Picture this online dating scenario:
- You see someone you like.
- You read their profile, and wow.
- You send them a long message.
- You hang tight and…
- …you never get a reply.
Sadly, this is a typical story. Even on a lively site like OkCupid, only about a third (32%) of first messages get any response.
Some people, however, get much better results.
In the next two posts here on OkTrends, we’ll be taking a closer look at messaging and finding some ways to improve your own message response rate. We will not be dispensing generic advice. No. We’ve done research, and we have actual numbers *.
DON’T RAMBLE
Lots of messaging advice circulating out there tells you to “make yourself stand out” and “write something interesting,” and it appears many have taken those things to mean “write a whole lot.” Almost 16% of first messages are over 2000 characters (roughly 400 words), and the average is 743! We’ve found that the most effective messages are much shorter. Let’s start with this chart *:
The y-axis is reply percentage; the x-axis is message length, in characters; and the two lines are as follows. Red is the ratio of messages that get any reply. Green is the ratio of messages that get a reply that in turn gets replied to by the original sender. The idea is that this is the ultimate goal of the first message: to start a conversation with someone.
Messages sent by guys are, overall, only about half as likely to get replies as similar messages from women. But when you consider we’re including dudes who send out messages such as:
Your hot
DAm I got inch for you
and
Your people need to get out of Israel
a baseline reply-rate of 22% is looking pretty darn great. (All those were actual first messages, by the way. )
The graph clearly shows that in raw terms, it helps guys to write longer messages. But when we factor in the actual time it takes to type a given message, it becomes clear that in terms of time put in vs. conversations generated, shorter is actually better. If we imagine that people type messages at about 200 characters per minute, we get the following table:
Of course, we shouldn’t forget that there’s a certain amount of overhead involved with contacting someone (scanning her profile for common interests, thinking of jokes to make, taking a deep breath, clicking around, and so on). If we include 5 minutes of forethought, we find that the actual ideal first message length is 200 characters, or 1 minute’s worth of typing for the average writer.
Brevity is key. Something we learned building SparkNotes, in our pre-OkCupid days.
If you’re the kind of person who spends a little more time reading a profile and thinking about your message, say, 10 minutes, then the optimal length goes up a few words (to 270 characters), but, still, short is better. Savor this advice, men, for there are not many things in your world that fit this paradigm.

For women, brevity is even more in demand.
The shortest messages get almost the best absolute response rate, and the reply rate actually goes down as messages approach extreme length. Apparently, after about 360 words (1800 characters), you start scaring people off, like the online equivalent of a face tattoo. Of your life story. Let’s look at the table for women:
Incredibly enough, the optimal first outreach from a woman to a man is just 50 characters long! I’m willing to speculate that this graph is telling us that a guy decides whether or not to reply to a woman’s message regardless of what the message actually says. The first message’s true function is to bring her profile to his attention.
My guess is that he looks at her picture and if she’s his type, he writes back. On the one hand, such a superficial reality is depressing. On the other, over 40% of female-to-male first messages do get replied to, so, as a woman, if you’re writing to a few people who fit your basic demographic the odds are very good you’ll get a response. Anyhow, all this implies that the average woman’s time is better spent looking for the right people to write to, rather than composing detailed messages.

NEXT UP
We’ll look at how specific words and phrases affect reply rates. It’s a lot of data, and we’re just starting to sort through it. Here’s a peek:
Until then, ladies, I say to you: zombie!
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You forgot the key. Ask a question that is specifically related to their profile and open ended. People love to talk about themselves. People on OKC are no exception. Is there a way you can evaluate messages and responses based on spelling and punctuation correctness?
I enjoy long messages; it shows someone actually has something to say. Short and sweet = mindless, to me. That doesn’t mean I want to read a bunch of aimless rambling, but a long message can be fun and gives me more to reply to.
Everyone’s different. Perhaps the superficial types don’t want to read, so good for them. I made the mistake of thinking they were actually someone humble and interesting. Oh well.. their loss.
Something not mentioned regarding the strategy of sending more messages of less length, from a statistical perspective, is that you reduce your variance. This is just the “law of large numbers”. So for all those guys and gals who send message after message and seem to never get anything back, you might do well to hedge your bets by following the advice, not just because it increases the number of replies you’ll get on average, but also because it reduces the chance that just by bad luck you get no replies today even though you “should have” on average.
