Finding the right words to start a conversation can be hard, especially if you're talking to a stranger on a dating app.

The most successful openers, it turns out, are positive, thoughtful, creative and slightly personalized. That's according to Hinge , a popular matchmaking service which connects users based on shared Facebook friends. Hinge published a report Thursday on the best ways to start a conversation with your matches and improve your chances of getting a response.

The report is the result of a month-long experiment, during which members of the Hinge team crafted over 100 different openers and let a small portion of its users access them. Whenever the app matched those people with someone new, it sent them a prompt to use one of the conversation starters. The company then tracked what lines were sent most frequently and measured response rates to detect trends.

Here are the best tips Hinge gleaned from its study:

1) Don't open with "Hey"

If you're really, really hoping to get a response from your match, a vague greeting won't get you stellar results. As far as response rates go, Hey performs at average, while Hey, whats up performs at 4 percent above average.

"Were aiming to help users do better than average, and are thus showing examples of the types of things that do better than a generic opener," Karen Fein, Hinges vice president of marketing, told The Huffington Post. "That said, there are also openers that do far worse than 'Hey, whats up.' ... The poorest performers are typically negative or pessimistic in tone."

Instead, people are more likely to respond to messages that display a unique question about lifestyle, food preferences or musical taste: