No Response To Emails
We have been hearing again from disappointed members who send out exchange offers but fail to receive any sort of a response. This is a continuing gripe being dealt with by all the home exchange companies as well as the blogs devoted to home exchanging. The excellent blog Home Exchange Travels opened this Wednesday’s post with a reference to the problem.
It really is disappointing when you join a club and send out your first contact emails, only to receive nothing in return. Even a short “no thanks” is better than absolutely nothing. As I’ve already explained in earlier posts there may a whole list of reasons why they don’t respond - they may be away, their Internet provider may have routed your message straight into their spam folder (a more and more frequent explanation), they may be overwhelmed with emails and just missed yours. Or, they may simply be lacking in basic good manners.
It could be the way you worded your inquiry. Many more seasoned home exchangers are immediately put off when they receive an email similar to: “Want to exchange in August. Take a look at my listing number 26***”. One or two have been very candid with me and admitted that whenever they receive impersonal messages similar to that one, they just hit the delete button.
Perhaps the following suggestions will help increase your chances of getting responses:
Never send out standard, impersonal messages such as the example above. Use your word processor to prepare detailed information about your home, family and local area to copy and paste into all your messages but take the time to personalize each message before you actually send it. On the ExchangeHomes.com website you won’t be able to address the people you are emailing by name because of our privacy guards, but you can mention anything that especially attracted you to his/her offer because everyone likes to hear nice things about their home and its surroundings!
Say if you can be flexible on dates and/or length of exchange. Indicate that once they have viewed your offer, you will be willing to answer any questions they may have. Direct them to any additional photographs or videos you may have posted on one of the multitude of free picture hosting web sites. Make it obvious that you are genuinely interested in their offer and are prepared to make every effort to make an exchange happen if they too are interested in exploring the possibility further.
In closing, always ask them to reply to your message as soon as possible as you are anxious to hear back even if they aren’t interested your offer right now. Explain that this will then allow you to look elsewhere.
I hope this helps. Previous postings on this have also covered this same difficult issue and I suggest you take a look at them as well.
Home Exchange and the Spam Dilema Posted 2007/04/05. (Previously posted in January 2007 on our old BlogSpot Blog.
ISPS Spam Tools Posted 2007/04/18.
