Guest Post: How to Engage Dating App Users
Guest Post: Leanplum is a mobile engagement platform that helps forward-looking brands like Grab, Tinder, and Tesco meet the real-time needs of their customers.
Want to engage dating app users? Act like you’re on a date.
The value of the dating app world is growing at impressive rates year over year. Worldwide spend in 2016 was £234 million — and rose in 2017 to £448 million.
The lucrative world of dating apps has not gone unnoticed, with the likes of Tinder, Bumble and happn all competing to gain market share. As the industry becomes increasingly crowded, marketers must adapt and evolve quickly to ensure they stand out and gain customer loyalty.
What is the dating app market currently like?
In order to gain insight into the current state of the market, Leanplum recently teamed up with Liftoff to investigate the cost of mobile acquisition in the dating world. The research led to some interesting results.
The good news is that in 2018, there has been an overall decline in install costs and a huge increase in install-to-register conversion rates. The real challenge remains in driving recurring subscriptions. For dating apps, this is an essential revenue stream. One review of popular dating apps shows many charge between £20 and £45 per month.
To woo your app users, start a personal conversation
For dating apps, monthly subscriptions are the holy grail, but these are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. The best growth hack for encouraging more subscriptions is personalised campaigns that move audiences to take the plunge.
Tailoring content to each individual user’s needs or preferences to encourage conversions works especially well on mobile. Most of us are now hopelessly devoted to our smartphones, with 46 percent of the population reaching for them as soon as we wake up, and then a further 49 times per day, making them an extension of who we are. This provides a huge opportunity for marketers to reach users — but to be successful it’s crucial to make sure targeted messaging speaks to users on a one-to-one level.
To motivate your most active users into signing up for a subscription, consider
teasing a free trial. You could personalise this campaign by adding their first name (“Hey Jason, try Dating Plus free for two weeks!”) or adding info about a recommended match (“Have you seen your latest matches? 😍 Get matched with even more profiles if you sign up for Dating Plus.”).
Personalised campaigns like these will enhance users’ in-app browsing experience, drive app sessions, and entice paid subscriptions after the trial ends.
Now you can get users engaged way before the first date
Dating marketing campaigns are already pretty engaging. On average, dating push notifications see 2.15 times as many open rates as other verticals. And emails see 22 percent higher open rates.
But to deliver a more contextual experience, the most successful apps trigger highly personalised campaigns based on user behaviours in real time.
Engaging in real time means you have to move fast. We now live in a world where we expect things almost instantly, and falling in love is no different. Being able to engage with a potential customer first can mean the difference between you getting them married to your app or them searching for love elsewhere.
For example, if a user has a new match, you can alert them with an in-the-moment push notification that says something like, “Who’s your soulmate? Find out by viewing your newest match in the app!”
Besides timing, you can create more engaging notifications by adding a little emoji love to your next message. Check out this list of the most popular emojis used by dating apps:
The best way to romance dating app users
Mobile campaigns have allowed marketers more data and insight into their customers than ever before. However, many marketers can’t use this information to their full advantage. Reports show that 63 percent of messages are sent at the wrong time — which means marketers are still flying blind.
That’s why it’s crucial to swipe right on a solution such as Leanplum’s Campaign Composer. It takes out the guesswork and provides greater clarity into your marketing campaigns to drive personalised engagement — and in turn, long-term loyalty.
Look for a mobile engagement solution that:
- Increases campaign effectiveness with automated send times and message frequency, powered by machine learning
- Provides adaptive feedback to improve segmentation, timing, personalisation, and channel selection with real-time guidance on audience and delivery timing
- Surfaces customer journey analytics to reveal which communications users respond to and where they drop off, optimising future interactions
It’s an exciting time to be a marketer, with more insights at your fingertips than ever before. But you have to support these insights by starting a personalised, engaging conversation that offers what your audience wants and needs.
When you marry these efforts, it makes for a winning combination that will make your dating app irresistible.
Visit the Leanplum website here.
