Set up BoldTrail for a team in this order: scope and roles, hashtag standards, lead sources, routing rules, email authentication, a cleaned contact import, Smart Campaigns, then a go-live test. The first three decisions are the hardest to undo once real leads and real agents are inside the system.
Menus and rules below come from BoldTrail’s help center as of October 2026, and screens change. Where we could not confirm a path, we say to check the help center. The same advice applies to accounts still called kvCORE.
1. Decide who sees what: roles and scope
BoldTrail organizes everything by scope, and its help center states the hierarchy as Company, Office, Team, Agent. Campaigns, routing rules and hashtags each live at one of those levels, so choosing the level is a design decision, not a formality.
The help center’s roles article describes five user types. Company Admins have the highest access on the brokerage side. Office Admins manage only the offices they administer. Team Admins manage things like the team website and cannot add agents to their team. Agents see their own profile, website and leads, and Lenders have access very similar to agents.
Two practical points. A lead from an ad goes to the entity it is attached to, and that entity’s rules route it onward, so a rule written at the wrong level will not fire. And we found no dedicated assistant role in the roles article, so if a VA will have access, ask BoldTrail support which role fits and grant no more than the work needs.
2. Write the hashtag standard before anything is imported
Campaigns, routing and searches all read BoldTrail hashtags. Write the list down first, because renaming later has side effects.
Per the help center, hashtags cannot contain spaces, there is no limit on how many a contact can carry, and the article suggests keeping each to about 20 characters. Its hashtag management page warns that merging hashtags does not update Smart Campaigns, search alerts or scheduled mass emails that use them. The article’s examples use underscores while a separate list of restricted characters also appears to include one, so test a multi-word tag in your own account first.
Admins can also create entity hashtags at company, office or team level, which appear at the top of the list for agents in that entity. This structure is illustrative, not a BoldTrail default.
| Tag family | Illustrative example | Job it does |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship | #past_client, #sphere, #web_lead | Says who this person is to you |
| Source | #src_fb_seller | Shows where the lead came from, for routing and reporting |
| Campaign trigger | #camp_seller_new | Exists only to start one Smart Campaign |
| Suppression | #no_email | Keeps a contact out of mass sends |
Recency tags go stale, so decide who refreshes them. For the Faruqi Team, we rebuilt the tagging structure from scratch and segmented 14,000 contacts by relationship type and recency before running outreach: standard first, campaigns second.
3. Connect lead sources and set their identity
BoldTrail’s onboarding article lists three ways to connect a lead source: email forwarding, Zapier and Zillow Tech Connect. Email forwarding and the keys live under Lead Engine, then Lead Dropbox. According to the Lead Dropbox article, Zillow and Trulia should not use email imports and go through Tech Connect instead.
For your own Facebook lead forms, we could not find a native connector in the help center, so Zapier is the documented route. The key you paste decides the destination: an agent key keeps the lead in one database, while team, office and company keys feed that group’s rotation. Our Zapier and Lead Dropbox setup guide walks through it step by step.
Whatever the route, give every source a custom lead source name and a source hashtag. A missing source shows as NULL or Manual and breaks reporting and any routing rule that filters on source.
4. Build the routing rules
Routing decides who gets a new lead and how fast. Per the help center, it sits in the top-right user menu under Lead Routing, with a scope selector at the top left.
The behavior to know before you build:
- Rules run top to bottom and a lead enters the first rule it matches, so put specific rules above general ones.
- A default rule always exists, cannot be deleted and round-robins by text and email to all active agents. If you leave it as your only rule, every active agent shares everything.
- Rules can filter by source, hashtag and lead type (buyer, seller, renter, agent).
- Round robin follows the order or weights you set, and weights must total 100%. Blast notifies everyone and the first to accept wins.
- With lead acceptance on, you must name a timeout agent. BoldTrail’s example is five agents at three minutes each, so a 15-minute timeout.
