Using Email to Communicate with Your Residents

Do you allow your properties to contact your residents and prospects directly via email? We allow our properties to send follow up emails directly to prospects for that "personal touch". However, we got blacklisted at Yahoo for spamming. Thoughts? Do you outsource?

Good to see you here Ray. Wow! Blacklisted? Are you using automated responses as well? I think there's more to the story here. Tell us more. It sounds like you could be email blasting too often. Are you sending the same message to all your prospects at the same time? How often are your sites emailing your residents? You can get that blacklist lifted, but it's a process.

Yea. We are past the blacklisting. Finally got that put behind us. We have been very much encouraging our properties to communicate with our residents via email. I think they might be taking it to far. Plus they probably are not allowing the resident to Opt Out.

We want to keep the personalized touch of property email and avoid the cost of third parties. But Blacklisting is a problem.

This is a very timely topic. We've learned that on average, 60% of residents say they prefer to communicate with the leasing office via email. Cell and home phone were a distant 2nd at about 38% of residents preferring those options.

Do you currently have any guidelines on how to use email communication with residents? Individual follow-up messages on completed service requests or responses to resident questions and concerns is always a very good thing. If properties are doing email blasts with community information and announcements, perhaps a better forum would be to post those announcements on a property web page or resident portal. That way, the residents can pull the information rather than have it pushed to them.