Most of the people who reach your signup form never finish it. That is normal on every dating site. What is not normal is losing them silently.
These are the warmest people you will ever have: they found you, they wanted in, they got as far as typing their email. Bringing one of them back costs you an email. Finding a new one costs you advertising.
What the platform collects
Everything a visitor managed to type into the signup form before leaving, plus the location their connection came from. Passwords are not stored.
Admin panel: Customers > Unregistered (/admin/incomplete_signup/not_registered).
One condition: a record is only kept if the person entered an email. Without it there is no way to reach them, so there is nothing to store.
This has a practical consequence for your form: ask for the email first, before age, city, preferences and photos. Everything typed after the email is a bonus. Everything asked before it is a chance to lose the person entirely.
Settings
Admin panel: Services > Customize your service > System > Incomplete signup (/admin/incomplete_signup/index/).
Two things to set: how often the data is collected, and how long to wait before a record appears in your list.
Why the delay matters. Many people do not abandon the form — they get distracted and come back twenty minutes later. A delay of an hour or two keeps those people out of your list, so you do not email someone who has already joined.
What to write to them
You have their email and the fact that they stopped. That is enough for a short, useful message — and short is the point. This is not a newsletter.
What works:
Offer help, not persuasion. "Looks like something went wrong when you were signing up — can I help?" A person who hit a technical problem will answer. A person who changed their mind will ignore it, and that is fine.
Say what is waiting. How many people are on the site in their city right now. This is the one number that matters to someone joining a dating site.
Give a reason to come back today. A few days of a paid service, some site currency, a free highlight on their profile. It costs you nothing real and turns "later" into "now".
Write once. Maybe twice, several days apart. A third message turns a warm contact into a complaint.
What does not work: a long letter about how wonderful your site is. They already knew that — that is why they started signing up. Something else stopped them.
Read the list, not just the emails
The records are worth more than the contacts in them. Look at where people stop.
If most records hold only an email and nothing else, your form asks too much too early. If people fill everything and still do not finish, the problem is at the end — email confirmation, a payment step, a photo requirement.
Fixing the form brings back more people than any email campaign, because it works on everyone who comes after.
To see the same picture in numbers rather than one record at a time, see analytics for dating platforms.
Before you write to anyone
These people never finished registering, which means they never agreed to anything. In some countries writing to them is fine, in others it needs care. Check what applies where your members are, and always give a way to opt out in the message itself.
Common questions
Someone appears in the list but has already registered. Why?
They came back and finished after the record was created. Increase the delay in the settings.
Can I send these messages automatically?
Not from this section — it gives you the list, you write the messages. For automated sequences, connect your mailing tool: see connecting MailChimp.
What is a good return rate?
Anything above a few percent pays for itself, because the cost is one email. Do not expect more — most people who leave a signup form have simply changed their mind.