Ylopo CMO & Co-Founder Juefeng Ge demonstrates Ylopo’s integration with BoomTown and how agents and teams can utilize it to have a complete digital marketing platform.
[00:00] Overview of the Ylopo-BoomTown integration
We integrate through BoomTown via a platform called Real Synch.
If you want to integrate any other piece of technology to BT, you pretty much have to use the Real Synch as the intermediary platform.
There are structural limitations to what we can do on the BT site, that is, limitations that we have for the integration.
BoomTown was not designed from the get-go to be integration-friendly. It’s been a platform that’s been around for a decade, so it has quite a few *corks and ways that you have to work around the system.
Ylopo’s integration with BoomTown is continuing to improve.
There’s one major improvement coming up that will make substantial difference to how your BoomTown experience looks. We’re continuing to work with BT, continuing to work with real estate, to try to *dial in the integration as much as possible.
Ylopo’s integration with BT is as good of an integration as any other integration partner of theirs. We’d really pushed the boundaries of what we can do, but obviously, there are still some areas that can be improved and will be improved overtime.
[01:32] Key features, improvements, and upgrades of the Ylopo-BoomTown integration
If you’re in BoomTown, you have been generating leads for a while and you typically have a large lead database. And you’re coming to Ylopo for new lead generation, but also, more clients are participating in a re-marketing perspective.
For example, Ylopo client Brian Kim had 50,000 leads in his system. Once you clicked on the “Advanced Lead Filters” section on the left side of the BT dashboard, scroll down to the “Lead Activity” section. Look at the “Last Visit” and see how many people have come back to the client’s website “In the last 4 weeks.” Click “View Results” and you are left with 2,000 leads. You’ve got 50,000 leads on your database, and only 2,000 of them have come back to do anything on your home search website. The reason for this is that BoomTown, for all intents and purposes, primarily nurtures their leads via email, email listing alerts.
For email listing alerts, Ylopo is doing something very different that can get clients higher engagement rates.
But because BT is not doing dynamic re-marketing at the level that we are doing, with email marketing, the challenge is that you can’t keep sending emails over and over again if someone is not opening them.
So after a certain number of people who don’t open their email alerts, as a responsible system you are going to stop sending them emails in order not to affect deliverability of the rest of the emails that you’re sending.
When you stop sending out emails, that is what is called “sunset”, which means this person is now no longer receiving any communication. If you have a database that has built up over years and years, your database is gonna look a lot like Brian Kim’s database where only less than five percent of your leads are still engaging on your contact. This is why you need a system like Ylopo, with our dynamic re-marketing and the rest of the things we’re doing, to warm up those leads in your database.
So go through your system, do the same sort, see what you see, and this will give you some confidence of why you need an additional enhancement to what BT is already doing for you in order to get the most out of your database.
[05:13] What new leads look like:
In order to see all of your Ylopo leads, go to Advanced Filters, go down to Lead Sources, and then click Ylopo.
The other thing about sorting these new leads is, when we generate a lead we not only send it over as a Ylopo lead. We also will define for you if it is a Buyer or Seller. Just go into the Ylopo Lead section, put in ☐Buyer, and it’s going to show you the leads that are buyers. If you go and put in ☐Sellers, we are going to show you the number of leads that are seller leads. You can do both, which is what most people do, but understand you can also micro-segment between buyers and sellers so you can see the proper leads that you are looking for.
Once you have isolated all of your Ylopo leads, what most people do is sort out by the last Registration date so you can get all the leads that are actually registered. If you click on one of those leads, it will show the typical path of what a lead looks like.
As soon as there’s a lead that Ylopo generated for you and delivered into your system, it’s gonna pass through all the contact information of the lead. In the Note section, we’re going to drop in a Registration note of everything we have about that person or particular consumer. This is to give you a pinned note that allows you to see what’s going on with this particular lead and highlight the Stars link, and then go into our Ylopo backend.
