We went to eHarmony’s Customer Care team and asked a simple question, “What can every user do, starting right now, to encourage more success on eHarmony?” Here’s what they told us.
1. Visit eHarmony Advice
Many eHarmony users don’t know that there is a thriving (and free) information resource adjacent to the eHarmony matching service. eHarmony Advice has over 800 articles on dating and a community with 300,000 members and over a million posts. You can get answers and opinions on almost any subject you choose. You’re on eHarmony Advice right now. Click on “Boards” above to see the community.
(Note to regular readers: this list of strategies is “sticky-on-top” until the end of the FGCE. If you’re on the blog’s front page, please find the latest article below this one.)
NOTE: These tips are only for eHarmony US (eharmony.com) and Compatible Partners members. If you use eHarmony’s Canada, Australia, United Kingdom or Brazil country sites, the Tips and Tricks for the Free Communication Weekend article is for you instead.
For Non-subscribers
Only communication up to Stage 3 is free. After you exchange answers to the third stage (the open-ended questions) with a match, BOTH of you must be subscribers to continue communication. There is no way around this.
Register on the site and finish the questionnaire a few days beforehand. Receiving matches is free but eHarmony only sends a limited number of matches a day, so give your account several days before the FGCE to accumulate matches. When the events starts, you’ll have more choices than if you’ve just come in.
Upload your best photos. You will get more replies and less closures.
Never post your contact information (email or web addresses) on your profile. Or say you’re just here for the weekend. Trust me, it attracts no quality replies. Plus, it may trigger the system’s scanners which automatically takes you out of the matching pool.
Review all your matches and initiate communication with EVERYONE, unless his profile screams that you two aren’t compatible. Nudge those whom you communicated before and would be interested in resuming communication, if any.
Be prepared to visit eHarmony several times a day until the end of the Free Event. You will get an email when someone replies, but this email could be hours late, so return often! Some stages of the so-called Guided Commmunication requires lengthy answers, be prepared to put time into answering them.
Know the end of the Free Event. Will it end Sunday or Monday? 11:59pm PST is what time where you are?
You have only two chances to sneak your contact information or email address. Either as a reply to the multiple-choice questions or to the open-ended questions. As you may expect, eHarmony tries to detect these types of messages and their penalty ranges from warnings to account closures. There are a few ways to do this:
And the MOST IMPORTANT tip. If you’re given an email address, write! If you’re given a phone number, CALL! (You did come here to meet people, right?)
For Subscribers
You probably won’t get anything useful out of this event. Non-subscribers do not see how you look like, and all they might do is sneak in their contact information within the first and third stage of Guided Communication. In short, you have the email address of someone you barely know and who has decided not to pony up money for a subscription like you did.
But if she’s hot, then why not, right?
Continue communication with those whom you began communicating during the regular period. They at least know how you look like.
Leave matching on but remember that anyone who starts responding to you during this Free Event is potentially a severely-limited non-subscriber. Then again, is he’s hot, then why not?
Got more tips and tricks? Got stories about the free weekend? Post a comment.
What counts as a “view” in Who Has Viewed Me? What counts as an activity in “Sort by recent activity”? What counts as a “Match Update”? Help me figure out my match is doing!
Answer:
There are many programming inconsistencies on the site, borne from many years of disparate revisions by many disparate programmers who never used the site as actual customers. This article hopes to clarify which is what… at least until the next revision.
Views. A “view” means your match looked you up. It is anytime a person accesses a Match page, that is, any page that has your photo on it — with a couple exceptions. Two exceptions are the “Icebreaker” page and the “Request Secure Call” page. The system doesn’t count them as views.
Accessing the Personality Profile is also not a view. Neither is clicking on a link in an email on your Inbox from eHarmony.
eHarmony’s Facebook pagehttp://facebook.com/eharmony/ launched nine months ago this weekend, and this week they bring in three more volunteer “Santa’s Elves” to highlight the positive and to encourage its frustrated customers.
Get in touch with a mentor and get encouragement. Here are the six mentors’ facebook profiles.
(Except for Jensen, all six are not their real names, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt that they are actual success stories and not company employees.)
(Our favorite eHarmony Host Kate today reveals never-before-official tricks on Match Settings for religion. It also adds official information on the site’s uber-secret religiosity filter. Almost all of her tips have been in our Match Settings tricks page since 2006)
Because faith can be deeply personal and difficult to organize into simple categories, it is a sensitive yet powerful setting device. On a service such as this, the system is necessarily finite and doesn’t have the ability to include every nuanced shade in the spectrum – without some artistic maneuvering of the account holder. How you define your own religion and religions of others based on your personal experiences may be different than the way they are labeled within eHarmony’s settings or within your potential matches’ minds.
In order to take the best advantage of the service as it is, it may be helpful to set aside personal definitions and work within the provided categories to get the matches that are best for you. It’s equally important to note that we are not recommending discarding your personal core beliefs to please someone else or to “be open” in a way which is contrived, but in a way that optimizes your experience.
I am disgusted that there is no email access to eharmony. There should be someone on line to instantly help with a problem. I had a list of men that I could look at but now the list is gone. I cannot join because they only use credit cards. Why not Pay Pal or another method, I want only 3 months bu …
Around 43051 marriages (and counting) were matched through eHarmony since March 2, 2005. Around 1337 members married today. - Harris Interactive (Caveat)
Many eHarmony users don’t know that there is a thriving (and free) information resource adjacent to the eHarmony matching service. eHarmony Advice has over 800 articles on dating and a community with 300,000 members and over a million posts. You can get answers and opinions on almost any subject you choose. You’re on eHarmony Advice right now. Click on “Boards” above to see the community.
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I am disgusted that there is no email access to eharmony. There should be someone on line to instantly help with a problem. I had a list of men that I could look at but now the list is gone. I cannot join because they only use credit cards. Why not Pay Pal or another method, I want only 3 months bu …
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