Breaking Down the Data: Online Dating Signs of Interest

Increase Your Response Rate by Focusing on Women That Notice You First

Was she looking at me? Was it accidental? Should I go talk to her?

A guy can drive himself crazy trying to interpret a woman’s sidelong glance or a brush on the leg. The same is true in the online world. Although the rules of interaction are more constrained, there is still plenty of room for misinterpretation and confusion.

Is She Looking At Me?

While we can’t tell you if that cute babe that looked at your profile last week is really into you, or if that hot chick that sent you a wink isn’t just jerking you around, we can tell you the next best thing: your odds of success.

Aside from sending you a direct email, there are a few signs that suggest a girl is interested in you – the most blatant being the wink function found on most online dating sites. Many sites also have a number of other less direct tools (i.e. Match.com’s Daily 5) that allow you to give a hint that you’re interested, but they’re not as clear as a wink. Finally, most sites will also record who’s viewed your profile.

Here at Virtual Dating Assistants, we track no less than 19 variables relating to each and every initial contact email we send on behalf of a client.

A few weeks ago, we decided it was time to dig into the data and see just how these signs of interest affected our positive response rate.

For each of the 12,400 emails we’ve sent on behalf of male clients since June of last year, we’ve recorded whether the recipient had:

a) shown no prior interest, b) winked at our client, c) viewed his profile, d) shown some other kind of interest. (We did this for our female clients too but we’ve had more male clients so we’ll focus on the guys for now; sorry ladies).

While we’re not scientists, we are online dating and marketing experts, and we couldn’t resist a little hypothesis. We predicted that any sign of interest, whatsoever, would have a clear, measurable effect on our response rate.

So far we’ve had clients whose ages ranged from mid-20s to early-50s. Individually they varied a lot in terms of their attractiveness level, but taken as a whole were pretty much average-looking guys. And importantly, almost all of these clients were looking for girls a little bit younger, and a little bit better looking than themselves. We didn’t just send out messages to every woman that viewed their profiles. Each woman who showed a sign of interest first had to meet our clients’ (at times stringent) standards.

Our Results

Note: We did not analyze less frequent signs of interest (Daily 5s, HotListed, Favorited, etc) as they weren’t used frequently enough to warrant a full study.

When compared to messages sent to women who had not previously showed any sign of interest…

•    Messages to women who simply viewed a client’s profile were 78% more likely to receive a response.
•    Messages that were sent in response to a wink were 392% more likely to receive a reply!

So, the data we have so far indicates that responding to these signs of interest will on average result in a similarly high 300+% increase in positive response rate.

Marketers often talk of cold leads and warm leads, and how it’s much easier to convert a warm lead (a person who has at least some familiarity/potential interest in the product being sold). It doesn’t even have to be all that warm to make it worth the seller’s time because marketing, in essence, is a numbers game. This knowledge is not lost on astute online daters.

In future posts we’ll talk more about writing what we call a “wink-worthy profile,” but in the meantime, think about what you can do to get more people to at least click on yours.

How’s your primary profile picture? When’s the last time you logged in? Is your headline funny? Is your first paragraph captivating? Remember, these are the things people look at before clicking on your profile - and sometimes it’s even less.

Think about how long it takes for you to decide not to click on a profile. You might have less than a second to make your first impression – so you better make it stand out!