This is positive feedback. You should feel good about yourself.
Damn it, you mean all the time I have spent typing “holla atcha boi, gurrrrrl” was for nothing!?!?!?
For the guys…you usually can’t just walk up to a girl on the street and say, “I want to lick your ass.” That’s precisely why you probably shouldn’t begin your message to a female on here with something along those lines…even if you do indeed simply want to lick the girl’s ass. I’m not suggesting that it’s 100% impossible that such a line could ever work because it certainly could, but I am acknowledging the unlikeliness of receiving a response should such a line be used. I hope that helps. Good luck.
Antonio
OP, you are correct! I think you’re digging deeper than the scope of this post though. I think the point of the post was to write shorter messages; not to ramble on.
The next post looks great! I am actually going to try using every green word in my following messages to women. Let’s see how that goes!!!
I completely agree with cynical_nerd. I’m guilty of doing that most of the time. I also refuse to reply to someone who cannot spell simple words and punctuate properly. A message to me is formal like a letter, not like a text message. I want to know if that’s a common thing.
Open-ended questions are essential because people feel no urgency to respond if they simply receive a statement like “ur hot.” On that note, spelling and punctuation are incredibly important; they point to a careful personality that took the time to craft a good-looking and legible first contact.
Your advice is useful to people who are churning out notes.
But I’m not trying to maximize my time/effort ratio. I’m trying to maximize my chance of a response! Finding someone who is a good match, interesting and attractive to me is rare. I don’t want to blow it, so I don’t worry about going over 200 words, and almost always blow past 200 characters. Yeesh. Hard to express much in 40 words!
Cynical nerd: if you look at the selection of the words that are most often found in notes that don’t get replies, you have part of your answer about spelling and punctuation.
The stats here seem to assume that contacting someone is always opposite-sex; how do the stats change for men trying to get a reply from men, or women trying to get a reply from women?
I have a hard time reading that first graph and not coming the conclusion that for men to women, longer is better. Your expected-value-style “average words per conversation generated” isn’t really practical. This isn’t gambling, and it’s not like you can run out of words.
Hopefully you haven’t simply been taking the raw keyword frequency, but have also been building markov chains. Ideally, the next step would be a hidden markov model that correlates an input space of profiles with an output space of automatically generated messages most likely to get a response. Now that’s what I call an A-list feature!
by the way, ‘Your people need to get out of Israel’ is TOTALLY my new pickup line.
ur = conversation death.
Awesome.
What i think is interesting is that a study was actually needed to tell us that a woman won’t respond to the message “hey babe, ur lookin realy beautiful, if u wanna hit me up holla cutie, luv dipshit”……really?
So, would that make the ultimate message sent then “Pretty awesome zombie band tattoo. Haha, sorry?”
/awkwardly lame humor attempt
Your logic is flawed as far as the users are concerned. You’ve highlight the ideals for okcupid, NOT the user. As a guy the most successful message length according to your stats is 3000+ chars. We don’t send hundreds of messages each (well I don’t) so we’re looking to make the few we send count. Your advice to reduce message to 200 chars is flawed as it reduces my chance of a reply. Conversions per hour is irrelevant to users.
This post also suggests you looking at users message not just from a stats point but from a nosey bastard point of view.
Sorry, I feel awkward here, but your profile is awesome. So you were attacked by a zombie with a flaming-skull tattoo, would you try to survive by (a) reading literature to it or (b) playing music from your favorite band.
haha piercings.
damn. i meant to add *IF* you were attacked by a zombie.
stupid.
haha awesome.
Great statistical information here guys.
The Dude did say it best:
Or… el duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.
I generally write short messages to start, because it seems more natural.I may be totally smitten, and even elude to it, but if you send 400 words to a stranger it makes you seem like one of those crazy people on the bus that talk about some war before you’ve had the time to sit down.
Actually, I think the most interesting statistic would be a comparison of the ratio of . to ? compared to the response rate.
Essentially do women respond more to questions, or you sharing information about yourself?
Of course this is assuming that people use punctuation in their emails.
Damn! Now the zombie secret is out!
