Marketing

With eHarmony appearing to be close to officially launching their UK dating site there has been an unusually high number of articles on the internet about the dating service. Just watch some of the statistics being presented, some are not completely accurate. In our last story we took a look at this Times Online article. In it they reported:

A poll carried out by Harris Interactive reports that last year eHarmony was the force behind 236 marriages per day. That is more than 80,000 a year. Indeed, the company claims to bring about more than 2 per cent of all marriages in the United States.

This is not correct. eHarmony has reported recently that they are responsible on average for 118 marriages a day. This then means that 236 eHarmony members get married everyday (2 people = 1 marriage). Likewise, according to eHarmony 86,102 eHarmony users have been married in the year ending March 2007. This works out to 43,051 marriages in a year, not the over 80,000 in which the Times article suggests. The last point of the quote is also inaccurate. eHarmony claims to be responsible for 2.57% of marriages in the United States of people between the ages of 20 and 54, and who use the internet. They do not claim over 2% of all marriages in the US. Of the 2.2 million people married in 2007 (from the US Census), only 1,675,172 of these marriages fall within eHarmony's parameters.

For the complete statistic read, How eHarmony Concluded, 236 Members get Married Everyday and for more general online dating statistics visit our Statistics and Facts page.

It looks like CNBC received a number of complaints of some dating ads which had been displayed on their website recently. The ads showed:

... women unbuttoning sweaters and listing mileage to ladies looking for a date. And the others showing come-hither countenances and blaring "NO CREDIT CARD REQUIRED".

A couple of days ago, the Managing Editor of CNBC.com, Allen Wastler, posted an apology to their readers with a small explanation on how it happened. He doesn't mention which dating site the ads are for, but I have a feeling it was SinglesNet.com. I have seen several of their No Credit Card Required ads before. They also tend to have woman in sexually suggestive poses on most of their ads (of course they are far from the only ones who do this).

For people who opted into marketing emails from Datran Media, eHarmony's e-mail marketing partner, they recently received 3 different emails over a 6 week period. The goal of this marketing email campaign was not only to find customers but also to increase brand awareness. At the end of the campaign, a study found brand awareness increased by over 37 percent for eHarmony, from those who received the emails. Through email, advertisers can focus their marketing dollars and zero in on key demographics. As an example, in a test, eHarmony targeted people over 40 who where Asian and Canadian. Once sent, they found brand awareness increased by almost 12 percent from those who received the email.

Click E-mail gaining utility among marketers for the full story.

For singles interested in this online dating service, our eHarmony review is a good source of information.

In the 90's Match.com at one point found that 70% of their members were men. Since then, more and more woman have found online dating and the scales have tipped . Some dating services still have a greater percentage of men to women but they mainly are more "Adult" in nature. But, services like Match.com usually have more woman, though this usually is less than a 10% difference. To start off the second half of the year Match UK plans a marketing campaign aimed at single men that is titled Too Many Woman. To start off this campaign Men who sign up before September 14 will get one week free. Starting tomorrow new TV commercials will begin to air for 4 weeks on mostly men TV channels.

Find out more at UTalk Marketing and for further details about the UK dating site, Match.com, read our review.

InformationWeek has a press release from True.com that is called "TRUE.com Increases Advertising Spend to $75 Million, Reflecting Positive Corporate Growth ". I had to laugh at the title. When is growth meassured by the amount of money you spend on advertising. It isn't even money they have spent yet, just forecasted too.

ZDNet posted the results of ad spending by dating sites for quarters 1 to 3 in 2007. These figures are compiled by Nielsen. It looks like the top ten dating websites in ad spending where responsible for 91 percent of all dating site advertising. Of the over $350 million spent in ads, Match.com spent 40 percent of it or $145.5 million. eHarmony was second at $88.1 million. Since 2006, Match.com has almost doubled their ad spending while eHarmony had cut theirs by 16%. It would be interesting to see how this affected membership numbers.

The other sites that made the list in which we have dating reviews for includes, Yahoo! Personals at the sixth position with $14 million, PerfectMatch.com at position number 8 with $13.4 million and finally, Lavalife with $6.1 million at number 9.

A few other things to note is, these numbers includes both internet and TV advertising. Match.com and eHarmony have successful TV marketing campaigns which probably eats into at least half of the total amount they spent. I also have to wonder if Match.com's numbers (which really are the numbers of their parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp) includes Chemistry.com (who is also owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp). It was around Q3 of 2007 when Chemistry was spending a lot of money on those eHarmony attack TV ads.