I can't believe I never thought about this but I'm glad someone did. Last year, OKCupid.com completed a study analyzing 500,000 first email messages for open rates and response rates and was able to come up with some rules for the perfect first message.
The basic points were -
-Men: don't tell a woman that she's sexy cause it's skeazy and (I loved this part) chances are, "you're not";
-Everyone: Typos and netspeak are toxic in a first message;
-Everyone: Use an unusual greeting (although, the best result based on this study is "how's it going" which, I'm sorry, is not "unusual"); and
-Everyone: Invoking the name of the Lord is a turn-off... indeed, mentioning that you're an Atheist scores big points.
Some of the results are obvious like this one suggesting that male self effacement makes a man seem less threatening (duh):
And digging in deeper on other obvious notions like "mentioning something specific about a profile," I was kind of surprised by which specific references seemed to be the most popular:
REALLY? Tattoos outranked LITERATURE? Both of which were eclipsed by "ZOMBIE"?
The nerd in me wants to export all of the first messages I have received from online dating sites and run them through a pivot table to see the trends. Which would be a lot of work... but the real deterrent is that opening all of those messages to copy them into the spreadsheet would signal to these guys that I looked at their profile after we communicated and/or went out and it didn't work. And there's some mind-game element in that exercise, I think.
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