Knock Email Standard

Prospects come into Knock from a variety of sources, including property website contact forms and ILS contact forms. These forms often trigger an email containing the contact information and preferences that were filled out by the prospect.

Although we have our own Knock contact forms that you can easily install on your property website or an API, we understand that sometimes you want to keep your contact form as is and continue to send in leads via email.

Whether you're a web developer for a community website or an ILS, if you are sending in leads to Knock via Email, it's important you include the below HTML comment to ensure that:

1. Prospects properly populate into our system

2. You are getting proper source attribution for those leads.

You do not need to change anything about the look or feel of your existing emails, you just need to make sure to include the below HTML comment:

<!--
  PROSPECT = {      
    "firstName": "Jane",
    "lastName": "Doe",
    "email": "[e-mail]",
    "phone": "2065550105",
    "moveDate": "2019-09-15",
    "bedrooms": ["STUDIO", "1_BEDROOM", "2_BEDROOMS", "3_OR_MORE_BEDROOMS"],
    "occupants": 2,
    "leaseTerm": 12,
    "minBudget": 1000,
    "maxBudget": 2000    
  }
-->

Because it's an HTML comment, the above format will not appear visually in the emails that leasing teams see, but Knock's system understands how to read these invisible HTML comments for the JSON data and extract out Guestcard information. You can use this free online tool to verify the data inside (and including) the curly brackets { } is valid JSON.

Developer Notes:

• The format of the above^ HTML comment section (everything contained within the PROSPECT = {} )  must exactly match (including quotation marks, white spaces, colons, commas, etc) in order to be extracted into the Knock guestcard

• Technically it's only required to include  email  or phone ; all other fields are optional and you can pass in null  if you do not have that info. For example, if you only had an email you would include this snippet:

<!--
  PROSPECT = {      
    "firstName": null,
    "lastName": null,
    "email": "[e-mail]",
    "phone": null,
    "moveDate": null,
    "bedrooms": [],
    "occupants": null,
    "leaseTerm": null,
    "minBudget": null,
    "maxBudget": null    
  }
-->

• Although not technically required, in order to maximize prospect engagement and conversion, we strongly recommend your form always collects at least firstName , lastName , email , phone , and moveDate .

• You should be sending your leads to [community_username]-[source_parameter]@m.knck.io
  
  Example: if community_username  = abcapts and source_parameter  = w (for "Property Website", this is most common), you would send leads in the above format to [e-mail].

• Anything other than the HTML comment section^ is optional and fully customizable! Nothing about your emails needs to change except the addition of the above formatted HTML comment.

Preferences Details:

• Move Date: moveDate  must be the YYYY-MM-DD  format

• Bedrooms: For bedrooms, we accept any of the following 4 values (multiple values are permitted, separated by a comma as shown): ["STUDIO", "1_BEDROOM", "2_BEDROOMS", "3_OR_MORE_BEDROOMS"] 

• Misc: occupants , leaseTerm , minBudget , maxBudget  must all be integers as shown. occupants  must be 1-5 and leaseTerm  must be 1-18

If you need help with any of the above, please reach out to [e-mail] and include the example of your email and our team can confirm if it is properly formatted.