Sales & Marketing || Online Dating
Since online dating is all about selling & marketing yourself, why not apply some online sales & marketing practices to your dating life? The Okcupid blog has done a number of studies to understand what matters, but here’s an actionable list.
Build a lead list || mark your favorites. As the sales saying goes, “plan your work, and work your plan”. But keep in mind to…
Keep the top of the funnel wide || message more people. Sure, you should have your standards. And yes, canned messaging is not as good as something that shows you actually skimmed their profile. But it’s a numbers game. Not everybody is gonna convert. (Yeah, go ahead. You can define “convert” however you want, horn dog).
Email marketing || messaging. AB test, baby! Variables you can test are all the same, if not even better: your profile image that appears, subject lines/ openers, length of text in the body, content of the body (ask a question or make a comment), time of day sent, day of week sent, demographic of recipient, date the recipient joined or last logged in & followup messaging.
Profile optimization || landing optimization. Less flexibility here because you don’t have full control of the profile page, but there’s room for testing: photos (angle of face, lighting, with friends or wo friends, action shots, in the mirror, with or wo clothes, outdoors, activities) details & text (the copy itself, less vs more completed fields, jokeyness vs seriousness, bulleting items, grammar & punctuation, maybe even have a friend write one for you to see if style matters).
You probably won’t be able to gather enough data for full blown optimization, but hopefully you can get things directionally better and won’t need to. :)