When a new lead first comes in, we’re not only going to drop off that top note in there but also drop in a Registration note. On this Registration note you’re going to see things like: if this lead is a buyer, if it came from Facebook, their timeframe, their buyer stage.
The labels “home_buyer1” or “home_buyer2 mean” are more for internal grading to tell us if we are generating a buyer or generating a seller, if the person needs financing or if they’re a renter. Obviously, for any renters we’re scrubbing out that data. For home_buyer2, it means they’re looking for a condo. Home_buyer1 means they’re looking for a single-family home.
We also give you the general age range. And then we’re gonna provide you a quick summary of who this lead is and what did they click on in order to get to your website. The summary for this particular lead is: this is a standard home buyer, so they’re just looking for a standard home; they responded on the market in 60 days listing rocket, so this is actually a Listing Rocket for one of your properties. And this is an ad that is running for over 60 days on the market-type advertising.
The Registration note also includes the average price point of what the person looked for, and there is a link to Ylopo Stars to be able to edit all of the alerts and all this kind of stuff that’s coming out from the experience.
Then we send a Priority notification to you because they have done something significant on the website. From these insights, you can go ahead and call that person.
When we drop a Priority note into your system, we are also going to send the assigned owner of the lead in email. It’s another way that you can access Priority leads.
Once a lead has been a Priority lead, we’re going to drop that listing as a Note in here as well because we want you to be able to stay within your BT system while being able to contact this person.
Once the person completed their session, we are going to automatically start texting this lead. You can see a drip text sent at a particular time, sent through as a note. If the person didn’t react or didn’t do anything after the text, in the next couple of hours Ylopo will send another drip text. We drop in something that is of immediate value to the consumer, e.g. of some other listings that are similar to the ones that they showed the most interest in. At this point, the consumer replies to the text. We are texting back and forth with the lead, getting more information about the person. And every single text that we send out to the consumer is dropped in as a note. If they reply, we will drop in another note with what we sent and what we reply.
With a lot of Notes, it can get a little bit confusing, but it’s at least in a linear fashion so you can see everything that’s going on.
What’s great about the conversations that are happening is, once a lead has actually gone to the stage where this person has engaged with you enough that you should call this person yourself, we will generate a Priority Lead notification to you again: “Ylopo Urgent Priority Lead, Ylopo AI has engaged [Lead Name] and they need follow up.”
In summary: When a new lead comes in, we send you a Registration Note with a Stars link. If they do something significant, we’re gonna send you a Priority notification. If they do anything around a listing that is significant, like favored a property, request a showing, share a listing with their spouse, we’re going to drop in that listing directly in as a note as well. And with the link to the property so you can see exactly what that looks like. Within a couple minutes of them finishing their user session, we’re going to start sending text messages on your behalf. Every single time we send a text message, we’re going to first send the actual message we send out. After that, we’re going to send you their actual reply to that message. And all of these conversations are captured as Notes. If at the point they have engaged enough, we’re gonna send you another Priority notification that you should be engaging with this buyer or seller.
All of that information is going to appear for new leads in your system.
[14:00] Ylopo Listing Alert vs BoomTown Listing Alert
Once a lead has been engaging, or even if they haven’t engaged and you’re calling through the system, a lot of clients say, “Okay, well at this point this lead is in the BT system, I’m gonna go into BoomTown, go to the Properties tab or Searches tab, and I’m going to “Send an invite” to get them up on an e-alert within the BT database.” There’s no problem if you want to do that. But you can also click on the Ylopo Stars link, go into Ylopo and do the same thing. But here’s why you want to do that.
Here’s what a BoomTown Listing Alert looks like and the precise science of listing alerts. First off, BoomTown’s not gonna be doing dynamic marketing to a lead, showing your ad on Facebook and Instagram, etc. That’s what Ylopo specializes in. But even something as simple as setting up e-alerts is one of the things you have to pay attention to because this is another communication channel with us particularly.
