More and more vacation resorts and foreign countries are internet ready, so in many cases you’ll be able to receive emails on your Blackberry. At any rate, even if you’re vacationing at an exotic locale, a telephone is seldom very far away. Are you that precious that you can’t take 5 minutes to call someone back or email them the same day? If you are, a lot of people won’t want to deal with you.
Forgetting About Vacation Alerts
Perhaps the worst sin you can make with an auto-responder for a vacation alert is forgetting to turn it off when you return. If your message says you will be out of the country until November 1st and it’s now November 15th, people may assume you stayed longer on vacation and forget about you. If your message is really old (eg. 2 months), people may think you’ve left the business altogether. At any rate, they’ll all think you’re out to lunch. So give yourself a reminder in Outlook or on your cell phone to remove the vacation auto-responder when your return.
Acknowledge Receipt Of Email
Email still seems to be an unreliable medium. I still find some of my outgoing emails are inexplicably delayed or not received at all. So it’s nice to get confirmation from a recipient that you’re email has in fact been successfully delivered.
Declare Your Responsiveness
People always like to be kept in the loop, especially on something as important as buying or selling a home. So in your auto-responder email always state when and how you’ll be contacting them. Most importantly, stick to this commitment. A failure to keep your word this early in the relationship can spell trouble on the horizon for some prospects. Don’t get the relationship building off on the wrong foot!
Don’t Be Totally Unavailable For A Long Time
One of the worst things you can do is go on vacation for an extended length of time (eg. more than 2 weeks) and make yourself completely unavailable during this time. If I was one of your current listing clients and you did this I would be furious! You might even lose my listing just for that because it tells me you’re letting MLS do all the work, and any real estate professional can do that. In making yourself unavailable for extended length, you’ll be immediately taken out of contention with any new sellers. Imagine losing a potential new listing for not taking 10 minutes to call a listing prospect back the same day. It can happen! And selling that listing would probably have paid for your entire vacation!
Learn more about best practices with email by taking my course The Awesome Power Of Email. This course has been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 to qualify for 6 Credits
