved. Let’s go to another one here. See if this one’s already saved as well. This one not saved yet. So she’ll click save that listing. It’s been saved.
When she comes over here to her favorites, she’ll see the section down here for saved listings. And so that’s been placed in her saved listings. So she’s got access to being able to run her own search, see the searches that I, as the realtor she’s working with, have saved for her. And she can keep track of her favorites Or if she’s looking at listings, maybe she’s in her news feed, and looks at a listing and says, this listing, it’s not for me. I don’t need to see it in my news feed anymore. She can always click on the three dots and hide the listing. So then that gets removed right from here. It’ll become hidden. So the next time she comes back to her newsfeed, that listings not going to display in the news feed. It also will not appear in her search results anymore. So she’s got that ability really to track listings, run her own searches, track listings, keep track of listings from there, mark them as favorites, or remove them so they don’t show up in her news feed or save search results.
And everything that my contacts are doing inside their portal, I’m going to come here. Let’s go look at Megan’s record. Megan is at the top of my contacts. I’m gonna come back to this in just one moment. Contact management. So we’ll identify our most active contacts. We’ll look at the searches and subscriptions. We already saw that opt in report. And portals, we’ll look at the portal activity, see what they’re marking as favorites, hidden searches that they’ve run. And I’ve already shown you where to email that portal invitation. So from right here, in contact management, as I’m looking at the screen, you will see that my most active contacts by default come to the top of the list. This activity bar updates nightly. It’s after midnight. It’s probably like at one or two AM that this activity bar updates. So when I log in in the morning, I’m going to automatically see who’s clicked on the most listings in the past seven days. And that way I can begin planning my next steps as I’m looking at that contact activity. So let’s just click on Megan and I’ll click right here.
It brings up her contact card and I’m already on the activity. I’ll see the day she’s been clicking on listings, so I can see that activity here. Now that’s just a graphic representation. If I actually want to drill down and see which listings has she clicked on and how many times, I click on viewed listings and I see this one. She’s clicked on seven times, five times, three, and everything else is just once or twice. So as I’m trying to figure out, okay, I’m going to reach out to Megan today because I see she’s clicked on a lot of listing updates yesterday. I already know which ones she keeps going back to. And I can always click on the listing. It opened up in a brand new tab. And I can see okay, what is it maybe I can drill down, see what she’s looking at, look at the photos, pull up more information on that listing.
You’ll also see as I am here looking at the listing she’s clicked on, and it opened up.
I see Megan’s portal menu over to the left hand side. The searches I’ve saved for her, but if I want to say which listings has she marked as saved, just click on saved over on the left, and I’m going to see, oh, look at, she’s put three stars on one listing, two on this one. These others have one star on them. What listings does she not like? I can go into hidden. So if Megan’s using the portal, I see what she’s doing inside that portal. When I’m looking at the listings that she’s clicked on, you will also get the same thing. If I click on her portal tab right here, and I say, what are her saved listings? That takes me to the same screen where I have her portal menu on the left side of my screen. I can see right now I’m on saved. I can see all of her saved listings, So I get a good sense for what Megan has done and is doing inside the portal. I’m going to click this link, return to contact management.
And from here, very last thing that I’ll show is my sent emails. Sometimes people don’t look at their newsfeed and say, hey, you know that listing you sent me yesterday, and it was from a subscription. So you don’t remember sending it because the system sent it for you. And if you want to get in and say which listings did I actually send yesterday? Which ones did they open? You do have under your menu, my sent emails. I’m just going to type in the word email after I opened my menu. My sent emails. I’m going to put a star on that one as well. Just pin it up to my favorites. And here I see manual emails, emails that I’ve sent just one off as a manual email. But up at the top center of the screen, I can see the past ninety days of those automatic updates. So I’ll click subscription, and I see these are all of Megan’s updates that she has received.
