Texting may seem too casual for businesses to engage in but sending alerts to owners and tenants via text message can be more effective than any other form of digital communication. As long as contacts aren’t being overwhelmed by the volume of texts being sent and property managers have explicit consent to contact owners on their cell phones, text messaging can be very beneficial.
Here’s why texts are more effective than other methods.
Emails
By the end of 2019, 246 billion emails were being sent every day but only around one third of those emails were ever being opened. Emails are being sent more than they can be read which causes recipients to ignore most of their inbox activity. This means that important information from property managers may be escaping owners and tenants even if that’s not their intention.
With an open rate around 98%, text messages are pretty much guaranteed to be read. Most texts are read within 3 minutes of being received.
Property managers can use the accessibility of text messages to alert owners and tenants to community updates or account changes. They can even send a brief text message to indicate that an email with more details is ready in their inbox.
Phone Calls
A phone call is a functional way to get direct access to someone, but if it’s not picked up, it can be a dead end. If someone you need to contact misses your call and you opt to leave a voicemail, there is only an 18% chance that they’ll listen to it.
A more reliable way to get in touch with your owners and tenants, if they haven’t answered your call, is to send a text message requesting a call back. You can even include the best times for them to call you in the text. Because the average American checks their phones every 12 minutes, a text message can get the attention of owners and increase the probability of your call being acknowledged.
Phone calls can disruptive and they can delay productivity. By answering a phone call, other tasks are immediately put on hold in favor of the call. Depending on the reason, the average duration of a call ranges from 2 minutes to an hour. At 20 calls a day, property managers, who are notoriously busy, could be losing a lot of valuable time.
On the other hand, text messages capture the attention of the person you’re trying to reach faster and the process of sending or receiving a text won’t cause long interruptions. Sending a text takes only a matter of seconds, which means that property managers can contact more people in less time. The time saved can be used to attend to urgent or more complicated issues.
Using text messages won’t eliminate the need for other communication methods, but it can increase productivity and facilitate property managers’ ability to get information to owners and tenants.
