Opportunities

Same-day conversion rate in the USA has doubled since January

You may remember, in recent months we have repeatedly highlighted the impressive growth in new paying subscribers across the White Label Dating platform – growth that continues to excel month on month and consistently exceeds January – the strongest month in the dating calendar historically.

Closely linked to new subscriber growth, same-day conversion rate is also continuing to grow across all networks and territories. A same-day conversion is recorded when a basic registration upgrades its membership to a paid subscription on the same day as joining the dating site. Same-day conversion rate gives our partners a solid indication of the quality of traffic they are driving, as well as a view on how well the platform is performing. 

Last month, our platform-wide mainstream conversion rate saw month on month growth yet again (+4%), as well as demonstrating a +32% increase versus January – a month that falls within online dating’s peak season. Impressive growth was seen across all territories, with notable uplifts since January coming from our largest network, the UK, that has presented a +29% uplift and our emerging network, the USA, that has presented a fantastic +63% uplift. 

Across our casual network, so far in July, our same-day conversion rate has shown a +5% increase compared to the same metric in June, an already incredibly strong month for our partners. The territory with the largest increase was the USA, benefitting from a +17% increase. Compared to January this year, across the USA our platform’s same day conversion rate has increased by a staggering +133%. That’s right, the same day conversion has more than doubled!

Our partners are thrilled with the new sustained norm, but what’s caused it?

This uplift has been the result of a number of payment projects that have taken place since the beginning of the year, including the introduction of a new native payment processor in the USA. As well as this, the White Label team have been working hard to optimise our billing processes with a focus on incremental gains and capturing payments wherever possible. 

Our approach to payments has become far more granular with deployments in mid-April that helped to optimise payments on a browser and even a device level. We’re continuing to see both same-day and longer-tail conversions grow across all networks and territories. We’ve also been working with some exciting new AI and reporting tools to help with churn rate, payment alerts, growth of LTVs and more. We’re excited to share more about these in the coming months. 

In May we spoke in detail about how we achieved this and the results spoke for themselves – in May we saw a record-breaking +20% growth in new paying subscribers versus April, the majority of which have gone on to rebill throughout June and into July. To remind you, the project involved us looking at payment failures across all acquirers and merchants, analysed by location, device, browser, bank and more. We then challenged all assumptions to enable us to effectively optimise the billing processes and fraud prevention techniques we already have in place.

What’s new

Cross-sell has already blown us away and the roll out isn’t even finished yet!

What is cross-sell? 

Cross-sell involves displaying banners and/or links on a particular site, that will navigate members through to another site within that partner’s portfolio. This can be from a broadly targeted mainstream site focused at all singles (the source site), to a more niche site on the same or a different network (the target/cross-sell/destination site) – popular examples are from broad mainstream to a mature site, a single parent site or even a casual dating site.

The banners are displayed, at present, 4 days into a members life-time on the site and therefore has no impact on same-day and early conversions. Sometimes an alternative offering is more appealing and peaks a members interest, resulting in an upgrade on a second site. A common and hugely successful strategy with the current mainstream roll-out has been to display a casual dating site to males, whilst still holding some zones for females.   

Last month we introduced a brand new cross-sell tool that gives our partner team the opportunity to implement cross-sell banners across over +20 brand new zones on the WLD app, on both desktop and mobile, on behalf of our partners. Our team has been working tirelessly to fill as many zones as possible over the past two weeks. The results so far have absolutely blown us away.

What we’ve seen so far 

In just the first 10 days following the implementation of the first set of banners, 11% of our total registrations came from cross-sell. Not only this, 12% of all upgrades were a direct result of the new banners across the live zones. With the zones being rolled out incrementally we’re confident these percentages will grow, meaning our partners will see increased yield from the traffic driven to the source sites. We’re forecasting an increase in yield of 20-25% as the project continues – a material difference when it comes to planning how much our partners can afford to spend per registration.

All of the current zones are performing better than anticipated, with a more recent zone increasing the volume of cross-sell registrations by a massive +91%. The zones are being rolled out strategically based on the data we have collated from banner campaigns across the WLD app, with zones offering the largest number of clicks being implemented first. The quality of the traffic cross-selling through to the destination site is very high. Same-day conversion rates are above average, with longer-tail upgrades following suit.

What does this mean for our partners?

We’re excited to update you on how this project progresses in the coming weeks. The opportunity to generate incremental revenue across our partners’ businesses is huge, allowing for much more aggressive bidding in online auctions when acquiring registrations for their dating sites, for example through Google or Bing. 

Over the next few weeks the team will be continuing to implement more banners each day. If you aren’t yet seeing an uplift from this project please contact your partner manager or reach out to partnersupport@whitelabeldating.com to express your interest. It’s a great time to start planning your implementation strategy to boost the return you’re getting on your current traffic, for no additional cost! It’s a no brainer.

What’s to come

Our recent projects are supporting the population of our brand new networks

We’ve already spoken about the direct benefits of the new cross-sell tool on our partners’ revenue, but not only this, the tool is going to form a major part of our niching project to support the population of the new networks that we are currently building. This will be a supplementary strategy to ensure that these new networks can reach a strong, critical mass as quickly as possible so that the traffic that our partners are acquiring through active acquisition and spend has the highest propensity to upgrade and generate return.

As well as the successful launch of the cross-sell tool in June, the White Label Dating team has been progressing well with the brand new Dating Dashboard. Replacing the Partner Portal, the Dating Dashboard will be completely self-serve and introduce an incredible amount of new features and tools to help our partners profitably grow their dating businesses with ease. We have invested a huge seven figure annual amount into the technology stack, it will be fully cloud based, and will offer cutting edge reporting, forecasting and optimisation tools. A select number of top partners will be utilising the new reporting features as early as next week.

Following the Dashboard launch in the coming weeks, we will be progressively inviting more partners to utilise the new tool throughout the end of July and August. If you are interested in gaining access, please do get in touch with our partner team as soon as possible. 

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Keep your eyes peeled for this months Inside Track where we’ll be sharing more detailed information about the initial results of our cross-sell project and letting you know when you can expect to be utilising our brand new Dating Dashboard!

All the best,

The team at White Label Dating