Hey REtipsters.
I wanted to make a quick tutorial on getting set up with a virtual phone provider called OpenPhone.
I really like OpenPhone for a number of reasons.
For one their app allows people who live outside the US to have a state-based phone number.
Their mobile and computer apps are extremely intuitive and simple to use.
And their setup is probably the easiest I've ever seen.
They also allow a user to set up an auto text response on missed calls, voicemails,
or whenever someone calls in general.
Beyond that they also integrate with Zapier,
which means I can have OpenPhone pretty much do anything I want it to
when it comes to automation.
As per usual, I always want to try and include the negatives well as the positive,
but honestly, it was pretty hard to find something negative to say.
If I were to highlight anything, their customer service is only email based.
So sometimes they take a little longer to respond than if they had phone support,
but with how simple their setup is
I honestly don't know how big of a deal this is
I guess the other thing to be aware of is that they don't include a virtual fax line,
but I've never found that to be a big deal because I use Traveling Mailbox as my business
mailing address, and they have a virtual fax line included within their service.
If you don't use Traveling Mailbox, you can always use your local UPS store on the rare occasion
that you actually need to receive or send something by fax.
So far OpenPhone is probably my virtual phone system
and I've used quite a few in my time as a real estate investor
from CallRail, RingCentral, Freedom Voice and others.
With that, let me go ahead and log in
and I'll show you exactly how to get set up with OpenPhone.
Now for most land investors, our primary purpose for a virtual phone provider is to route
all calls to go directly to voicemail.
To do that with OpenPhone it's so easy,
you literally just have to click a button or two.
Let me show you.
The very first thing you're going to do is you're going to go to your phone number under inboxes.
You're going to go ahead and click these three dots and you're going to select Settings.
Make sure that the phone number's tab is selected underneath where it says Workspace Settings.
And then you're going to scroll down to where it shows Voicemail.
And you're going to upload your custom voicemail.
There are a couple different options for you.
You could upload a file.
You could record a voicemail right here on your computer, or they have this nifty text
to speech option where you could type in your voicemail and then they'll have a computer voice
actually read what you type.
For the sake of example today, I'm going to simply just
upload a file that I have set up for my land business.
So we're going to use the New Land Voicemail 2022.
Now that that has finished uploading
we're going to go ahead and test it out, make sure that it's working.
Hey there, this is Jaren with ibuyland.org
Perfect.
And now we're just going to go up here where it shows the username.
Obviously this is a dummy account for the sake of this video, but we're going to go ahead
and click on it and then we're going to select this "Do not disturb" button.
Then we're going to go ahead and select until further notice.
And now whenever you call in, it goes straight to voicemail.
It's literally that simple.
Now the negative thing about doing it this way is that when someone calls in,
they won't hear much ringing.
A lot of the times when you call in under this setup, you don't even hear a ring at all.
It just simply goes straight to voicemail.
I don't know if this is really that big of a deal, but I know speaking for myself,
when I switched to OpenPhone, I wanted to set up my system exactly how I've always had it.
So I wanted there to be a ring for 10 seconds before going to voicemail.
In order to set that up with an OpenPhone at the time this video is being recorded anyway
you're going to have to be on a premium account
whereas the first option I showed you can be done on the cheaper standard option.
In order to get some ringing before it goes to voicemail on a premium account,
this is exactly what you do.
Go ahead and do not disturb on, still here underneath the inboxes, underneath this setting
section with phone numbers highlighted,
we're going to scroll down to where it says phone menu.
Then we're going to click on this and we're going to set a greeting message.
Now you're going to want to upload a five to ten second audio file that has the standard
ring sound we commonly hear when we make a phone call
For your convenience, I've included a link to one in the description box below.
So we're going to go ahead and click on this.
We're going to select upload a file.
And then where it says Ring MP3.
And by the way, OpenPhone always needs audiofiles to be MP3.
We're going to then select open. Then underneath where it says menu options
we're going to delete number two here, because we don't need it.
We're going to make sure that the key is set to one.
And then we are going to set it to go directly to voicemail.
