Good morning, everybody. This is Josh Hernandez, and today’s webinar is going to be on preview mode while using subscriptions. And this allows you to send only the best listings or only the listings that you approve to your client. This will be a short webinar, about fifteen minutes, and we will record this. So if you have any problems with audio or video, just wait twenty four hours and we will send you that recording via email tomorrow about this time. Before we begin, as always, remember that there are a lot of people using the Internet right now. So if you have problems hearing, go to your GoToWebinar audio options and select the option for phone. That phone option will give you a number to call in as well as a PIN, and that oftentimes will provide better audio than your Internet audio is able to do. If you can’t see, make sure that you don’t have other browsers open that are streaming things like music or movies in the background. And if all else fails, remember it is being recorded, and we will send you that link in twenty four hours.
If you have any questions during today’s session, use your GoToWebinar control panel, type your questions into the question panel, and we have Amy and Anne on the line and they’ll be responding to your questions as we go throughout the presentation today.
Finally, today’s topics will cover what is preview mode, how do you turn preview mode on, and how do you approve and reject listings when you’re in preview mode. So we’ll start with the first one. What is preview mode? And as I mentioned at the beginning, it is a subscription, those automatic updates. But your contacts will not receive the updates until you approve the listings. So let’s go ahead. I’m going to change screens right now. And in just one moment, you should see my Flex MLS screen pop up. We’ll give it just a few seconds to switch over to that.
And now let’s go ahead and come in. My Flex MLS screen is up. I’m going to begin with an example of what preview mode looks like so we understand the functionality first. And then I’m going to show you how we can set it up and where you can access it, different places that you can access it. So I’m going to go to my inbox. This is an inbox and you can see my training account, Joshua Bloom. I’m getting a preview mode of a subscription that I created for several contacts a few days ago. So I have Erin with a subscription set to preview mode. I created a preview subscription for my contact Megan as well. And that’s this one that says general residential search.
So I get an email notification that there are new updates for listings that match somebody’s subscription, but they don’t get the email notification yet. Instead, I need to go in and approve or reject the listings to determine whether or not they receive it. So I’m going to click on my email and you’ll notice you get a preview of the listing and you have this box. This is only on my version of email because remember, Megan has not received this yet. It says click here to approve listings for Megan.
When I click on that, I am going to see, what looks like Flex MLS here, a search results screen. And I see that there are listings here that say approve or reject. So this is the most recent listing at the very top of my search results here. And Megan doesn’t get this in her subscription. Her subscription turned it up as a match, but until I click approve, Megan will never see that. So I can click approve and manually send that to Megan. And I can click here to approve. Now the email notification that she gets, we’ll look at what that is because that’s the subscription email notification that actually goes out with this. Or if I look at a listing such as five seven one six Wildflower Drive, I can also say reject, and that will remove that. So if Megan is using her news feed when she’s looking at these subscriptions, she won’t see anything that I’ve marked as rejected. She will, if she uses the portal, be able to see something called hidden by agent. But when she views her news feed or if she’s using the portal and looks at the search, she won’t see that in the newsfeed or within the search itself because I’ve rejected that. So again, I can click reject.
One other thing that you can do from here is I can look at listings and I can select multiple. When I have multiple listings selected, there’s an approve button at the top that is going to then approve all of those at the same time. One question that people often ask is, if I’m just approving these one at a time, does this go out as an email? And then I come and I look at this listing. Maybe I want to look at the photos before I approve it. And then I say, okay. Let’s approve this one, and I manually click approve. Do they each go out as separate emails? And it actually has about a ten minute delay. So as I’m looking at listings here, I can manually approve, approve, approve, and they’ll all be contained in one email. Or I can just make a check mark next to the ones that I want, and then I can click approve at the top of the screen. And it’s going to mark those three as approved, and then they’ll go out in one email to Megan as well. One other question that people sometimes have when they’re looking at this and they say, now I see a listing some of these listings here no longer have the approve or reject next to them. I’ve already approved them. They were already in that news feed.
Now maybe there’s been a price change or something on the listing that come at make it come back into the news feed, but these were already in the news feed or maybe turned up by one of her other searches that doesn’t have the preview mode turned on. So from here, how do I turn on that preview mode or turn off the preview mode for a contact? If they already have a subscription, I’m going to go into contact management in Flex MLS. Now I was just in my email inbox outside of Flex MLS for that notification, But you turn it on or off. For an existing contact, I can go to contact management and I can select a contact. Maybe I’ve got let’s see. Think Crystal has a subscription down here. I’m going to go to this contact, Crystal. Go to her searches and subscriptions. Oh, she doesn’t have one yet. Let’s go ahead. We’ll just add a search. I’m gonna select one of my premade searches just to show you. I’ll attach that to Crystal. On the subscription screen itself, when I click add a subscription, I select the search and I go in to add the subscription.
I can set my schedule. I can set the recipients.
The option to turn the preview mode on or off is right up at the top of the screen. Enable preview mode. By default, it’s off because it’s an extra layer of work.
