Have you ever read someone’s mind?
We haven’t, but we sometimes think CRM companies like IXACT Contact can and do read minds.
How else would they come up with a CRM/IDX website package that solves so many of the pain points Realtors have, including pre-written content, at such a fair price?
Psychic or not, if you’re looking for a CRM/IDX website package or just want to stay in the loop, grab a cup of coffee and a comfy seat and let’s kick the tires a bit to see if IXACT Contact lives up to the hype.
What is IXACT Contact Exactly?
Founded in 2007 and a sister company of Morris Real Estate Marketing Group (founded in 1927!), IXACT Contact is a real estate CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system that offers lead organization, bulk emailing, marketing automation (digital AND print), and a custom IDX property search website for an affordable price.
How Much Does IXACT Contact Cost?
We’re glad you asked. In fact, their pricing was one of the main reasons we decided to write this article.
Since they’ve (wisely) decided to offer features a la carte, there’s a lot of detail here. That said, there is one truly amazing number that stopped us in our tracks when we heard it.
Any Agent Licensed for Less Than One Year Gets Six Months of IXACT Contact for FREE.
Okay. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, and probably lost half our audience in the process, let’s take a look at what IXACT Contact costs after the first six months, or if you’re an experienced agent:
IXACT Contact CRM/Website Pricing
| Basic Version | $33 per month (billed Annually) |
| Teams Version | Team Leaders: $33 per month Team Members: $23 per month |
| Broker Program | Custom Pricing |
| Website | Included (No IDX) |
| Website Domain Registration | $24 per year |
IXACT Contact IDX Websites Pricing
| Website | Included (No IDX) |
| IDX (Basic) | +$13 per month |
| IDX (professional) | +$33 per month |
| One Time IDX Setup Fee | $65 |
IXACT Contact Social Stream (Done for You Social Media Content) Pricing
| $20 per month |
IXACT Contact Mass Email Pricing
| 1,000 Emails | $10 |
| 2,500 Emails | $20 |
| 5,000 Emails | $30 |
| 10,000 Emails | $50 |
| 25,000 Emails | $100 |
| 50,000 Emails | $150 |
Ease of Use: Is IXACT Contact Easy to Use?
Yes, yes it is. In fact, we found the layout on the dashboard very intuitive and easy to understand. Instead of using weird proprietary names for their tools, we get what we expect. Business Pipeline. Task List. Calendar. Mass Email. Letters & Labels. Etc.
If you do get confused, they offer top shelf onboarding and training geared toward people who are new to IXACT Contact or CRMs in general.
Getting Started With IXACT Contact: Onboarding
Onboarding is one of those things that even great real estate CRM companies tend to get wrong. Some think a few tool tips or hints is enough to get someone with limited tech skills started. Others just throw their users to the wolves and expect them to just figure it out.
What we loved about IXACT Contact is that they offer in-depth, easy to follow onboarding that even your least tech savvy Realtor will be able to follow.
Here’s how it works:
When you first log in to IXACT Contact, you’re greeted with a popup with several options. You can email IXACT your contacts and have them add them to your CRM, you can register for a Quick Start Webinar, or check out introductory tour videos.
If you’re feeling adventurous, you can cancel the popup and just dive straight in to using the software, which is exactly what we did.
What’s even nicer is that they have a “tell me later” option on the popup for people who (ahem) tend to immediately throw away instructions for everything they buy… Then, of course, have to either dig through the trash or look online when they can’t figure something out.
Next Steps: Getting to Know Your Dashboard
The dashboard is your main staging ground for everything you need to do with your CRM. This is what you’ll be presented with every time you log into your CRM in the morning. That means layout, design, and general aesthetics of the dashboard is crucial for any good CRM.
Imagine if you had a piece of software that worked great, but was just… ugly and clunky. How long would you keep using it? If you’re a Team Leader or Managing Broker, how many of your agents would keep using it?
Customizable Dashboard is Designed for Functionality, But Still Looks Great
Like almost all good CRMs, IXACT Contact gives you a navigation bar on the left and key metrics and tasks in the middle. For example, IXACT Contact’s default dashboard layout puts your tasks and appointment for the day front and center, your contacts to the right, and your pipeline, prospecting, and business activities below that.
Makes sense, right? This is the basic order that most agents prioritize their day around. Even better, IXACT Contact has them in basically the right order. After all, how many agents do you know who start cold calling first thing in the morning?!