Then underneath option three here, if no option is selected,
we also want that to go directly to voicemail.
So we're going to go ahead and hit save.
And now when we call in, this is what we hear.
Hey there, this is Jaren with ibuyland.org.
And there we have it.
Now when it comes to adding text message autoreplies, all you have to do from here
is scroll down to this section called auto replies.
For me because I have everything go to voicemail
I avoid setting up incoming message auto apply.
I only have it set up for on missed calls and on voicemail.
As far as I can tell under this setup where we have everything go directly to voicemail,
you need to have text replies set up for both the "during" business hours section
and during after hour section.
In full transparency, OpenPhone may only require putting the text
under the during business hour section, but I haven't properly tested this at odd hours
like 12:00 AM or 2:00 AM.
So just to play it safe, I have it set up for both
business hours and after hour hours on my account.
I do know that if you only set up auto texts under after hours, it doesn't seem to work
at least at the times that I've tested it.
And I'm very aware that this seems really weird because with office hours being disabled,
I haven't declared what time blocks I should be able to send text messages.
That's why in case OpenPhone is somehow defaulting
to certain business hours that I can't control or see
I'm simply setting it up for both and then not worrying about it.
Now, why am I going through the process of showing you all this regarding auto text replies?
Well, my goal here is to highlight just how easy OpenPhone is to get set up.
As you can see, all it took was a few clicks
and now every single time someone calls in to leave a voicemail
I now have my phone system automatically send them a text, which is proven to have higher
engagement and also helps capitalize on leads that for one we reason or another
don't end up leaving a message on the answering machine.
This saves me a ton of time, energy and effort because it's all automated
and almost takes no time to set up.
It's honestly pretty hard to beat.
Let me go ahead and do one more test call with the text message auto reply in place,
and then we'll wrap up today's video.
Hey there, this is Jaren with ibuyland.org
With that, I look forward to us making a deal happen soon.
Thank you so much.
And there you have it my friends.
I want to give a special shoutout to my assistant May
who helped me call in and leave a voicemail.
So thank you May.
You're awesome.
And as you can see, the text message went right out after she left the voicemail.
Now, as we approach the end of today's video, there's one last thing I want us to go over.
If we scroll down to this section called integrations here
I want us to briefly discuss this connect to your email button.
Currently I use a software called REI Pebble.
It's kind of the command center of my landflipping business.
And this email notification function is actually what they use to sync up
what virtual phone providers like OpenPhone
to automatically populate a new lead record,
each time a potential buyer or seller leaves a voicemail or sends a text message.
The way that this works is that on the right subscription level, REI Pebble provides
a user, two different email addresses, one for seller leads and one for buyer leads
that are uniquely tied to that user specific account.
Within any third-party application
as long as that application happens to send out notification emails
and as long as that user lists that Pebble generated email address
as the preferred destination to receive notification emails,
regardless of the platform, be it an online listing directory,
the results of an intake form from a website
or a voicemail text from a virtual phone provider like OpenPhone
with each notification email sent out a new lead record will automatically generate within Pebble,
which is pretty sweet because you don't need to use any kind of online automation tool like Zapier.
OpenPhone can handle this level of automation 100% natively on its own.
To give an example, let's take a look at my real OpenPhone account
and not this test one that I created for today's video.
You can see on integrations here that I have
email notifications set to go to the seller inbox email
provided by Pebble as well as to my assistance email at cashoffer@ibuyland.org
It's honestly that simple.
And hey, if you're not using Pebble or some high end lead tracking system
I still heavily encourage you to push all incoming activities from OpenPhone
to a designated email address because it's honestly a great way to keep things organized.
And in fact, before using Pebble, that's exactly how I process all my leads.
I had a particular Gmail account in all inbound notifications, whether it be a text message
voicemail, missed call, what have you,
was setup to automatically go to that specific email address.
To wrap things up, I honestly don't know of an easier virtual phone set up
and I hope that this video serves you well.
As always for more tips, tricks and real-world guidance
on how to crush it as a real estate investor
come and join us over at retipster.com.