Match.com, like many other sites, has something called “winks” that you can send to other users. It’s basically a quick way to let someone know that you’re interested in them. Now, when you receive a wink, a screen pops up asking if you’d like to email and stating that:
She’s 15X more likely to respond to an email.(At least that’s what happened for a male match.com member at the time of this writing.)
Think about what this implies.
The following is an excerpt from my new book, A Hacker's Guide to Online Dating: How to Train Your Computer to Get You Dates. In it I discuss all my tips and tricks learned over years of online dating, how to optimize your online dating strategy, and how to automate the whole process.
So you want to know if your online dating emails need to be personalized? You want to know whether you need to read her profile to craft an eloquent essay about all the things you have in common, or if you can get away with sending a generic, cut-and-paste email to everyone. It’s an important question. Crafting that perfect personalized email takes a lot of time. And if you consider the fact that even with a perfect email, the likelihood of a response is fairly low, you’re going to have to send somewhere between 5 and 20 emails to get one response. All that time writing emails adds up fast.
If you do some research online, you’ll probably see a lot of articles written by women whining about how generic emails are such a turn off, how unromantic they are, and how no one wants to respond to them, yada, yada, yada. Some articles are less emotional, but also conclude that generic emails are less likely to get a response, usually using a mixture of opinion an anecdote. But those people are missing the point. They’re answering the wrong question. The question isn't, Do people prefer personalized emails to generic ones? The question isn't even, Are people more likely to respond to personalized emails than generic ones? No, the relevant question is much more specific: Is the increase in response likelihood gained by a personalized email over a generic email worth the time it takes to write it? The answer to that question is an unequivocal no. Here’s how I know.
Dear loyal readers,
I’m ridiculously excited and disgustingly proud to announce the release of my new book A Hacker's Guide to Online Dating, How to Train Your Computer to Get You Dates. Available on Amazon here.
If you enjoy the blog, you’ll love this book. It’s everything I've learned throughout my years in the online dating world. All the tips and tricks on how to optimize the dating process to do what online dating is supposed to do – get you actual face to face dates – as efficiently as possible. Basically, overcoming the paradox of choice. I've even included the automation code that I personally developed and use to have my computer do most of the work for me. Online dating on steroids!
I’ll be posting excerpts periodically – there’s so much good material here that I’m not going to limit it to just the book - but to wet your whistle, the table of contents is below. I also want to do something for my loyal readers. For the next 5 days, the kindle ebook is going to be available absolutely free! No strings attached. The whole thing. Free. What are you waiting for? Here’s that link again. The only thing I ask in return is this: if you like it, give me a review on Amazon. It always helps. And let me know how my strategies work out for you. You can always reach me here in the comments section.
Vaya con dios, Dorian