This is something that would be ideal to turn on for a really active prospect that is very particular about what they’ll be receiving. I can create that preview mode subscription. So I was just a normal subscription, but I turn on preview mode by checking this box.
And that ensures that the recipient doesn’t receive anything until I approve those listings. And then I go through and select my schedule. The email content. Remember I said when I approve the listings, I have about a ten minute delay so I can approve them one at a time and look at them thoroughly before I mark them as approved.
When the listing email does go out after I approve it, it takes about ten minutes before it’s going to go out and they’ll all go out in one email. This is the email that they receive. Just like a regular subscription update email, this controls the content of that email. Here are new listings. Check them out. Let me know what you fit know what you think.
So you can put in whatever you want and customize that, of course.
Crystal, here are some fantastic listings. Take a look. Let me know what you think. I know they’re fantastic listings. I’m not exaggerating because I’ve gone through and I’ve looked at them. I looked at the photos. I looked at the details. I made sure that they’re exactly what Crystal is looking for before they’ll ever be sent to her. So when I click save and I’ve set up my subscription now, the preview mode is on.
Now Crystal’s an inactive contact, so I would have to just make sure she gets that opt in request for her subscription. She is an old contact, so she hasn’t used FlexMelest because she doesn’t really exist. That’s why it says inactive. She hasn’t been active for over twelve months or thirteen months is what that means.
Now I’ve got that subscription set up for Crystal.
And remember, I get the email notification first. She never receives the update until I get a notification. I go into that notification and click, and in this case, it’s Erin, but I would approve or reject listings on behalf of that particular contact. So I can come in, approve or reject.
If I want to change that, maybe I have preview mode on and I think, oh, that’s a lot of extra work. I didn’t realize that I was supposed be doing that. I just want Crystal to get these updates automatically. Go into the subscription itself.
On the contact record, go to searches and subscriptions, select the subscription, and just uncheck that box and click on save. So anytime I’m in that subscription screen where I edit the subscription or add the subscription, I have the option to turn that on or turn that off.
Lastly, how do I access that? For well, let me go back into contact management first. On a particular contact’s record, I’ve got Megan.
I can see on the details of the record that Megan has fourteen listings that have not been approved yet. So I can click this fourteen to access them right from here.
So I can see that on a particular contact record. Now I also showed you in my email inbox that I’m getting these notifications.
If I want that email notification, on the subscription itself, I’ll go to subscriptions, select Megan’s subscription. This is the one that has it turned on.
On the subscription itself, it’s automatically when I turn preview mode on, it’s automatically going to be sending it to me. So I get that notification automatically. That’s what turning it on does. The client doesn’t get it. I get it. So that’s on by default. Also, other places I can find that. So maybe you didn’t check your email. On your Flex MLS homepage, if you have a contacts gadget like I do right here, I can see a listings to approve column. If you don’t see listings to approve, go to your contacts gadget on your dashboard, click on those three dots, and go to settings. And these are the columns of information that are available for you. So I could say here actually, let me swap out. Be careful about don’t select all of these columns because the gadget’s not that wide, but I just wanna see favorites, last match, that’s the last subscription match, and then listings to approve. If you select multiple items from this list, just hold down your control key or command key if you’re using a Mac. When you’ve made the selections, click on save. And here I’ve got how many favorites they have in their portal, the last subscription match for their search, and then anyone with preview mode on has this column listings to approve, and I can see how many listings are there to approve. And click on that number, and it takes me directly to the approval page where I could approve or reject listings. So I don’t need to rely on that email. I can see that from the contacts gadget. The last place that that that this listings to approve is available, in contact management, I showed you it’s on an individual contacts record, like Megan. On the contact details, I can see listings to approve. And that’s going to be zero if preview mode is not on. There’s no listings to approve because they automatically go out and you don’t have to preview those. But this just lets me select the very specific listings I want that client to receive.
One other place you can see that is on my contact management page, I have specific columns of information.
Last active, listings to approve, last match, manual emails sent, manual emails viewed, saved listings so I can see anything that they’ve marked as a favorite. You can customize these columns of information. And that’s what I did to make sure I have my listings to approve column of information. It may not appear by default.
So in order to add that, if you don’t see it, on contact management, go to advanced in the upper right corner and then scroll down, customize contact list. This lets me select options like how does the contact’s name appear, last name first, display name, first name, last name, how they appear and are sorted. And then I see the columns of information and layout in the bottom half of the screen. Last active, subscription listings to approve. If you don’t see that there and you see it up here with a plus sign, that means it’s not in your list. Click. It gets added to the far right. You can just change the order and save changes.
And now you’ll have that section there, listings to approve.
And with that, I want to thank everyone for attending today. That’s a very specific information on the subscriptions. If you need more information on subscriptions in general, feel free to use the guided help. There are tutorials here or the video training library on just general subscriptions without preview mode. But preview mode is a great feature, not for all of your contacts, but for those who you want to have the final say before they ever receive those listing updates. It helps automate that process, but it still gives you final control over what they will and will not receive from their subscription. So not something you need to use with every contact, but definitely a great feature to have available to you for specific contacts that require it. With that, I want to thank everyone for attending today and hope you have a great rest of your after
