Virtual Gifts will almost Double your Success in Online Dating

The owner of DateHookup.com, Dustin, wanted to find out if sending a Virtual Gift with your mail message to a member would increase the chance that the member would reply back. He took about 1 million first contact messages from last month (first contact refers to the fact that the member hasn't communicated with the person before) and compared the ones which included a virtual gift with ones that did not.

He found out that it did greatly improve your chances of getting a response. Your average mail message sent on DateHookup without a gift will have a 14 percent chance of getting replied to. With a virtual gift your chances nearly double to 26 percent. It sounds like if you really like the person, it would be stupid not to include a virtual gift to increase your chances of a reply.

I was surprised at the results. I figured that virtual gifts would improve the chance of someone replying, but not by almost 100 percent. Another thing I was surprised about was the actually reply percentage of 14 to 26 percent. I do not know the overall average reply rate, but if an equal number of virtual gift messages were compared with messages without virtual gifts then it would be 20 percent. This means 80 percent of all messages sent that are first contacts go unanswered. Is this reply percentage rate (which feels low to me) a DateHookup problem, or does this average reflect most dating sites which operate similar to DateHookup? I bet this average reply rate is similar across most free sites.

For more on the story visit the new DateHookup Blog. For more about this dating site you can read our review of DateHookup.com.