CRM

One thing that's lacking in the current CRM market is software catering to the vacation rentals industry. Since your plan is to integrate email inquiries into your product, you will essentially serve as a repository where users can store information about customers. Making that information searchable, allowing users to upload / connect via IMAP/POP to upload historical data, and perhaps at some point organizing that information by customer, would all be helpful additions.

I guess my only advice would be to not go nuts on features. There's something to be said for the 37Signals method of developing software - embracing constraints, simplicity, and less features.

I would love to be able to get an inquiry by email from within ownerrez, reply to it, track the conversation, add in things such as "called person, left a voicemail" or "this person wants a bottle of wine and flowers waiting when they arrive.", automatically add people who inquire to a third party mailing list service, add information to the lead as I converse with them such as name, phone, email (if not already captured), address, preferred property, lead source, dates of stay, current not-booking excuse, lead value, and track all of this information. Then when they are ready click one button to convert it to a quote or a booking and send it off to them. If you integrate with a service such as mailchimp what would be amazingly useful would be to add them to a certain list in inquiry state, then when they book add them to a list for the just booked state along with their dates booked, name, city, and other fields, then remove them from inquiry state list, then when they've just checked out the ability to shoot off a survey email, and if the survey is positive ask them to leave reviews on yelp, tripfinder, etc. THEN put them on another mailchimp list of previous guests and remove them from the booked state list.

I don't know about others, but this system we would gladly pay $199/month for, if integrated with what you already have.

Glenn, I agree completely, and we're working on more now than ever. Don't take my word for it - check back in the next two weeks or so. We're finishing the first release of a design overhaul and some of what you just mentioned. Trust me, 2013 isn't "dry" on development. It will be far FAR bigger than 2012. ~Sam

Have you guys checked out your competition at bookerville,com? Fantastic customer management tools + very flexible emailing system where you can create templates and also define events for when emails go out (ie. when full balance is paid, 3 days before arrival, 2 days after departure, etc). It even has the ability to create and use user-defined fields (such as my lock code), etc. Customers are stored in its database to allow you to rate them (privately) and therefore offer specific discounts on repeat business.

It is not as nice or user-intuitive as this site, but I have to admit that I am torn now, as I really like its flexible emailing capabilities.

Has anyone had any experience or a proposed solution to managing emails to customers? I have a process wherein I send at least four separate types of emails to my renters based on things such as full balance paid, 2 days before rental, and a follow-up two days after rental. I create these emails manually which is tedious and error prone. I have tried toutapp.com and it is ok.... but not great.

Glenn