If you do happen to be one of those people who (god forbid) likes to cold call first thing in the morning, you can easily customize your dashboard. Likewise, you can reorder if you’re running an email drip you want data on every morning, or anything else that helps your workflow.
Contacts: Custom Fields, Social Intelligence, + More
The Contacts tab works exactly like you’d expect it to. You can add, sort, or prioritize contacts, or create custom fields to sort by like favorite baseball team, or whatever you can use to connect with them.
Even better, IXACT Contact scours the web for social media accounts every time you add a new contact. While this might seem a little silly at first, just think how valuable that information might be for a hot lead. Did they just tweet about the Red Sox game? Well, now you have a talking point that they will surely respond to.
Marketing Tools: Mass Email, Automated Marketing Plans, Letters & Labels, + More
Along with a customizable dashboard and solid contact organization tools, IXACT Contact also offers great marketing tools. Even better, they offer marketing tools for digital and traditional marketing. Let’s take a quick look at what they offer:
Mass Email
Using IXACT Contact, you can send mass emails to contacts based on whatever criteria you choose. For example, you might want to send all buyers a great new listing, or all sphere of influence contacts you haven’t touched base with recently an invite for a coffee.
IXACT Contact also offers hundreds of great pre-written mass emails for many common sales situations. For example, there are pre-written emails about curb appeal, how to hire a great Realtor, and hundreds more.
Automated Marketing Plans: Email Drip Campaigns + Tasks
You can also create or use IXACT Contact’s pre-written email drip campaigns. Here are just a few of the pre-written campaigns you can choose from:
- 6 Month After Purchase Nurturing Plan
- 6 Month Expired Listing Prospecting Plan
- 5 Year Sphere of Influence Nurturing Plan
You also can, and should, customize these pre-written drips to work in your market or to appeal more directly to the people in your sphere.
Next, let’s take a look at the marketing plans that IXACT Contact offers so you can add tasks like phone calls or even direct mail to your drip campaigns.
Here are just a few of the pre-written marketing plans you can customize and send to your buyer leads, seller leads, or your sphere of influence.
- 3 Month New Listing Plan
- Listing Closing Plan
- 6 Month After Purchase Nurturing Plan – Email
Letter & Labels
One great feature that IXACT Contact has that we wish more CRMs would offer is the ability to create and send bulk mail to contacts. Direct mail like letters and flyers can be a great way to reach older home owners, or anyone else you can’t reach via email or social media ads.
Deal Pipelines, Reporting, & Goal Tracking
You can also use IXACT Contact as a basic transaction management platform, as well as a way to report on progress like click through rates, open rates for emails, closing rates for buyers and sellers etc.
One cool feature unique to IXACT Contact is goal tracking. Using their goal tracking module, you can input what you want to achieve as far as closings, GCI, etc. at the beginning of the year and get continual updates over the year on your progress.
IDX Websites: Fully Featured Sites at a Great Price
Amazingly, IXACT Contact also offers a free basic website along with their already affordable CRM.
The websites are fairly basic, but they are cleanly designed, load quickly, and have all the features that a newer agent might want from a website. That includes a blog to help your site rank on Google, an about us page, and pages on buying and selling a home.
They even throw in 3 free articles to post to your blog every month.
To check out an IXACT Contact website without IDX, click here.
Basic IDX Websites
For just $13 per month, IXACT Contact will give you a basic IDX website with all the features above, plus a property search widget and IDX listings page. For just $13 per month on top of the $33 you’re paying for the CRM, this is one the best deals for a website/CRM in the industry today.
To check out a standard IDX website, click here.
Professional IDX Websites
They also offer a professional IDX website for $33 per month that adds map search, polygon search, communities pages, sold/pending listings, schedule a showing, email listing alerts, and more.
To see an example of a professional IDX website, click here.
For both website tiers, IDX is provided by ihomefinder and looks great.
IXACT Contact Social Stream
For another $20 per month, IXACT Contact will even post content automatically to your social media accounts. Called Social Stream, this add on allows you to schedule buyer and seller friendly articles from sites like Huffington Post, Martha Stewart, and Better Homes and Gardens to post automatically on your social media accounts.
While this is a great feature on its own, with Social Stream your social media followers don’t just get dumped out to a website to read articles, they actually click on and read articles that include your personal branding, increasing the likelihood of capturing potential leads.
Over to You
Do you already use IXACT Contact CRM or IDX websites? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
Tell us about you so we know what to send.
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