At the very top of a BoomTown Listing Alert, you’re going to get all information about the person that this alert is designed for. The format may look visually appealing to the agent, but it has two negative consequences to you from a listing alert perspective. First, just from a content perspective, the consumer doesn’t care. They’re in it to see content so they wanna see the listings at the bottom. So just because you’re putting all the content at the top, from what it appears on the screen when you click on an ad perspective, the consumer is gonna have to scroll down in order to see the content they’re actually interested in. The second problem is that platforms like Gmail, Yahoo!, and other platforms that you use have gone really smart about filtering content into one of these tabs: Primary, Social, Promotions, Forums. If your content appears in one of the secondary folders, your chance of getting that content viewed dropped by 80 percent.
So when we talk about email listing alerts, we’re always talking about inboxing—getting the listing alert into a place where it actually gets the consumer to view it. And that means getting into their Primary tab so that they can see that content. You do that by making your content on an email listing alert very dynamic. Listings are dynamic, so the more listings you have, the more dynamic content you have and it’s going to “inbox” more.
The top of every listing alert from BT is identical from one listing alert to another. That makes it extremely easy for Gmail to say it is a repeat content so it’s going to drop it to the Updates tab or into the Promotions tab.
There’s two obvious negative implications to this listing alert. There’s actually a third, and this one probably makes the biggest difference in terms of if you’re going to get your listing alerts read by the consumer and how much engagement you’re gonna get, which is that you have to make sure your listing alerts are mobile-optimized. Right now, seven out of 10 people who open up a listing alert are doing so from mobile. So if your listing alert isn’t mobile-friendly, isn’t mobile-optimized, you are losing out on a huge amount of your traffic.
See what happens with your listing alert when you make the screen smaller – what exactly it looks like on mobile. You are seeing what the experience will look like on Gmail when you are in a mobile environment. With this listing alert, because Gmail does not, like a Google website, make an experience what’s called “responsive.” Meaning if you are on mobile view, you see a listing alert one way; if you’re on desktop, you see a listing alert another way. As a result, all of the content of the listing alert is scrunched together. If you are on your phone, you can barely make out anything because it’s not just optimized for mobile.
On the Ylopo Listing Alert, we’re going to still put in contact information, put in some dynamic elements of the search, give them a “Opt Out” right away so that they can opt out if they want to instead of actually wait for them to press the Spam button. We get straight to the point showing them all the listing content, a lot more photos, and make very clear call-to-actions. We’re giving you all of this dynamic content and your branding is going to be at the very bottom of the screen. It means there’s very little repeatable content that is going into this listing alert, as opposed into what you’re doing in BT.
We have a much higher deliverability rate, much higher open rate, and as a result, much higher engagement rate.
A comment that can be heard over and over again is that: “Okay, fantastic, I’ve generated a Ylopo lead, I’m gonna go and bring this lead into the BoomTown experience just because I’m more familiar with it.” When you do that, you are losing some major advantages of what a listing alert should look like in the modern age.
Ylopo Listing Alerts still looks great in mobile—huge photos, great CTAs, everything looks linear. Ylopo designed it specifically with mobile in mind to make sure that all of this looks fantastic and that it’s going to get you the highest engagement.
[21:05] Other Tips:
With leads that come from BT, if a lead has engaged in the BT environment, you should engage them on BT. But if a lead came through Ylopo, we’re texting that lead, we’re doing all that kind of stuff from the Ylopo platform, to then move that person into the BT environment, not only are you losing some connectivity in terms of the usability of the two systems but also, you’re frankly degrading the type of alerts that you’re sending out as well.
What is recommended is to leave the listing alerts in Ylopo, let all the nurture happen, so you can get the best of that technology.
