When it comes to men and online dating, it may seem like a numbers game. The more matches you make, the more messages you send, the better your chances… right? Well, as it turns out quality matters too, and a lot more than we thought. While trying to find out what makes a good online dating first message, the online dating site and app Zoosk, stumbled across an interesting truth—even if you’re a good-looking guy, sending the same message to multiple women will hurt your chances. Big time.
To find this out Zoosk looked at male members on the site who got the most matches, likes, and attention from other women (aka the guys who were either the best looking or had the most compelling dating profiles) but still didn’t get a lot of responses when they sent out messages. Why were these handsome men all striking out?
87% of the good-looking guys who weren’t getting replies to their messages, were sending the same exact message to multiple women.
And on average it was around 15 women. So even though copying & pasting the same message to multiple women may seem like a good way to save time, it just plain doesn’t work.
After looking more closely into the messages themselves, Zoosk also found that a lot of these men were sending very similar, generic messages (which makes sense because they were copying and pasting them). By looking for the five-word phrases that appeared most often they were able to pull out some of the phrases that got repeated the most.
So if you’re wondering what online dating first message clichés to avoid (copying and pasting aside) here are a few of the big ones:
Getting to know you…
The most common phrases that didn’t do well were things such as to get to know you, like to get to know you, to know more about you, would like to get to, love to get to know, and get to know you better.
Hope to hear from you…
Other phrases that women didn’t respond to were hope to hear from you, to hear back from you, forward to hearing from you, to hear from you soon, look forward to hearing from, and I hope to hear from.
I’m looking for…
Phrases such as looking for a nice girl, guy looking for a nice, looking for someone with similar, I’m looking for a person, a nice guy looking for, or nice guy looking for a didn’t do so well either.
Hi, how are you…
As we’ve found out before, the hi, hey, hello, how are you messages aren’t very successful and now we know it doesn’t matter if you’re attractive or not. Other common phrases among our good-looking guys who didn’t get a lot of replies are hello how are you doing, how are you doing today, hi there how are you, hi how are you doing, and how are you doing today.
While you’re online dating, it may be tempting to try and cut some corners to make things easier on yourself. It’s perfectly understandable to want to save a little time. Unfortunately, cutting this particular corner isn’t going to help you get what you want.
