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The Initial Contact Wizard (ICW) is a guide for contacting new leads.
When you receive a new contact, the Contact Summary view displays a notification.
What is the ICW?
- Step by step instructions about how to make an initial contact phone call
- A pre-written email designed to drive them back to your website
- A backup system in case you are not able to contact your new contact within 12 hours
How to Use ICW
When a new contact signs up on your site, the Agent Dashboard displays their name in the New contacts list.
- Click the name of a New contact.
When viewing the contact summary page, you will see a message box at the top, which includes a link to open the ICW. - After reviewing the Contact Summary, click the Open the ICW link.
- If the contact provided a phone number, the ICW displays call scripts and suggested next steps.
- If they do not answer the phone or did not provide a number, choose an appropriate follow-up step.
If they did not provide a phone number, ICW displays a form email. Usually, you do not have to edit the message, but verify its accuracy and helpfulness based on what you know about the contact from perusing the summary. You can add or remove listings and make minor text edits to match contact requirements. Based on experience, top performing agents recheck every message and send them as soon as they can.
To send the email, click the Send button.
Customizing the Automatic ICW
If you do not use the ICW or change the contact status to something other than New within the first 12 hours, Market Leader sends the message automatically.
If you would like to customize the message that goes out automatically, you may do this by selecting Email Settings from the Profile Admin Drop-down Menu. Then click on Templates from the links on the left.
Scroll down to the Initial Contact Wizard template. You can make your edits and save them there. If you decide to revert back to the default text, click the link that says view default ICW text here and copy and paste the text back in and save.
Default ICW Text:
I wanted to touch base and see how your home search is going. Did you come across anything interesting?
Our home alerts feature will let you know about homes for sale the same time I hear about them. Please let me know if you need help signing up for your targeted home alerts.
My phone number and email are below if you need to get in touch. Have fun searching!
Useful Tips
- Do not copy and paste text from Microsoft Word to form email. Microsoft Word does not adhere to common HTML standards, so copying and pasting formatted text from Word can cause unexpected results.
- Using the Enter key to add a new line to your signature will result in " " appearing instead of the symbol for a new line. Typing Shift+Enter when you want a new line will prevent this from happening
The ICW, or Initial Contact Wizard, is a streamlined guide for contacting new prospects. When you receive a new contact, the Contact Summary view displays a notification.
When a contact signs up on your site the system sends a welcome message to the contact with login information so that the contact can return to the site and view their saved information. It is up to the agent to make first contact after a contact signs up. The ICW is a user friendly resource for helping you make that first contact with your new prospect.
According to NAR, there is a 72% success rate of turning a web contact into a client if live contact is made within the first hour after the contact's visit. After 4 hours, the chance drops to 29%.
Market Leader recommends that you contact at least 90% of your contacts within 12 hours. Market Leader calculates your response time across all your new contacts and reports it in Performance Evaluator.
The ICW is a guided step-by-step tool to help facilitate a better conversion rate for the agent.
The ICW is located directly above the Contact Summary page for 12 hours after the lead registers on your site.
Although the ICW is an optional process, it is highly recommended in order to facilitate higher lead conversion. If you opt to make contact in another fashion, it would be important to complete the process to mitigate the automatic follow up email from being sent out 12 hours after registration.
Golden rule: Use the ICW as often as possible and consider it a tool to help you turn a lead into a live contact.
However, there are times when the ICW may not present a perfect follow-up solution. What you may notice in these scenarios is the following: there may not be enough home inventory within the average price range gathered at the time of registration (your contact has viewed all of the homes - remember, the ICW shows only the homes NOT already viewed). Therefore, the ICW won't pull in any homes for you to send to your contact.
When this happens you can still send the ICW out to your contact. Just change the message text by typing a new message in your own words. A spell checker is included as part of the ICW user interface. Before sending your message, be sure you have checked the box to change your contact's status from "Lead" or "New" to "Retry".
If you change the status of your contact before launching the ICW, the ICW will be gone. Once it's gone, your initial follow-up rating among your new contact will not be tracked. However, the contact and all of the information originally captured at the time of signup on your website will be left intact.
If our call center reaches your contact prior to you having a chance to launch the ICW, the ICW will remain available. The regular ICW rule applies: ICW is available on all contacts upon registration until exactly 12 hours have lapsed since your contact's initial registration.
The ICW does not appear on contacts that have been imported or manually entered. For all other website, new contact registrations the ICW will be available for up to 12 hours after the contact registers on your website.
As a rule, the ICW doesn't differentiate property types. It will suggest all property types within the chosen price range.
You have a number of options at your disposal:
- Set reminders for continued follow-up via email, or phone. Just check your site regularly to respond and complete your reminders.
- On a daily basis, review your website's Recent Activity to see which contacts have logged back and in and review which properties they have reviewed.
- Utilize the campaigns that are included in your Market Center to assist you with converting your contacts.
- Be sure to put your contacts on listing alerts
- Use the Market Insider to assist you with lead conversion by providing your clients with comparative demographic detail on a zip code-by-zip-code basis.
Yes, you can edit the default ICW as well as on a one-off basis.
Professional users
The ICW will remain available for up to 12 hours. If you do not utilize the ICW to complete the initial follow-up with a new contact nothing will happen.
Business Suite users
The ICW will remain available for up to 12 hours. If you do not utilize the ICW to complete the initial follow-up with a new contact within 12 hours you will not be credited with sending the initial follow-up response to your new contact.
What is the impact? The initial follow-up ratings of all agents are tracked and displayed on the broker dashboard of Business Suite. Your broker may refer to this information for business decision data to assist with managing your brokerage and making impactful business decisions. Therefore, it is important to send the ICW out for all new contacts.
No, your follow-up rating cannot be reset.
By adjust the property prices and features you can adjust the number of properties from which you can select to include your outbound email to your contact. Increasing the price variance from + or - $10,000 to one of the other price variance options and clicking "Update" will return more properties. Once your list of properties has been expanded select your desired properties by clicking on the radio button to the left of the property and then click, "Add Selected Listings".
The area displayed as "interested in" on your contact's profile and shown within the ICW is determined based on the homes viewed upon registration of your contact. This area is the city location of the last home viewed at the time your contact registers a profile on your website.
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