Cold Profile › answers

What do I do when a match does not reply?

The short answer

Send exactly one follow-up, after two or three days, and make it about something other than the fact they did not reply. If that gets nothing, let it go - a second follow-up has a worse success rate than a new conversation with someone else, and it costs you more.

The follow-up that works is not 'hey?' or 'still there?'. It is a new thread on something in their profile you had not used yet.

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Why they did not reply

Usually nothing to do with you. The three commonest reasons are that they match with more people than they can talk to, that they opened your message in a queue and lost it, and that they were half-out of the app already when you matched.

The fourth reason is worth owning: an opener that gives them nothing to work with. 'Hey', 'how's your week going', or a compliment on their appearance all require the other person to generate the entire conversation.

The follow-up

Pick a detail you did not mention the first time and react to it properly. 'Just noticed the [thing] in your third photo - was that [place]? I've been trying to get there.'

It works because it is evidence you actually looked, and because it is answerable in one line. Nobody owes you a paragraph.

What not to send

Do not comment on the silence. 'Guess you're not interested', 'wow, ok', and 'I'll take that as a no' end the conversation for certain and occasionally get you reported.

Do not send a third message. At that point the pattern is visible to them and it reads as pressure, whatever the content.

The number that matters

If most of your matches never reply, the problem is upstream of the follow-up: it is the opener, or it is a profile that gets the match on the photo and loses them on a second look. Fixing one opener is worth more than chasing twenty silent matches.

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