Today’s guest post is by Eddy Ankrett. Sixteen years ago, Eddy set up Elite Introductions – an offline dating service with a strong focus on personal contact with members. Today, Eddy is Chairman of Dateline PLC, one of the UK’s most established dating companies, which offers online and offline with a personal offline home interview. Eddy is also a Director at White Label Dating.
Having experienced on – and offline dating for close to two decades, I’m constantly surprised to see how little the two industries seem to be prepared to learn from each other. They both have significant strengths – volume and accessibility in the case of online, and valuable personal contact and security offline.
Of course, each also has limitations and weaknesses. The percentage of daters who register with online sites but leave before committing to paid membership can be as high as 70%. With offline, retaining members is far easier, but profit is often be limited by the sheer resource needed to manage a high volume of clients.
The volume of online daters means that the industry remains healthily profitable, but the situation could be vastly improved for agencies and members. After all, it is vital to remember that our dating services exist to bring single people together in happy, well-matched relationships.
To me, the solution is simple and very obvious. The reluctance to give members what they so clearly want – the best of both worlds – must end. It is time to embrace the links between on- and offline dating, combining the ease of use and cost efficiency of internet dating with the verification, personal profile help, and security of an offline consultant.
There is certainly profit to be made from the high numbers of online daters, as well as from the fewer (but far higher spending) offline singles. However, some simple changes within the industry could easily make a hugely positive impact on our businesses’ bottom lines and our members’ satisfaction with the services we provide.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I hear a lot of people saying change is needed and some, like above, saying the changes are so simple. But no one offers any suggestions and everyone complains that the changes aren’t happening. I have a feeling the changes needed aren’t simple at all.
The two worlds/industries can learn from each other. Its interesting to have attended multiple Internet Dating Conferences, and multiple Matchmaking Conferences. iDate is male dominated and marketing focused. The Matchmaking Conference is heavily dominated by very charismatic females and internet marketing is still somewhat of a new proposition. The simple tie-in between the two worlds is lead generation. But the matchmaking industry is rather fragmented around the USA so its tough to coordinate. A few national footprint matchmakers exist. Its Just Lunch, The Right One and Together Dating (full disclsure: TRO/TD are clients of Courtland Brooks) and Great Expectations. GE’s model is a tad defunct at this stage with the rise of live online video sites like Speeddate.com and Woome.com.
Take a look at Baihe.com and Zhenai.com in China, and BharatMatrimony.com and Shaadi.com in India. These services have successfully fused online and offline. The combination of agents and the internet and are doing well for them. They’ve fused online and offline because both countries have a respect for traditional matchmaking services, and the people have a very local inclination and ability to plug in a credit card number to an online service.
All good points but why are you saying that GE’s business model is defunct, isn’t it the same at TRO?
Dave,
Two distinct business models!
The Right One & Together Dating business model is “matchmakingâ€. Members rely on their personal matchmaker to arrange compatible introductions.
The GE model relies on members picking members (video dating NO matchmaking). Obviously this creates the same problems you see with online dating … the good looking female getting all the attention and no emphasis on compatibility.
To make a great match there’s nothing like the intuition of an experienced matchmaker.
Thanks for the clarification.
I agree with all comments that UK singles are looking for something different and our members on and have recently confirmed to us from our member surveys that it is not all about volume, but more the personal selective service.
Most UK singles just don’t have the time these days to either send lots of mails in hope of getting a few replies, nor sift through hundreds of search results in the hope of finding “the one” or several possible “onesâ€.
As Terry says above, regularly the attractive females are inundated with hundreds of mails from guys, of which not all can of course be a perfect match by shear reality. This therefore often results in the ladies responding to only a few of the mails due to time taken to sift though all the profiles and mails received and therefore often the possibility of true matches being missed out unfortunately.
It’s for this reason and in response to our members’ comments that Xfactor are now blending the 2 offerings – online and offline, which we have been doing very successfully for almost 6 years now, into a completely new offering soon to be released into the UK market.
We truly believe this will shake the market up move it in the right direction with a perfect combination of both markets – the personal matchmaking service complimented with latest online technology to bring UK singles the very best of both worlds.
Will keep you posted on progress.
They run on two different business models. Some people do want the personal contact, yet for every one person happy to pay for the personal matchmaking service, there are many others who feel burnt by the high fees charged. There is room for both models of course, yet most of the previously exclusively offline matchmaking services (such as Dateline in the UK) have scaled back these services to take a share of the online cake.