Potential customers who ignore your emails just aren’t the obstacle that they used to be. If you’re tired of sending out countless emails and receiving nothing in response, Quokka’s ad retargeting service may be the solution for you.

Aside from having the objectively cutest animal of all time as their namesake, Quokka allows you to follow up with people who don’t respond to your initial emails. Instead of firing off an additional email, however, Quokka’s response is a bit subtler: it shows retargeting ads to the offending customer. This method gives your product or service a second chance without giving the customer the opportunity to bin your follow-up email sans a read.

Quokka also provides you with statistics regarding how many emails were sent out, how many were opened, and how many customers are available for retargeting based on those numbers. This information is provided on an email-by-email basis in their easy-to-use interface.

Once you’ve allowed a certain amount of time to pass, you can plug your mailing list into Quokka and select a platform on which you want to display the retargeting ads. Quokka will determine who on your mailing list didn’t open the email and then show them your ad on your selected platform (e.g., Facebook). While social media ads haven’t been faring particularly well as of late, we may see Quokka find its niche in other marketing venues.

As it sits, Quokka plugs into your Facebook, MailChimp, and Campaign Monitor services. Based on comments from the platform’s founder, Quokka’s future includes additional integration with existing marketing platforms. Ideally, Quokka will eventually be usable with the bulk of mailing services and marketing automation, but getting the app to that point will undoubtedly take some time.

2018 marketing practices already look like they’re going to have to evolve away from some of the pre-established paradigms, and Quokka appears to be one appropriate answer to the underlying “How?” question here. As customers become more suspicious of ads in their inboxes and ad-blocking software use continues to grow, services such as Quokka may be viable solutions for those hoping to reach the most stubborn demographic.

Most professionals are setting sales goals for 2018, and are seeking the resources to help get them there. Realtors most certainly are with the changes in the market for more homes to sell, more millennials possibly ready to buy, and most certainly tax reform changes to the game.

Fortunately, if you’re feeling a lack of inspiration to determine how you’re going to reach those goals – Realtors Property Resource (RPR) is putting together a few webinars to help you work smarter and pick up a few new tricks.

While of course, the highlight of the trainings focus on the use of RPR mobile app, they should promise to offer important information. The 4 Part series “4 Steps to Real Estate Success with RPR Mobile” for example, focuses on capturing leads, better communicate information in a listing, capturing open house leads, and improving the buyer tour experience. That series begins on February 21st, and continues weekly for a month.

Realtors unfamiliar with RPR should know that the app is included in National Association of Realtors (NAR) dues, and if you don’t know about it, your first webinar should be focused on getting to know the app, and see how it can help support your business by locating information. That particular webinar can be found here.

Additional topics focus on things from perfect pricing, pre-listing checklist, reigning in buyers, and creating relocation packets – all things that can be done to help facilitate a smoother selling process and help get you more results easier.

This particularly packet of resources should be useful to both realtors who aren’t familiar with the RPR tools, but also maybe the user who hasn’t leveraged the resource quite to its full extent. Most webinars are offered at least 2-3 times, so there are plenty of opportunities to attend a session. RPR also has a number of other resources including articles, social media information, graphics, and handouts for member use. Of particular place for inspiration is the Realtor case studies, where app skeptics may see how the use of RPR can apply to their real world realtor-ing.

Ultimately, this is just one of many possible resources, but if you’re looking to try a few new things to kickstart your sales in 2018, and are looking for tools to help you reach more lofty goals, some free education (that you already paid for, NAR members!), this is a great head start.

It seems like everyone nowadays wants to post the best version of themselves online. Vacation photos, listing photos, family portraits, and every day snapshots of breakfast go through extreme scrutiny before posting, sending, or texting to our family, friends, or followers. Even my mom figured out how to paint away her wrinkles in Apple photos before she sent out her Christmas card this year.

This is what it actually looked like, we tell ourselves after extensive editing, this red really was that red, the sky really was that vivid, the trees that brilliant un-capturable shade of green. And perhaps the iPhone snapshot couldn’t accurately capture the minutia of color and vivid warmth we actually experienced in that moment. So we edit. We pinch and pluck and filter and filter again. It’s easy. It’s free. Why the heck not promote the best version of an image?

It’s no wonder the market for accessible AI (artificial intelligence) photo editing tools is so competitive.

Now, every social media app has auto photo editing capabilities and filters. One new app is trying something different – photo editing ai that can dissect a photo and edit each area differently. At least that’s what it claims.

Photolemur is an app that uses AI to enhance photos enough to be socially acceptable and maybe a little bit more.

We ran the free version through the ringer here at The Real Daily and found interesting results. Using a photo from Wiki commons of Yosemite National Park, we tested the auto editing features/filters of iPhoto, google photos, and photo lemur to see which got us the most drool worthy pic. Because drool worthy is so subjective, you can see for yourself below.

Personally, I think the Google Photos auto enhance feature hit the nail on the head. Photolemur looks a little unauthentic, and let’s face it, if you’re posting a photo that looks like you spent a lot of time editing it, you’ve already failed, even if it’s a shiny listing photo.

Photolemur looks at your photo pixel by pixel. It can differentiate faces, objects, horizon, and sky and it edits each differently. It can reduce noise in low light shots and can enhance the sky in landscapes so you don’t get white textureless nothing when the sky you’re looking at is true blue.

The app is relatively easy to use. Simply drag your photos into the editor and bam – you’re on your way to awesome pictures.

We tested this with some iPhone snapshots to some disappointment finding the standard phone filters were better at enhancing the mundane daily pictures than photolemur (see above).

Landscapes seem to fare better with their technology, but at $30 this may only be worth it to heavy users, and those folks likely desire a little more control over the look of the photos than photolemur can provide. All in all, it’s a cool tool but won’t put professional photographers out of business.