If a new lead comes in and there’s a Ylopo Stars link, click on that Ylopo Stars link so you can go into our backend. There’s a couple of things that you want to look out for. At the very top, we give you a summary of what’s going on with that particular lead. The next most important thing is the Lead Message Inbox, where you can see all of the conversations that Ylopo had with this particular person. If you go into the message thread and text a particular lead, it’s going to come from the Ylopo AI (formerly rAIya) phone number. So if the consumer is used to talking with Ylopo AI, or you want to set yourself up for an appointment but appear that your assistant is doing so, all you have to do is type the message within the Stars environment and it is going to through them from the phone number of the assistant. The Lead Message Inbox is one the most important parts of the Stars experience.
If you want to get some intelligence about what has this person done, the equivalent is to the Properties tab in BT, you just need to scroll down to the page and Ylopo is going to show you in a linear fashion all of the listings this person has viewed when they’ve logged in. After that, we started texting this person homes that they’re interested in. The consumer clicked on every one of the properties sent out to them, and viewed properties or rental service. You can even see a history of every listing alert Ylopo sent the person to see what they viewed, what they’re interested in, etc.
Would you need to shut off BoomTown e-alerts for all leads? No, absolutely not. Ylopo-generated lead and Ylopo remarketed lead are all happening through Ylopo. What that means is unless you manually set up an e-alert in BoomTown for a particular lead, they’re not gonna do it for you. So you just let, especially for a Ylopo-generated lead, everything to sync. Ylopo is going to continue sending them email alerts based on what they’re doing in a dynamic fashion. And you are going to be able to see all those notifications in BT. It isn’t recommended to turn off any e-alerts in BT because, first off, only five percent of your leads are engaging with your listing alerts over time, anyways. The chances are, if it’s a priority lead that we provide, there’s frankly not giving your BT emails the same alerts, anyways.
Keep in mind that NAR research has shown that the average consumer views five different listing alerts from all the different sources—Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, etc. if you get two listing alerts to the consumer, you’re taking up two slots in their overall awareness. And that’s not a bad thing.
And especially since Ylopo’s Listing Alerts and BoomTown’s Listing Alerts look very different, you’re giving the consumer an opportunity to choose which type of listing alerts they engage in. If they start engaging in one and they don’t engage in the other, over time, the platform that “loses” the engagement of the consumer is going to stop sending out emails. Just let the system take care of itself. It isn’t recommended for a Ylopo lead to separately set up an e-alert inside BT because that is going to be taking away some of the power of the Ylopo system.
[27:08] Saved Searches and Listing Alerts Section
If you see something in green in the first block, it is the Listing Alert that Ylopo had set up for the consumer on your behalf. As soon as a new lead comes in, Ylopo is going to set them up with a Search Alert. If you want to edit the Listing Alert, click on the Edit button to be able to see all of the search parameters for that person. You can type in the location of the alert that you want to create or add to the consumer. Ylopo is editing the search based on what the person has done. If you have a couple of cities that are your favorites or cities that you work in the most, Ylopo is going to include that in the Favorite Cities section. You can also handpick all the locations you want to see via checkboxes. You can also draw a shape on the map if you want to show the person homes that are in a particular location. There are a lot of different options for you to define your search, and all of the options can be combined together: Map search, Location search. There’s also the Price Range, Bed, Bath—all the standard things that you might be focused on.
The Amenities section could be based on what you selected during your set-up process. There’s the Featured Amenities, which are amenities that are searched very often. You could also click on All Amenities, where everything that Ylopo had programmed from the MLS is going to appear. If you don’t see something that you want, just email support@ylopo.com and Ylopo will add it for you. We just don’t want to code up all the MLS because there’s a lot of irrelevant fields in there, so we’re just waiting for you to request the field that you’re interested in and we’ll set that up. You can also change the frequency of the alerts: instant, daily, weekly. It isn’t recommended to use the “Instant” unless it’s a person that you know wants to get instant alerts. The reason is that they’re gonna get flooded with the emails and if they don’t open them, there’s a chance that you’re gonna get “sunset”. There’s a lot of automation that’s happening that you don’t have to worry too much about, but the default is “Daily” and we move between “Daily and Weekly”. Ylopo’s system is going to automatically calibrate when to send alerts based on the actual map of what they’re doing, so you don’t want to be too prescriptive.
