Best Practices for Importing Leads

Every lead provider is different, and this articles covers how to set up common ones for the best experience.

Matt avatar
Written by Matt
Updated over a week ago

Importing leads is a really easy process in LeadSimple. You can find full instructions on the different ways of doing this below.

But this article covers the best practices for importing leads from a few sources that can cause issues if not set up correctly.

Your Website

Most property managers get a lot of their leads from their website, and it's easy to set this up by following the instructions for importing leads directly from the source.

The only things to note are:

  • You may need to contact your website manager to configure this if your website is managed by a third party.

  • Sometimes, you may find that leads import into LeadSimple with some of their information missing. For example, the name or the property address might not be pulled in correctly the first time. We can fix this easily with a parser update on our end.

Thumbtack

Leads can also be imported from Thumbtack using the normal method. However, there is a catch.

When you are contacted by a lead on Thumbtack, you'll receive a notification email. Normally, you would want to forward this email to the unique LeadSimple email address LeadSimple generates for you (see the import instructions above). However, that email does not include the lead's contact information, because Thumbtack encourages their users to follow up with the lead using their system.

This means there is not a good reason to put the lead in LeadSimple until you have collected their email address and phone number through the Thumbtack chat.

Our Recommendation

Create a source called "Thumbtack" in LeadSimple, under Settings > Pipeline Settings > Sources. Every time you receive a lead from Thumbtack, first collect their email address and phone number and then manually enter them into LeadSimple, selecting "Thumbtack" as the source.

Yelp

Yelp leads are best imported using an email forwarding rule from your email client.

Many sources will allow you to add multiple email addresses to send new leads to. This makes it easy to save the unique email address from LeadSimple as one of those "to" email addresses that will receive new lead notifications. However, this is not the case with Yelp.

  1. Yelp only allows you to add one "to" email address to receive new-lead notifications. This email address is always the one you use to log into Yelp.

  2. On the new-lead notification emails from Yelp, Yelp supplies a unique reply email address for every lead. This is NOT the lead's real email address, but it will route any of your emails to the lead through Yelp. This is almost always the first way you will communicate with Yelp leads.

  3. However, in order for your emails to route to the unique reply address assigned to the lead by Yelp, you must send those emails from the same email address you use to log into Yelp. Otherwise, your emails will not be delivered to the lead.

Our Recommendation

For the best experience in LeadSimple, this is how you should set up the Yelp integration.

  1. First, do not use the unique source email address supplied by LeadSimple to log into Yelp. This will cause your email replies to new Yelp leads to not be delivered. Instead, use your work email address to log into Yelp.

  2. Next, create a Yelp source in LeadSimple (Settings > Pipeline Settings > Sources) and copy the unique email address for that source.

  3. Set up an email forwarding rule that sends new Yelp leads to the unique source email address that you just created in LeadSimple.

  4. Lastly, make sure that the email account you have connected to LeadSimple is the same email address that you use to log into Yelp. This will ensure that the emails you send from LeadSimple will be delivered to your Yelp leads. See instructions for connecting your email account here.

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