Online Dating Stats from OkCupid
OkCupid just came out with a must-read article for anyone who is dating online.
They looked at over 500,000 (?!?!) first contacts on their site and figured out what to say and what not to say in an initial contact email.
How Long Did it Take to go Through 500,000 Emails?
First of all, the average reply rate was 32%, meaning about a third of the initial contact emails get a response – not too bad. By the way, the average man-to-woman reply rate was 27%. So the interesting part of the article is what was said in the emails to deviate from that average response rate.
Some highlights…
- If the word “atheist” was mentioned, the response rate was 43%. And if “god” was mentioned, the response rate was 30%.
- If you mention connecting outside of the site, there’s a HUGE dropoff in the response rate. They ranged from 10-18% when mentioning “gmail”, “chat”, “aim”, “yahoo”, “msn”, and “email”.
- Greetings other than “hi” or “hello” did very well – “how’s it going” has a response rate of 53% (wow!), “what’s up” 42%, and “hi” only 24%.
- This is my favorite. Using slang absolutely destroys your chances of ever connecting. If the pseudo-word “ur” is in a post, the response rate is a miniscule 7%.
What do you think of the article? Any surprises? Does it matter that OkCupid is a free site? Do you think there would be any differences with Match?
Comments (4)
I don’t think it really matters that OkCupid is a free site, but what kind of people you meet on it. If you find someone who is honest and really looking for a relationship it will be much more successful. But of course there’s always the issue of not knowing who’s on the other side of the computer, and if they’re telling you the truth or feeding you lies. So again, what it comes down to is who you are talking to.
[...] the post from OKCupid about what to say and what not to say in an initial contact email? I was wondering what people [...]
Hi – It’s great to read such interesting writing on the Internet as I have been able to discover here. I agree with much of what is written here and I’ll be coming back to this website again. Thanks again for publishing such great reading material!!
Hey everyone, greetings from Germany. This is a cool blog. Does anyone have any advice on staying out of the friend zone with girls? Honestly I’m sick of girls telling me they just want to be friends. Maybe I’m being too nice?