Company Overview Equity Residential is the largest publicly traded owner, operator and developer of multifamily housing in the country. It is a key player in the area of apartment rentals and offers perhaps the largest choice of apartments across budget, location and style. It lays a high emphasis on quality, fully conscious of its role in fulfilling one of the very basic needs of a family, which is providing a home. The company engages itself constantly in acquisitions, divestitures and development activities in multiple markets in order to provide a wide choice of houses to its customers. Equity Residential condominiums offer multiple benefits to its customers in terms of features, life style, quality of construction and amenities at popular and convenient locations combined with competitive pricing and easy payment options. It also has investor friendly schemes where tenants can become owners by paying rent for a given period.

Before EchoMail: Equity Residential did not confine its activities to any particular region and was a nationwide player, its offerings catered to different income groups, factors that increased the size of its target audience. It received a huge volume of inbound mail of which a good percentage was enquiries from potential customers. These enquiries were allotted to its representatives in the respective region for follow up. Equity realized that after a while it was losing track of the status of these enquiries, in terms of follow up and results. It was also aware that these Emails reflected the feelings of its existing customer base, something it could not afford to ignore.

The EchoMail Deployment: Equity Residential felt the need for a robust solution to enable scientific storage, retrieval and analysis of its large database. It wanted to enter into a strategic tie-up with an Email management company with expertise in this area and chose EchoMail as its partner. EchoMail studied the needs of the company and deployed its well-researched data management solution Data Warehouse (DW). This helped in automatic filtering of inbound mail, integration of data from multiple sources and enabled centralized control over this huge data bank. DW also helped in taking reports on this data on the basis of in-depth analysis on multiple parameters.

After EchoMail: Data Warehouse helped Equity Residential in better management and easy retrieval of its huge database. This helped Equity Residential to know the exact status of incoming enquiries, follow up action executed and where follow up action is pending. A detailed tracking of incoming mail also helped in knowing the various sources from where these enquiries originated and plan their sales and advertising strategy. These mails also gave a valuable insight into buyer preference in terms of house type and other parameters such as single bedroom/double bedroom/three bedroom, furnished/non-furnished, preferred terms of payment, condominiums/ independent houses and most preferred locations. This information was very vital in helping Equity to tailor its projects.