If you want to meet more women on dating sites, you’ll need to get more responses to your profile and emails.

There is one method that trumps all others in terms of consistently getting the most responses from women.

The method I’m talking about is called split testing, and it’s something you must understand if you want to meet more women online.

So what is split testing?

Split testing is a marketing method designed to determine which one of two options converts best, or gets you more responses.

How Does Split Testing Get You More Responses?

Say, for example, that you split test two emails that you send to women. Split testing would allow you to determine which email gets more responses.

You could then send the email that converts better to women to get higher responses than you would have if you had sent the other email.

By doing this, you find out which emails to use to get the most responses from women.

Each time you conduct a split test, one version will outperform the other. By doing this, you can make incremental improvements on whatever you’re testing.

Over time, those incremental improvements, even if they are small, can mean a huge difference in your response rates.

You can split test everything you do online, from your profile wording and pictures to your emails.

How Split Testing Works

For split tests to work effectively, only one variable is tested at a time.

This is like the old rule you learned in junior high when conducting scientific experiments. You changed only one variable at a time so you could be sure the change you made was responsible for the outcome of that experiment.

For example, let’s say you wanted to split test email subject lines. You would have two identical emails with the only difference being the subject lines.

You would then send those two emails with different subject lines to two different groups of women.

If one email got more responses than the other, you could be fairly certain the subject line was responsible for the increase in response.

To make the test statistically valid you would need to send the different emails to enough women to account for flukes and other anomalies.

You might have to send the emails to 10 women or 100 to find out which subject line performs better, but you’ll usually find out pretty quickly which of two options works better.

After you determine which subject line works better, that subject line would then become the winner or “control.”

You would then test the winner against other subject lines.

After you’ve conducted a series of tests, and one subject line proves to be the winner each time, you’ve found a good email subject line that you can use over and over to get higher responses.

You would then want to create more email subject lines and conduct additional split tests to find other subject lines that work well too. By doing this you would create a group of email subject lines that all work well that you could use again and again.

When you email a new new woman you could then use one of those proven subject lines to have a better chance of getting a response from her, and you wouldn’t have to spend any additional time thinking about what to write in the subject line.

You don’t have to stop at testing subject lines though.

You can split test nearly anything:

• profile wording
• profile headline
• profile pictures
• initial emails
• subsequent emails
• how you ask for a woman’s number (see How To Get Women’s Phone Numbers On Dating Sites)
• time of day you send emails
• how long to wait before replying to emails
• or anything else you can think of.

You can make slight or drastic changes to the variables you’re split testing.

Think big picture first and then focus in on smaller details.

Don’t be afraid to try crazy ideas now and again (within reason). I’ve found some of my best material by trying crazy things I thought would never work, but they did. You’ll probably be surprised at what works best.

Remember, most women think very differently than men, and what they respond to is different too.

The Only Women You Should Run Split Tests On

This point is very important, so listen closely.

You want to make sure you run split tests on your intended audience. Conducting split tests on anyone else is a waste of your time.

Who is your intended audience? The kind of women you want to meet and date.

The reason it’s so important to conduct split tests on only these women is because you want to learn what makes them respond best.

Different types of women will respond very differently to the same message. The way to find out what your type of women respond best to is by split testing on them over and over.

Of course, every person has their own idiosyncrasies, but odds are you’ll find many commonalities you can leverage.

Let’s Create A Split Test Right Now

To make sure you understand how split testing works, let’s create a split test together right now.

Let’s say you’ve just started on a dating site, and you’re not sure what to say in your emails.

You might start with something like this:

Email 1

*****************************************

Hey,

I read your profile and you sound
fun, so I decided to email you.

I noticed in your profile you talked about…

*****************************************

Another version might go something like this:

Email 2

*****************************************

Hey,

I read your profile and you sound
fun, unlike most of the women on
here that sound so serious.

I noticed in your profile you talked about…

*****************************************

These aren’t great emails, but they are a start. Split testing is how you improve them.

Assuming everything else about these emails is the same, you’re testing one variable – the last half of the first sentence.

The first sentence ends like this, “so I decided to email you,” while the second sentence ends like this, “unlike most of the women on here that sound so serious.”

You would then send each email to two different groups of women.

I like to send each email I’m testing to at least 10 women (for a total of at least 20 women). In other words, I would send Email 1 to 10 women and Email 2 to 10 different women.

You don’t have to email 20 women at once, but you would want to send out both emails at the same time to eliminate other potential variables like the time of day you sent the messages.

So you could send Email 1 to five women and Email 2 to five women on Monday, and then repeat that process on Tuesday or Wednesday, for a total of 20 women.

After you send the emails and wait a predetermined amount of time (three days is good), you then look at your response rates using the simple calculation below.

Split testing your profile works slightly differently since you can have only one profile up on any site at any one time.

You would run one profile for a week or two and send out some emails, and then run a different profile for another week or two.

To make the conditions as similar as possible for each profile, make sure to send out approximately the same number of emails, and of course, use the same emails too.

You would then determine which profile performed better by determining your response rates to the emails you sent out while each profile was up. You use the emails as the metric to determine which profile worked better because that’s the easiest metric you can directly measure when testing only profile differences.

Simple Calculation Gets You More Women

You determine the winner by tallying up which email got more responses, and then put those figures into percentages so you can make easy comparisons to other split tests.

To break the responses down into percentages, you just divide the number of responses by the total number of women you sent that email to.

For example, if you sent an email to 20 women and six of them responded, you would have 6/20 or 0.3, which is 30%.

The email with the better conversion rate (higher percentage) is the winner.

If the results are too close to determine a clear-cut winner, send out both emails to another group of 20 women.

I’m sure it’s obvious by now that the reason you want a higher conversion rate is because more women will respond to that email and hence you will meet more women.

Ding, Ding, Ding! We Have A Winner!

After you determine a winner, you would then put together another email to test against it, and then send those emails to 20 more women to find another winner.

As far as the kinds of changes you can make to emails, you could try to improve on the current winning email by making a small change to it, or you could send out a completely different email. (These would be two different tests against the winning email.)

You’ll want to save the results of all your split tests so you can identify trends and predict other variations that might improve your response rate.

The easiest way I’ve found to save your results is by inputting the information (percentages, email titles, email differences, profile differences, etc.) into a spreadsheet such as Microsoft® Excel or a free option like openoffice.org.

I’ll put together another article to show you in detail the easiest way to log the information you learn from your split tests.

Last, but not least, the best part about what you find out by split testing is…

Women On Autopilot

It doesn’t matter if your profile and emails are horrible right now. If you conduct split tests consistently, and you use the information you learn from those tests, you will get more responses and meet more women. That’s the only thing that can happen.

If you’re looking for a magic bullet to meeting more women online, this is the closest you’re going to get unless you have someone else write and split test your emails for you.

Conducting just one or two tests isn’t going to do anything for you though. Conducting 50 split tests will, although you probably won’t have to conduct that many tests to find some great emails.

Once you’ve written a killer email, you can add it to your arsenal and use it over and over again to meet women on autopilot.

I know this may sound like a lot of work, but the end result is you end up with some killer emails and a profile that allow you to meet as many women as you have time for.

If you’re going to be on a dating site, what’s better? Doing a little bit of work for great results, or sitting back and doing nothing and getting crappy results?

The choice is yours, and it’s an easy one.

If you have any questions about split testing leave a comment.

Brandon Duran

Related posts:

1. Reader Q&A – Setting Up Split Tests This past week I got some great questions from a...
2. How Many Women Should You Email? Success on dating sites boils down to getting women to...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This entry was posted on February 25, 2010 at February 25, 2010 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.