How Her Last Login Date Affects The Probability of a Reply
You see it lurking there, next to her photo and age, hovering under her headline, but what does it mean? 1 week, 2 hours, more than a month…you know this information is important, you know you should take it into account, but how? We’re talking of course about the mysterious Last Login Date.
Online dating sites are practically overflowing with data. They bombard you with information, but don’t give you the tools to interpret it.
Here at Virtual Dating Assistants, we track 19+ variables related to each and every initial contact email we send on behalf of our clients. And given that we’ve already sent well over 10k messages during the past 12 months…that adds up to quite a significant pool of data.
For every initial contact email we compose, we record the Last Login of the recipient the moment before we send it. We use the following 5 categories to classify the data: 1) online now, 2) online within 24 hours, 3) online within 1 week, 4) online within 3 weeks, and 5) not online in over 3 weeks.
Recently, we decided to break down the data and do some analysis to discover how messaging recently active vs. inactive users can affect your positive response rate.
Like the experiment we conducted for our last “Breaking Down the Data” post, for simplicity’s sake we just analyzed the data from men emailing women. We knew that the longer a woman hadn’t been active, the less likely she’d be to respond…but we have to admit we were quite eager to break down the data and check out the numbers.
Our Results
We had an idea that the response rate would start to taper off after the 1 week mark, but even we were surprised at the extent of the results.
According to the data, if you email a woman who last logged in 1-3 weeks ago then your response rate will be 60% lower than if you message one that’s ‘online now’. And good luck getting responses from women who haven’t accessed their profile in over 3 weeks… here our response rate dropped off to 0%!
What can you, the everyday online dater glean from these results?
The last login date is extremely important so you should always have your search results ordered so that you start with the most active members — the ones that are ‘online now.’
And clearly you shouldn’t bother emailing women who haven’t been active within the past 3 weeks. It’s a huge waste of time!
So why is it that recently active users are so much more likely to reply to you than inactive ones?
It’s simple… the longer it has been since someone logged in, the more likely it is that they’ve met someone or stopped using the site without deleting or hiding their profile.
Some just plum forget they even set up a profile, and never delete it. So beware of anybody that hasn’t logged in for a while and has a sparsely completed profile. You could be messaging a profile from the realm of the living dead…an online dating zombie!
By the way, when was your Last Login?
Breaking Down the Data: How Her ‘Last Login Date’ Affects Your Results
