Listing alerts and notifications

Your marketplace can tell people about new listings and new emails in three ways:

• Listing alerts. Visitors subscribe to new listings in the categories, location and price range they care about, and get an email as soon as a matching listing goes live. This is the most useful of the three.
• The email digest. A daily, weekly or monthly round-up of all new listings.
• On-screen notifications. A small pop-up on your site telling a signed-in member that you’ve just emailed them, powered by the Pusher service.

Listing alerts

Let visitors subscribe

Visitors subscribe with the Subscribe widget. Add it to your site:

1. Go to Design › Widgets.
2. Add the Subscribe widget to an area, such as the sidebar, the footer or the post-a-listing page.
3. Set it up (see the table) and save.

Widget setting	What it does
Subscribe title displayed	The heading above the form.
Categories	TRUE lets visitors pick one or more categories. With FALSE, they subscribe to every category.
Locations	TRUE lets visitors pick a location. With FALSE, they subscribe to every location.
Price	TRUE shows a price range slider.
Minimum Price, Maximum Price and Increment Step	The ends of the price slider and how far each step moves.

The visitor enters their email address, makes their choices, fills in the captcha if your site uses one, and clicks Subscribe. If they don’t have an account yet, one is created for them with that email address.

Each category a visitor picks becomes a separate alert. See Widgets for adding and arranging widgets.

Which listings trigger an alert

When a listing goes live (straight away, or when you approve it in moderation), everyone with a matching alert gets the ads-subscribers email with the listing’s title and a link to it. A listing matches an alert when:

• its category is the alert’s category, or a subcategory of it, or the alert covers every category;
• its location is the alert’s location, or inside it, or the alert covers every location;
• its price is inside the alert’s price range, or the alert has no upper price, or the listing has no price.

Only members whose account is active and who are Subscribed to emails in their profile receive alerts. On a multilingual site with a language user custom field, each member gets the alert in their own language.

Change the wording of the alert in Email templates (key ads-subscribers).

See your subscribers

Go to Subscribers in the sidebar (under Manage). The page shows how many alerts and different people you have, how many alerts were added in the last 30 days, and the most wanted category and location.

The list shows each alert: the subscriber, the category and location they want (Any category, Anywhere), their price range and the date. You can:

• search by email or name, and filter by category and location;
• remove an alert with Remove this alert (the person stops getting those emails);
• download the list with Export CSV;
• write to your subscribers with Send a newsletter (see Newsletters).

The most wanted categories and locations tell you what buyers are waiting for. Share that with sellers, or promote those categories to bring in matching listings.

How members manage their alerts

Members find their alerts under Subscriptions in their account menu, with the category, location and price range of each. They can delete one alert, or all of them at once with the unsubscribe button at the top of the list. Signed-in members also see an Unsubscribe button in the Subscribe widget.

On-screen notifications with Pusher

With Pusher connected, a member who is signed in on your site sees a pop-up when your site sends them an email, with the first words of the email and a reminder to check their inbox. For new messages in messaging, the pop-up says they have a new message and links to their inbox.

Pusher is a separate service with a free plan. To connect it:

1. Create an account at pusher.com and create a Channels app.
2. In the app’s App Keys, note the app ID, key, secret and cluster.
3. In your admin panel, go to Integrations and open Pusher.
4. Tick Enable Pusher, fill in App ID, Key, Secret and Cluster, and click Save.

Pop-ups only reach members who have your site open at that moment. They’re a nice extra, not a replacement for email.

Related guides

• Email digest — a regular round-up of new listings.
• Widgets — place the Subscribe widget.
• Email templates — reword the alert email.
• Newsletters — write to your members yourself.