OMMA Magazine has a story about Eharmony and how they went against the grain by using the word marriage in their advertising. Lucas Donat, CEO of Donat Wald, talks about how Eharmony sought to differentiate the service by focusing on people serious about finding relationships and it’s rigorous questionnaire. Donat reviews some of the cable tv and radio campaigns, and the article finishes up with Eharmony marketing executive Suzanne Nagel talking about Eharmony’s online marketing, where 70% of visitors are coming from search engines and 24% of total visitors became paid subscribers in 2004.
No related posts.
{ 6 comments }
no freakin way… There is no way I can believe this… and if the numbers are for some reason true… I wonder what their retention rate is…
Please see this PPT presentation about how the U.S. market opportunity remains enormous. (page 6)
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/11/111999/presentations/IAC_Personals.pdf
or
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=111999&p=irol-EventDetails&EventId=804120 (Select Personals)
Although the information is from NOV 2003, the leader company named in the PPT presentation STILL has ONLY nearly 1% penetration of the whole U.S. market, because according to Census 2000 figures, there are nearly 89.3 million persons singles at the US, and nearly 1.074.500 are net paid subscribers of that leader online dating site (From http://www.iac.com/iac_q1_05.pdf page 6)
If you add net paid subscribers of all U.S. dating sites, perhaps the total is less that 10 million. There are 76 million waiting for quality at affordable cost
(Perhaps USD 300 first year. Note that OffLine Chains charges USD1,500 minimun)
Cordially,
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com
The industry drove itself right into the current situation. Too many sites, unprofessionally run, lack of customer service. Flattened growth curve comes from the fact that a) online dating isn’t new anymore and b) dating services are not innovating fast enough to keep up with customer demand.
What more are dating services going to do to go after the remaining 70 million singles? A large percentage of those 70 million singles will never use online dating for whatever reason, so let’s call it 40 million. Many of those 40 million belong to free sites already, so they are in the game, just not paying directly.
The cost of acquiring new customers gets higher each quarter. At what point is it cost-prohibitive to land new customers through traditional means?
Smaller sites can never compete unless they niche out and go to a high-touch model. How can a mom& mom dating site afford $25 acquisition cost? 90% of sites will never be able to accomplish this. They are dying off each day, which is not necessarily a bad thing because they never brought much value to the table in the first place.
Online introduction services are going to have to take on a whole new business model in order to survive. Blending with social networking services will help, need to increase the value to the customer, give them more to do, diffferent ways to interact. More live events(better run) and video and audio(member-rated) need to come back into style. Outsourcing customer service is another option to appeal to those that don’t want to be just another 10-digit number in a database.
“How can a mom& mom dating site afford $25 acquisition cost”
I think you are going to find that number is going to go up sharply in the next 6 months. I also strongly believe that the match.com business model will die, and companies like eharmony will grow in leaps and bounds.
Are you speaking about a SECOND BIG BUBBLE?
When it will explode?
Cordially,
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com
I wouldn’t call the popularity of online dating a bubble, more like mild satiation of dating demand. If you look at the revenue generated it’s definitely following the 80/20 rule, perhas more like 90/10. Eharmony is spending $60-80 million on marketing and advertising in the upcoming year, which I would definitely characterize as a sharp increase in acquisition costs. Match will follow, less $$$ but they must keep up the spending with Eharmony to remain competitive.
One difference between the two is that Eharmony has a marketing message in place that works very well for them and they don’t have to change a thing. Match on the other hand needs to come up with a message that connects with consumers deeper than “Match is easy.”
Comments on this entry are closed.