Awesome Zombies turn me on like nothing else. Except maybe Awesome Zombies with tattoos. 8D
I can understand why the male sexual innuendo messages don’t get replies, but it seems kind of rude to me not to reply to messages at all. But I have noticed women who are in a relationship seem to have a much higher reply rate than those not in a relationship. Maybe single women think that replying to a message implies they are interested in a date. Of course, I can understand if that’s true in my case, considering I live with my parents, am unemployed and clinically depressed. I’m just a cornucopia of desireability. lol
This is a wonderful analysis, but I’m disappointed that it’s so heteronormative. Us homos need advice too! I hope further posts in this series include numbers on the gays. Thanks!
@Nick: Guys are willing to equate just about anything to “she wants sex with me!”. So gals have learned that really just ignoring men they aren’t interested in is the best way to go. Uhh, were you serious about the unemployed etc. part?
I think there’s gonna be a big TL;DR; factor here with attractive women receiving messages. Give her a reason to check out your profile in 1 minute or less. I think that a woman who receives an enormous message will feel obligated to respond with an enormous message so she’s already gonna think “oh man tooooo much work”.
Nick: If people aren’t interested, they often won’t respond. That’s partially because not everyone wants an active rejection, and partially because many women have learned the hard way that sending a rejection email, however polite, tends to result in abusive or pitiful backlash from the rejected guy.
Also, women in relationships may reply more often because they get a lot fewer emails. Single women tend to get a *lot* of messages.
Personally, I prefer shorter messages, but ones which comment on my profile and then ask a couple questions to get conversation going. Long rambling messages containing a great deal of information tend to make me go “Um, so what?” That stuff should be in your profile. Also, a longer initial email tends to make me think “Ugh, now I have to answer that whole thing and I procrastinate. Shorter emails are easier. Often in a good conversation, the emails exchanged will become longer and longer, but I tend to find long initial emails intimidating.
I answer any short email that basically says “I like your profile”or “you’re really cute” with “Thanks” and leave it at that. That kind of email isn’t interesting, nor does it start a conversation, so unless the point is simply to pass on an idle compliment, those sorts of emails are sort of pointless.
It would be awfully handy if you could peel back the curtain a bit more. Almost all of the messages I get a reply to go to 3 messages, so become what you call a “conversation.” But that could easily be an example of:
My careful note
Their No Thanks reply
My “thanks anyway” response.
I’m MUCH more interested in finding out how the stats on intro notes compare to stats on “conversations” that keep going for weeks or months, or that are followed by chat sessions that go for hours, or sometime after result in both parties mutually favorite-ing each other. Those are MUCH better metrics for successful first message composition.
According to OKC’s tech analysts, the optimal keywords (awesome, sorry, haha, pretty, band, zombie, tattoo, awkward, literature and piercings) for a guy to use in a message could be forumlated into the following statement for the optimal introductory message, as formulated by me:
“Sorry, I was listening to my favorite band and had an awkward moment when I saw your awesome profile. It was as if I were suddenly attacked by a pretty zombie with tattoos and piercings with a maniacal “haha” laugh scrounging for interesting literature to read. Not that you are a zombie but you are pretty awesome”
I shall proceed to test this theory, if not for the humor of it alone. If you actually get this message from me, and bother to read this journal entry as well, please post a comment.
You’re analyzing this as if for a marketing campaign or a spammer, where quantity matters. How about when quality matters? And, more than that, if you’re the kind of person who generally tends to go into detail, write long messages and be very open, there seems to be very little point in trying to get a first reply from someone who’d be scared away by such a message.
Also, as ablondecouple said, a better way to present “conversations” would be to tell us how many actually last a while. Three replies from each might just barely cut it (though I’d be much more interested in 10+), three messages sent in total certainly doesn’t.
haha, a mathematical approach to getting “responded to” that’s just terrible…
how about instead of writing what gets the “most responses” you write what’s on your mind!!! fuck!! individuality is key, not strategy
As a girl who gets about 10-20 messages a day, I can say that I rarely reply to short messages with nothing to respond to. Also:
If the spelling/grammar is bad.
If it seems like a form letter.
If they sound boring.
If they call me hot/sexy/cute.
If they ask for a threesome or spit out some gibberish about me being bi and so we should totally meet omg!
Messages I DO respond to are:
Somewhat creative.
They catch my interest quickly. They aren’t TOO long or TOO short. Somewhere around 50-200 characters is good.
If they make me smile or laugh.
If they respond to something in my profile. (People rarely actually read it.)
If they use correct grammar/spelling. <—This turns me on!
That is all.
I’m just awesome, sorry. Haha! You’ve got a pretty band and zombie tattoo. Want to have an awkward conversation on literature about piercings?
ur awsome :/
Interesting… I’m going to have to start typing all of those green keywords into my message titles now!
“Pretty awesome zombie band tattoo! Awkward literature piercings? Haha, sorry.”
I’m going to get all the ladies…
Oh, I thought no-one replied to my messages because I never sent them because everyone I match has a big red “replies very selectively” on their profile and it’s kind of discouraging
That said, I am prone to rambling at about the third message in a conversation, which is usually about the time it ends.
Now that most females love to shop I could say “Limited time offer only” or “Advertised item may vary from actual in store item.” or ” No returns after 30 days.” in other words your stuck with me…hehe
So, exactly how dismal is the response rate for winks?
Want to see a pretty awesome zombie band?
You could predict whether someone will respond to the message by using
1) logistic regression on keyword counts
2) message length
3) match/friend/enemy scores between the two people
4) age difference
5) sex
6) sexual orientation (ex. bisexual women are probably less likely to respond to men, more likely to respond to women)
7) the response rate of the person getting the message.
9) keyword counts in the profile of the sender (might be a minor factor)
the biggest reason i haven’t responded to a lot of the messages i’ve received while using okc are as follows: 1 - most of the guys who messaged me are too old or too young. 2 - most of the guys who messaged me did not have a photo. 3 - most of the guys who messaged me wrote inane things like “hey sexy” or “ur hot” or used numbers to spell words. 4 - most of the guys who messaged me were extremely physically unattractive.
i know what i want in a man and i don’t have a lot of free time to humor every loser who happens by my profile. furthermore, to assume that physical attraction isn’t a huge part of who we are is ludicrous. i plan on having boatloads of sex with my next boyfriend. why shouldn’t i want someone who is in shape, my age, emotionally/financially stable, and super sweet faced?
My new introductory message: “Haha, sorry, but I had to write and say your profile is pretty awesome. I’m in a band called Zombie Tattoo. We’re a little awkward on stage, but definitely getting better. Our major influences are Victorian literature and facial piercings. Tell me about you!”
BAM! Let the hits come rollin’ in.
I’m pretty sure there’s a strong correlation in reply rate to how good your pictures are, and whether your matching percentage is high. A content analysis of the message sender’s profile would yield insight, as well.
I don’t reply to people who have boring/stupid/empty user profiles, or who don’t have pictures, or who I don’t find physically attractive in their pictures, unless they’re writing something really interesting.
Of course, my pictures are awesome, and I don’t get as high a response rate as I feel I deserve, so clearly even if you have everything going for you, a lot of people just aren’t going to write back, and most likely I think it’s because they’re either not interested in you, because your pictures+profile+intro message didn’t appeal.
It’d be interesting to know how much of a contributing factor the overall site experience is to the response rate; in other words, I think a lot of (especially female) users are turned off by the deluge of horribly written messages from illiterate douchebags, who think a crude, sexist come-on is actually going to help them get laid, and end up deleting their profile two weeks after signing up for the site.
So, OKCupid, are you saying that you are monitoring all our messages? And you’re actually reading them, too?
I was very surprised by those statistics.
I am a straight guy. I tend to send brief, meaningful messages to women who have a high match % with me and who seem to be into my type. I always mention something from their profile. I am polite and friendly and I have impeccable punctuation and spelling — I actually have writing skills (I am a full-time writer/editor). I have a profile that friends have told me is fine; physically, I usually hear that I am decently attractive.
Yet, for some reason my response rate is more like 2%.
Go figure.
A note to women who like to get long messages: since I have never met you, chances are I don’t have that much to say to you specifically. Consider the possibility that some men who send very long messages are copying and pasting from emails they’ve sent to 250 other women.
I usually send a short first message just to see if I get a response, and then start with the longer ones.
In the rare instance that I find a woman to whom I feel I have a lot to say even before talking to her, I’ll send a long initial message. I believe I’ve gotten a response to every single such message I’ve sent, but they’re usually people I seem to resonate very well with, straight off the bat.
Ur realy beautiful lookin babe, luv wat u did with ur hair, dont u wanna hit this, cutie? holla!