eHarmony

Since 2000 eHarmony has produced more than 1 Billion automated matches for its members. With eHarmony's detailed profiles and strict criteria for matching singles, combined with their large membership base, this is a huge success for them.

To see how this fact was established using eHarmony's match ID, visit the Unofficial eHarmony Blog. For more information about this popular online dating service read our eHarmony Review.

We found this PDF file on eHarmony called eHarmony | Harris Interactive 2007 Marriage Metrics Number of eHarmony Marriages, which explains the facts behind their findings in which 236 eHarmony users get married every day. Of all the popular dating sites on the web today eHarmony is definitely one of the more trusted dating sites. By releasing the facts behind their claims, it helps improve eHarmony's creditability even more.

To find out more about eHarmony, please read our review.

Bill Tancer of Hitwise released a book recently called "Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters". For those of you who don't know Hitwise monitors the internet and compiles anonymous statistics for clients on how often web sites are visited, how they are found and the demographics of the person doing the surfing. There are many companies that do this type of work with Compete.com and QuantCast.com being some of the other popular ones. These 3 statistic sites of course usually don't see eye to eye and the data they release every month never fully matches. What it does though when you compare the statistics is give you a general idea on how websites you are interested in are performing.

One of the topics the book covers is online dating. Of the top 10 dating sites it lists most of the Male to Female ratios hover around the 50 percentile mark with the most notable exceptions being the gay dating sites. eHarmony also has a much more uneven Male to Female ratio of 38% to 62%. What I was surprised at is the average age range of eHarmony visitors. Bill pegged it at 25 to 34 years of age. I had thought eHarmony members tended to be older than this. Match.com members average age according to Bill is between 35 and 44 which I would see as being more reasonable for eHarmony. eHarmony also appeared 7th on the list behind such dating services as Adam4Adam and DateHookUp. While these are popular dating sites, in my view and research eHarmony receives many more visitors. With this ranking issue found with his online dating facts, it puts into question the rest of the statistics.

Now QuantCast monitors eHarmony directly through a business agreement, you can trust their statistics for this site much more. Bill's book and Quantcast do pretty much agree on the gender ratios and age ranges for eHarmony. For the month of August 37% of the visitors where male (which makes 63% female) and 40% of the visitors where between the ages of 18 to 34. 38% of visitors fell in the age range of 35 to 49 and 20% were over 50.

QuantCast also had another stat which was interesting. 16% of visitors used eHarmony through a business internet connection. With the way companies monitor their internet connections these days, I wouldn't be doing this.

eHarmony announced today that they have partnered with AOL Personals (which is in BETA). They will be offering their matchmaking services to American Online visitors along with dating and relationship advice through the “eHarmony Boutique”. The interesting thing here is AOL already has a partnership with Match.com. On the AOL Personals homepage both dating services share the same space. AOL tells visitors to use the Search for a Match option (which is powered by Match.com) to give you complete control over your searches and to use the Get Matched option (which is powered by eHarmony) to receive matches to compatible singles. I would be surprised if Match.com was happy about this new eHarmony partnership. They already have a sister site called Chemistry.com which competes with eHarmony directly.

eHarmony won Silver in the Customer Service category for the 2008 Gartner and 1to1 Customer Awards. Gold went to Overstock.com with Bronze being received by Cricket Communications. You ask, who is 1to1? Quoted from their website:

1to1.com is a personalized Web site developed by Peppers & Rogers Group to help people interested in CRM and one-to-one marketing find information and resources to create more loyal, profitable relationships with their customers by treating different customers differently. The site is built around the four-step IDIC methodology of Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. - identify your customers, differentiate them based on value and need, interact to learn more about what they need and then customize your products and services to meet their needs.

eHarmony is a client of 1to1 Media and it is nice to know they are taking an interest in customer service to help not only the company's bottom line but to improve the overall experience of members at eHarmony. Too often dating sites rely just on FAQs and Help sections built into the website. Paying customers need more than this. Emails and calls to customer support need to be tailored to the member. Dating Sites should be exceptionally good at this since they already have a lot of personal information about the member and hopefully they keep track of the members usage pattern of the dating service as well. Simply substituting a members name in a stock email doesn't work anymore, people are smarter than this.

See the complete winners and category list Winners here.

For more information on eHarmony, read our review.

I saw some interesting statistics on a website that mentions:

According to the US Census, 40% of American adults patronize the services of online dating sites resulting in about 120,000 marriages annually.

I searched the U.S. Census Bureau website for awhile and couldn't find the information mentioned in the quote. If this statistic is true, it would mean that eHarmony is responsible for a third of all marriages that resulted from online dating. According to eHarmony they are responsible for on average 118 marriages a day or 43,000 in one year, in the United States (see stats).

I am suspect of the number of total marriages resulting from online dating as mentioned in the quote above since, other facts didn't ring true in the article. As example, it also mentions:

China too expects dating patrons to grow in huge numbers. With 64 million singles residing in the nation, the market is expected to double in the present year.

The United States has a population of roughly 300 million with over 90 million singles. Canada has a population of 30 million with a third being single. This is the same ratio as the United States. China has a population of over 1.3 billion. I would expect them to have more that 64 million singles, a lot more! If the same ratio holds true then you would expect to see over 400 million singles.

For the full article called Internet Dating – The Good, Bad and Ugly, visit MedIndia.com. See our eHarmony Review for more information on this dating service.