You can also add a spouse or something else as a CC Email.
[30:53] Setting Up Seller Alerts
If there’s no Seller Alerts set up, you can click on “Create A Seller Alert” at the top. They operate either at the zip code level or at the address level, or you can give both. You can then set up the Alert Settings, such as setting it up to Active and changing the Frequency. On the Seller Alert side, you have four options (Weekly, Bi-weekly, Monthly, Quarterly) because you have a lot of folks that are probably past clients.
Setting up a Seller Alert is so important and awesome because we are sending out a very unique alert to all of your sellers.
In the Seller Alert we’re sending out, we’re giving the consumer a Market Competitive Analysis on their zip codes.
All of the data that are market trends-based comes from a platform called Altos Research, the premier provider of market trends data in the industry. Ylopo has licensed and white-labelled all of that for you.
And just like with Buyer Alerts, Ylopo realized all the consumer wants is actual listing content, which also makes the listing alert unique. We feature all great listings so they can see all the dynamic content that’s associated with it.
If you click on any of the options in the listings, it’s going to take you into the Seller Experience that Ylopo built out for you on your behalf.
The Seller Experience includes: market trends, how many buyers in your database are actually interested in the home that you’ve just sent out, a unique primary CTA to schedule a private showing, additional CTAs, additional market trends widgets, and other properties that are immediately impacting their home price.
Seller Alerts is a feature that not enough clients use but is really powerful and highly recommended.
[34:28] Creating A New Search Rather than Editing an Existing Search:
If you edit the Search and Listing Alerts, it will no longer be dynamic.
Only edit a Listing Alert if you have talked to the consumer and they told you they’re specifically looking for homes in a specific area. You might want to adjust the listing alerts to reflect that. But if you haven’t talked to them, just let the system do its work by not adjusting the listing alerts.
If you want to set up a secondary alert based on a conversation you had with them or you decided to make it more custom based on their search, just click the “Create New Search and Listing Alerts” button.
If you think two listing alerts means it’s going to flood the user and that’s going to confuse them, it’s the same logic as sending out a BT Listing Alert and a Ylopo Listing Alert at the same time. When you send out two listing alerts, we are going to read what the consumer is doing. We’re gonna let the consumer decide which of these content they’re most interested in and use that data to calibrate what we’re going to set up.
[36:02] Push Listings
Push Listing is where you actually select a number of listings you want to send out because you think the consumer will be interested in those listings.
In sending a listing, you have two options: you can either send out an email push listing or click “Generate Textable Link” where we are going to generate a link that you can send out to the consumers. Once you copied the web address, you can then either text that person via Ylopo AI or within BT.
[37:28] Other Tips:
Seller Alerts also work in non-disclosure states that don’t disclose sales price. If you don’t have any Recently Sold Properties because it’s a non-disclosure state, Ylopo is going to automatically show them Under Contract Properties associated with their location or Active Listings.
When it comes to BT, new leads are fairly obvious. But it’s just as important for you to be working your Priority Leads and see all the leads that are coming through. On the BT site, you can do that via Tags.
YPRIORITY - every single lead that is a priority lead is going to have a YPriority tag.
One of the issues of the BT integration that doesn't have a fix yet is that there is no option for you to see the leads that are the most recent priority leads. The only filter that you can use to look at the leads that have been most recent is Last Communication. Because of this, you will have some level of sorting issues because there’s a lot of noise in the communication section.
HANDRAISER - a lead that has requested a showing or info on a particular listing.
The most important tags to look at are New Ylopo Leads, Priority Leads, and the Handraiser tag.
What could be the biggest frustration with BT is the fact that you can’t accurately sort by the Priority notifications, the AI conversations, and others.
BT has recently opened their API to allow us to drop in tasks as it relates to leads, and assign those tasks to an agent.
Automation is already built out for you to automatically get leads from the BT system, and we will then re-market to them and do AI, etc.