Online Dating Blog

Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.
– William W. Watt

OkCupid.com has some interesting statistics on online dating emails, specifically some numbers on who gets responses to their first email. Creating good first emails is something I’ve discussed in my online dating guide and also in some posts. My advice has always been keep your first contact brief and OkCupid agrees with this…but for some very different reasons.

My main reasoning behind shorter first emails is that your profile should be your selling point, not your first email. This approach first and foremost keeps your “weird” factor low. Super long emails have a tendency to cause some people to think “stalker”. Remember, you are working against the bad impressions created by every weird person who has come before you. Also, if they don’t like your profile, excessive writing is just taking up time that could have been used elsewhere.

OkCupid on the other hand strictly uses their statistics when deciding on how long your email should be. For men, their statistics suggest that longer emails result in greater success. Their numbers suggest that very short emails get around 25% replies and very long emails get around 35% replies. However, they recommend brief emails because you can write many more short emails in the same time-frame a long email would take. In other words, if I can either write four short emails in an hour or one long email in an hour, my odds of getting a response from one of the four women I write is far greater than the single 35% chance from the one woman I contact with a long email.

This theory seems strong as long as two things are assumed: a) you have a relatively limited amount of time to contact people and b) there are a large number of people you wish to contact. If I’m able to spend hours every night writing emails or if there are only a few people I want to contact it seems to me that, based on their numbers, you would want to write longer emails. I don’t mean to confuse the issue; I do believe shorter emails are better. It just seems their numbers suggest that there are actually a few decisions that can be made depending on how many people you want to contact or how much time you have. Plus, their strictly mathematical approach makes things feel rather impersonal.

OkCupid’s statistics for women show that the shorter the email, the more success almost 100% of the time. Just 360 words starts to scare the guys off ladies…apparently us guys are on the lookout for stalkers too!

All that said, let me talk a little bit about statistics. I’m not a big fan of making decisions solely based off of statistics. If you see a profile that you feel you have a connection with and are compelled to write a longer email, I think you should. The idea that you must make a decision in a particular way just because an equation says it’s the action most likely to work is…well, silly. If you look at the numbers, particularly the chart for women, the difference isn’t really all that much between the success of the long versus the short emails anyway.

Additionally, statistics just hide so much! For example, how many of the short emails were a guy sending out the same “You’re hot” email over and over. Don’t forget that OkCupid.com is a free site and because of this their statistics are based on a free dating site’s activity. I think the concept of a free dating site is great but there is no doubt in my mind that the free sites have much more riffraff. If you want to test this it’s easy: if you’re a woman sign up for a free dating site and if you’re a man ask a woman you know to sign up for one. The amount of malarkey that women have to deal with on the free sites is…excessive.

I can’t help but feel that the “short email length” statistics for men would have had a much higher success percentage on a site where the members were more serious about wanting a relationship. Not one where there’s tons of “Ur hawt” messages flying back and forth every day, muddying the water on statistics like this. Paying for online dating may not be fun but it does improve many, many things about the experience.

Regardless of how strong these statistics are, my opinion remains the same: for your first email shorter is better.