ESSAYS
SAMIR EL-ALAMI, ONLINE MARKETING DIRECTOR AT
LOVESTRUCK.COM
GETTING REAL Raw data, of course, is only as valuable as the actionable insight it provides. Beyond providing users with the best matches, what role does data play in
Lovestruck.com’s daily operations? “The relationship with data runs
through the entire company. As Online Marketing Director I spend most of my time looking to recruit new users and honing the ones we already have. But I also get involved in our product. Having more information about our users allows me to change how I actually do our marketing. That includes the imagery we use, the branding, the wording, the positioning, the different marketing channels. All those decisions are based on the information we take from users on the site.” As an example, El-Alami cites
Lovestruck.com’s posters on the London Underground. The Tube has been a consistently successful channel for
Lovestruck.com’s marketing due, in part, to Londoners’ reluctance to look attractive fellow passengers in the eye. “Everyone just stares up,” he says. “It’s the safest place to look on the Tube!” As a result of feedback from users,
those Tube ads now feature real-life
Lovestruck.com couples. “Before, those
ads just showed locations, but people wanted to feel there was some real emotion there. That prompted us to make that change. On the website we’ve also made it easier to send messages. We’ve improved the browsing experience. And once we’ve made changes like that we can just look at whether the number of messages people are sending has increased.” Social too, has a role to
play.
Lovestruck.com’s Facebook and Twitter users are a vocal community, says El-Alami. “They tell us what they like and whether Lovestruck is working for them. We collate all that information alongside the info we get from the site. There’s also real-life feedback in emails from users. All of this is actionable data. Every single bit of it. Every single one of our products has been infl uenced by the way people use the site.”
IF YOU’RE ASKING
PEOPLE FOR DATA, MAKE IT WORTH THEIR WHILE”
WHY PEOPLE LEAVE For many users, the relationship with a site like
Lovestruck.com is uniquely intimate; in how many other contexts are we inclined to disclose details about our most personal values and aspirations? What, then, can marketers in other industries learn from the way
Lovestruck.com handles its data? “The fi rst thing,” says El-Alami, “is to
have a very good CRM system. So many companies don’t. They have data, but they have no real way of aggregating it, and therefore it becomes impossible to really act on it. Having a system in place makes it so much easier to action data. “Secondly, you should be sharing the
data among yourselves – with your marketing team and your product team. You want everyone to be on the same page. That’s particularly important with
44 issue 20 january 2014
retention. It costs between fi ve and eight times more to bring in new customers to your website than it does to keep an existing one. For a dating website, because the overheads are so high and it costs so much to bring new users in, we’ve been forced to focus on retention: how do we offer a better service to our users in a very busy market? And of course, you also want to know why people might leave your site. Whether you’re Amazon or eBay, you really want to know that. If people aren’t coming back, you’ve done something wrong and it’s usually actionable.” But in the case of a site like
Lovestruck.com, isn’t the fi nal defi nition of success when a user vanishes into the sunset with their new partner and leaves the site for good? “Well, there are three
reasons why people leave a dating site. They’ve either met someone, which is obviously a
good reason. Or they don’t meet someone and they blame themselves or the website. Or their priorities in life change; they’re just not looking for a partner anymore. The point for anyone though, is to understand why people leave your business and how you can get them back.” So, in the fi eld of online dating the heart may rule the head, but quality user data trumps them both. “Data is an amazing thing,” says El-Alami. “If you get a good grasp of it, it allows you to do better acquisition, to improve your product and to retain your users. And that applies to any company.”
lovestruck.com
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