You can type I’ve only got a few active contacts right now. But I could always type and come in and see has Mark received any updates in the past ninety days. These are the updates that Mark has received. And as I’m looking at that, I can see how many times they’ve been viewed in this view column. Now Mark doesn’t actually exist, so he’s not getting a lot. Megan, I’ve shown you what she’s received. We’ve been in her inbox. So you can see these are the ones that she did as we did as an example here. One listing clicked, one listing clicked. So when she clicked on it, the date, the time, how many times this view count will go up every time they go into that email and click to view it again, it goes increases. So you do have my sent emails. Just remember if you want the automatic subscription emails come to the center of the screen and click subscription. And then if you want to filter by a specific contact, just use that filter to the right of where you checked subscription.
Alright. That does take us to the end of today’s session. Just a nice general overview of how these things work. The subscription, we created the search, we saved it, and while saving it, we click the option for save and add the subscription. Turn on the auto emails. The portal, it’s a website where your contacts can view and keep track of listings. If they have a subscription, those subscription emails actually open up inside the portal once they’ve actually logged into the portal. They don’t get logged out of the portal if they’re using the same device to open up their subscriptions that they’ve already logged in on the portal. They’ll stay logged into that portal so they don’t have to keep logging in again and again and again. And then contact management. How can I see what they’re doing? One thing that I’d like to point out in contact management, I didn’t mention this, but when I look at the activity column, this activity and these number of clicks that we looked at, this aggregates all of the contact activity for listings that, in this case, Megan has clicked on. So whether Megan is in the portal and clicks on a listing, whether she just opened up the automatic update and never logged into a portal, doesn’t like to log into the portal, she’s just looking at the email subscriptions, It aggregates here as well. Or if I manually send a listing and I just send one listing here and one listing there as I come across them and I think Megan likes them. All of those clicks are combined into this activity. So this takes all of the clicks and puts them in one place. So the activity is not concerned about how they got to the listing. They just wanna know, or I just wanna know. It’s a listing that they received from me, and how many times did they click on.
And the very last thing is help resources. Now, if you’re not familiar with help in Flexmls, you do have the help option in the upper right corner. You can get help as you’re saving a subscription or search. You can click help with this page. If you like video training, you can go to the video library. You can click on Flexmls help, and you want help for subscriptions or portals, just type in what you’re looking for or see some of these pre made topics and get into that help that way. And the last thing I’ll point out here, or second to the last thing, there’s guided help. This is on screen help. So it’s not a video that you watch. It’ll actually point where you need to click on screen. So if you want it to take you through setting up listing updates, the subscriptions, you can do today’s class, and this will just walk you through the process. You just follow these on screen prompts. It’ll take you to start on a search like we did. Show me how to search. Show you how to save the search. It walks you through that process.
And the very last resource that we will conclude with today, as I click on help, the Flexmls Academy, I’m going to click on that. Now this is a one stop shop.
It has access to the Flexmls help screen, the video tips, but there is a section called, upcoming webinars. And I mentioned we’ve got a webinar coming next week for portal preferences, and that will be on November sixth at one PM. If you’re watching this in the future, you’ll be able to find this in the recorded trainings folder. This is going to be about a thirty minute class that takes a deep dive into some of the customizations that you can make with the portal. There are some new branding options that are being released very soon, so you can change your photo or your contact information in the portal. That will be covered here. The statuses that are allowed to stay in the news feed. All of the portal preferences and tweaks that you can adjust to make the portal that you use set up the way you want it, will be covered, and that will be next week. Now, again, if you’re watching this in the future, you’ll see other webinars advert advertised here. You can always sign up for those. I always recommend to people to sign up for the class. Even if you can’t attend, you’ll get a copy of that so you can watch it at your convenience.
And even if you lose that email because you always have good intentions, you can always look at the recorded trainings here in the Flexmls Academy and see all of those previously recorded classes as well. So that takes us to the end of today’s session. Now I am going to mute myself, but I’m going to take a look to see if there are any additional questions.
I know Ann and Amy have been answering questions quite, frantically. There’s a lot of attendees today, so, they have been answering those questions. So I want to thank you for attending and wish you a great rest of your day. Rest of the webinar will be muted as I check the questions. Thanks, and have a great rest of your week.
