No matter where customers are in their lifecycle, eHarmony is conducting top-notch customer engagement to build deeper personalized relationships with each of them. As an online dating website designed specifically to match up singles, users of the popular site are often in a situational flux because as relationship statuses change, customer experiences change.
Therefore, eHarmony has developed an incredibly rigorous, detailed, and successful range of customer engagement strategies to manage many types of behaviors. eHarmony collects a massive amount of data that it can leverage in this regard, and it is keenly perceptive of where each member lies on their respective customer journey.
Regardless if members are new to the site, lapsed with an expired paid membership, or even exist at any stage in between, eHarmony generates highly targeted message streams. Here, customer engagement happens before registration, during onboarding, while they are actively engaged, and even after their subscription expires.
During a recent conference session titled, “Make a Deeper Connection with Your Customers: How to Leverage Recency, Behavior and Demographic Data,” offered at the Modern Marketing Experience and presented by Oracle, Tracy Kobzeff, Director of Product Marketing & Monetization at eHarmony, detailed this process to attendees in Las Vegas.
Kobzeff offered an overview of the entire process from registered users to lapsed expired customers. Based on engagement levels with the site, eHarmony sends registered basic users notifications and helpful tips on how they can maximize their customer experience. They receive what Kobzeff calls “weekly drips.” These messages inform them of unused features, let them know who is attempting to contact them, and prompt them to upload photos.
These active users, who are not yet paying customers, also receive aggressive offers in the form of special invitations. This increases engagement levels and, ultimately, helps to turn basic members into paid subscribers by explaining all the value they stand to gain.
“This is a really high performing campaign for us because of the deep discounts we offer, and because we send it right at the beginning of their lifecycle,” Kobzeff said. “Once that person does subscribe, they will go into a welcome series where we give them tips about how to use the website to their best advantage.”
But it is important to note that eHarmony never stops with this highly personalized form of engagement, even after paid memberships are won.
“We don’t forget about our paid subscribers after we have converted them,” Kobzeff said. “We still send them a month’s worth of onboarding campaigns, letting them know about all the valuable features on the website. So we teach them about the best ways they can leverage the website, give them encouraging results about how they are performing, and how they can communicate to get better results.”
eHarmony also takes great effort to continually engage expired subscribers, which it calls the “win back” series.
As Kobzeff explains, “On Day 1 after a subscription expires, users get put into a weeklong win back stream where we send reminders of all the great features they accessed as a paid member. From there, former members then go into a weekly promotional email stream where we continue to let them know if people are viewing their profile and encourage them to come back.”
These aforementioned categories of various customer engagement tactics are, however, merely the tip of the iceberg. eHarmony’s data can become incredibly specific. For example, it sends targeted emails to members who have completed certain percentages of personal questionnaires and urges them to continue. Personalization efforts also target members based on how long it has been since they logged in, how many matches they have communicated with, how many nudges they have received, and so on.
eHarmony further personalizes campaigns based on holidays and even geolocation, which zeros in on areas in ways that are much more specific than simply highlighting broad regional swaths. Many members, for example, will get targeted emails encouraging them to widen their proximity-matching radius to increase the number of potential matches they might find further from home.
Demographic data also plays a very large role. In addition, matching user profiles with one another based on stated preferences, eHarmony also uses this information to determine how much different users are actually willing to pay.
“Purchase propensity is really big for us,” Kobzeff said. “We take some of those demographic values that are self-reported and we use that to model our customers and determine how much somebody will pay to become an eHarmony customer. It is going to be different for different types of people all over the world.”
Regarding a discounted incentivizing campaign, a certain user might get 78% off, another might get 67% off, and still another might get 62%. It’s an arduous process and eHarmony actually completes it on a weekly basis. But they find an immense amount of value by finding an optimal price for every user.
Because eHarmony has been around for 14 years, it has a very large database from which to draw some very rich data driven insights. It may, at times, be a monumental task to analyze it all. But the results certainly speak for themselves. So far, more than 600,000 married couples have met on the site, and eHarmony claims that the divorce rate is only 5%, which is far less than the rate among couples meeting under almost any other circumstance.
More relationship seekers are still coming to eHarmony, and they are all hoping to find a special connection. eHarmony understands this and does everything it can to make it happen.
“That’s really why we strive to be as authentic and as genuine and as personalized and as relevant as possible,” said Kobzeff. “And also, so that our marketing really means something to our users, when it is tailored to each unique individual.”
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.