What's New: Your Dashboard Got Busier

Since the last update, most of the work has been in your dashboard rather than on your site. Here's what changed, why it matters, and what to do about it.

Most of what's below runs on newer Avenue sites. If your site is older and you want to try these features, chat with us about getting a new one.

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Email campaigns, in beta

What changed. You can now write, schedule and send email to your contacts from inside Avenue. Pick one contact, a segment or a list of addresses, start from a template or write your own, and send it now or set it for later.

Why it matters. Your newsletter list used to live in one tool and your leads in another. Now a contact's record shows what you sent them and when, so you're not checking two places before you follow up.

What to do. Campaigns sits in your dashboard with a Beta label on it.

Also landed with it:

• A template library with market update, just listed, open house, buyer and seller nurture, and general newsletter layouts. Each one is editable and previewable.
• Merge fields. Drop a contact's first name or a listing address into the copy and it fills in per recipient.
• Branded automatically. Campaign emails pick up your site's colours, fonts, logo, contact details and social links.
• Segments. A new Segments tab under Contacts lets you group contacts under one name and send to the group. You can also add individual addresses directly, and anyone you email that way is added to your contacts.
• Send history per contact. Sent, delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, with the timestamp and a preview of what went out.
• Recurring sends. Set a start date, an end date and the days in between, and the campaign repeats on that schedule.

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Your site's SEO score

What changed. Avenue now crawls your site and scores it out of 100. Under the main score sit five component scores: page speed, meta tags, schema markup, mobile usability and internal linking. Each one is clickable, so you can go straight to whatever is pulling the number down.

Why it matters. "Improve your SEO" is not an instruction anyone can act on. A score with five parts and an issue count under each one is.

What to do. Open the Actionables tab to see what to fix first.

Alongside the score:

• Technical SEO, covering the structural issues a crawler sees.
• Content strategy, covering what your pages cover and where the gaps are.
• Reputation, covering how your business shows up beyond your own site.
• Backlinks, refreshed weekly: referring domains, domain rank, and what you gained or lost since last week.

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Contacts as a pipeline

What changed. Contacts can now be viewed as a pipeline board instead of a list.

Why it matters. A list tells you who you know. A board tells you where each of them is.

What to do. Switch views from the Contacts page.

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Blog posts on a schedule

What changed. Choose the topics you want to write about and the days you want posts to go out, and Avenue drafts a blog post for each one. Publish them straight away or hold them to check first. You get an email when each one is ready.

Why it matters. A live blog gives Google and AI search a steady reason to find your site. A blog that stopped in March tells visitors something too.

What to do. Start by choosing the topics you want covered.

The blog editor also now shows posts the way they'll look on your site, and can generate a featured image in one click.

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An AI assistant on your site

What changed. Your site can now take enquiries through an AI assistant instead of a contact form. The assistant talks with the visitor, asks for the details that fit what they've told it, and sends the result to you as a lead.

Why it matters. A form asks every visitor the same questions. The assistant asks the ones that matter for that visitor, so a buyer and a seller aren't asked the same things.

What to do. Choose between the regular lead capture form and the AI assistant in the builder's settings. Pick a persona for how it talks, and add preset answers to steer visitors toward what you want them to know.

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Your website

• Prioritize active listings. A toggle on the listings widget puts active listings ahead of the rest.
• Off-market listings redirect home. A visitor landing on a listing that has since gone off-market now lands on your home page rather than a dead end.
• Mulish joins the font set in the builder.
• Section editor spacing and type are now consistent across sections, so a page built from several section types doesn't drift.

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Refer a friend

A Refer a friend button next to Help gives you a personal link and a QR code. When someone signs up through it and starts a paid Starter plan, you each get a month free.

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Most of what's above only exists on newer Avenue sites. If you're on an older one, you're missing the email campaigns, the SEO score, the AI assistant and the rest of this list. Moving is how you get them. Email help@avenuehq.com and ask for a new site.