Using Your Cell Phone for Email 2
Mar12
Today, Chris McKeever over at the NAR Center for Technology Blog gave insight into how to use your cell phone’s email address to become a more efficient real estate agent in the field. He hit on a great tip; every cell phone provider has it’s own email address. I really like his approach to using email on your cell phone. He doesn’t use it to check messages. Rather, he uses filters in his main email account system to forward important emails from specific clients/persons to his cell phone so that he has an instant notification of an urgent message.
Great idea indeed, Chris! Read up here.
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An extension of this functionality is Teleflip. You can send an e-mail to just about any cell phone even if you do not know the recipient’s carrier. From your e-mail client, send the message to 2135551212@teleflip.com where 2135551212 is the complete cell phone number. The e-mail then shows up as a text message on the cell phone. Remember, cell phone carriers may (will) charge for text messages. There are also size limits on text messages – typically 160 characters.
Teleflip’s web site (www.teleflip.com) says they are about to launch a new service, but at the bottom of the page, it says that their original service is still available to existing customers. When this service originally came out, they gave you something like 200 free messages sent out a month from a given e-mail address. After that, you had to sign up for a monthly plan. I just tried it from several e-mail addresses and clients and it still is working great.
This can be a great service for sending short e-mail messages out to a group of people who may be using different cell phone carriers or if you don’t know who the carrier is. I don’t have any thing to do with teleflip, except for being a satisfied user.
Thanks for the insight into Teleflip, Greg. I see that your usage of the text messaging service is more towards sending text messages to people with a certain message you’d like to deliver. In your experience, what type of messages do you send to your clients via text message using Teleflip?
I want to get a feel for how agents could use a service such as Teleflip to better serve their clients.
I also know there are other services such as Peekamo, Gizmo SMS, and TxtDrop. What do you think of those services?