Last night I was tweaking my Match profile. I saw that it asked me for the town I grew up in. I don’t remember that as a question before, and have no way of telling if that’s a new question or not because who can keep track of these things?
Sometimes it takes re-subscribing to a dating site to make you realize most dating site users are like goldfish in a bowl. One trip around equals the industry standard three month average subscriber. After that point, they’re gone, to be replaced by the next member. In fact, I just read a business plan for a new social networking site that listed reducing customer churn as the primary marketing tactic.
This is a good thing for the industry, which has a collective memory of goldfish, unlike the elephant-like memory of most consumer services. Think Enron, Exxon, Sony, etc. In the dating world your missteps are forgotten quickly, which is a clear upside to the amount of customer churn the industry generates each month.
How many upgrades, changes and revisions have the major dating sites made to their sites in the last year? What are the effects of these changes? Who are the self-described stats geeks that gets off on metrics and measuring the changes brought about by small changes in the user experience? I love the idea of playing with all the levers and seeing the results. Doing this at a high-traffic site would be fascinating. Change a font size, loose 1,00 customers. Drop subscription price by $1, make an additional $500k in revenue that week. Success can often be traced back to a color scheme, a font size or how search results are displayed.
Some sites are quite aggressive in their willingness to tweak the norm, try something new, or test a feature. Others require a panel of experts and a lengthy series of meetings to make the most minute changes. The important thing is to remember that we never really know what’s going to work and what won’t until we try it. In your next product development meeting, take the conversation about more radical changes a step further, hopefully you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the outcome.