- Leads arriving outside business hours get email only, not text, and seller leads with only an address are not routed until contact details are added.
The trade-off is real. Blast is fast but rewards whoever is holding their phone, and round robin is fair but can park a lead with someone at a listing appointment. Pick on purpose.
5. Authenticate your sending domain
Do this before any campaign goes out. According to BoldTrail’s deliverability guide, DMARC absence will hurt delivery, DKIM needs a unique value for each independently managed domain, and DNS changes can take 24 to 48 hours to propagate. It also notes that as of February 2024 Google requires bulk Gmail senders to authenticate.
BoldTrail documents a DNS configuration wizard for users with a custom domain, reachable from the DNS status button in the profile side panel. Agents sending from a generic Gmail or Yahoo address are assigned a relay address instead and will not see it. The guide suggests starting DMARC at p=none. As general practice, you then watch the reports before tightening the policy.
We fixed SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the Faruqi Team’s domain. A branded email that lands in spam does nothing.
6. Clean, then import your contacts
BoldTrail’s import article says only CSV files are accepted, with a 2 MB limit and a required header row. Every row needs an assigned agent or it fails, and one agent cannot own two leads with the same email address. Duplicates without emails are imported, so you merge them afterwards.
Three details catch teams out. Hashtags in the file are separated with a pipe character. Self-import is capped at 7,000 leads, so a 14,000-contact database would need BoldTrail’s import specialists if loaded from CSV. And imported leads cannot receive campaigns through the import hashtag or the Lead Import source, so give them a unique hashtag, status or type. The bulk tool does not assign Smart Campaigns by itself.
Clean the file before it goes in: dedupe, fix phone formats and apply relationship and recency tags in the spreadsheet. Cleaning inside the CRM is slower and can enroll the wrong people in campaigns. Our guide to cleaning and reactivating a database goes deeper.
7. Build Smart Campaigns last
Campaigns depend on the tags, scope and routing above, which is why they come late. BoldTrail’s Smart Campaigns guide sets scope in the first step, offers four standard triggers (Lead is New, Contact is Transferred, Hashtag is, Specific Date Occurs), and lets Locked campaigns force a sequence onto matching agents.
The limits shape the design: one campaign per contact unless Always Run is on, no sending outside Office Hours, one text per lead per day. We cover the seller version in BoldTrail Smart Campaigns for seller leads.
What this looked like for a client
For Ambreen Faruqi’s team at eXp Realty NY, we built an automation so that whenever we run Facebook ads for her, the seller leads import straight into BoldTrail, which then starts the email campaign, workflow and follow-ups automatically. The owner reports 5 seller leads in one day at about $8 per lead on one run. The case study separately reports 5 leads in 2 days at $15 per lead from one ad push. Those are two separate runs on a small sample, and we are not publishing the workflow steps. See the Faruqi Team case study.
The go-live checklist
- Submit a test lead through every source and confirm the right owner, source name and hashtag appear.
- Confirm which routing rule caught it, and who the timeout agent is.
- Confirm the right Smart Campaign was assigned and is switched on.
- Send a test email from each sending user and check it in the inbox, not just the preview.
- Check Office Hours against when your leads really arrive.
- Confirm each agent receives notifications and knows who owns a lead after hours.
- Record tag definitions, key levels and rule order in one shared document.
What to review at day 30
Review it as a skeptic would. How many leads had no first contact, and how long did the first touch take? Did any arrive with a NULL source? Which leads entered no campaign, and why? Did anyone create near-duplicate hashtags? Did bounces or unsubscribes climb after the first sends? Fix the rules, not the symptoms.
When this is the wrong size of project
A solo agent with one lead source does not need entity hashtags, weighted rotations or a timeout agent. Steps 2, 3 and 5 plus a few campaigns are enough. Multi-agent setups often drift because nobody owns them. That ownership is the work our BoldTrail virtual assistant team takes on, and the post on what a BoldTrail VA can manage lists it in detail. A free consult will scope your team’s version.