Well, another month down the line and another big promotion to tick off the list for 2013.
March’s comms finale was a jam-packed Easter weekend of promotions, beginning with a free read session, closely followed by a fantastic discount offer. Official public holidays differ from country to country over the Easter weekend, so our programme of offers was engineered to fit with the variety of territories served by the WhiteLabelDating.com platform. Uptakes were exceptionally strong but with only 4 days of Easter, the offer was extended by a further 4 days to maximise the opportunity for members to upgrade with a discount. Impressively, this offer increased the number of members online by almost a third.
March also played host to Mother’s Day and St Patrick’s Day in the UK and Ireland, taking place across successive weekends. As such, promotional activity was spread out across March to avoid flooding members’ inboxes with “yet another offer”, which may have damaged conversion rates. The results spoke for themselves as the number of members online soared during the free access sessions, with even greater improvement in uptake rates for the discounts.
The success of this strategy is a valuable lesson for future campaign planning. With a number of other busy periods coming up during the next few months across various territories, we are confident than we can continue to further improve our results.
And yet with so much offer activity going on in March, it was important that we continued to ramp up the engagement elements of our CRM programme. We gave particular prominence to promoting key actions like photo upload, profile completion and other site features, both new and existing, to great effect.
March was also a record month for content-driven campaigns. The launch of our “Ask the Expert” help-and-advice newsletter has already shown exceptional interest from members in need of advice, while site-specific blog extracts, testimonials, competitions, cross-sells, up-sells and general chitter-chatter has kept members in touch with their dating site at regular intervals.
What’s more, with our new designer hitting his stride after joining us midway through February, we’ve also been able to further review some of our regular featured member campaigns. In addition, we experimented with some email animation, from which we’ve seen some really interesting results so far.
So, to the month ahead. With fewer worldwide events to keep us occupied, April’s campaigns will be more localised and as summer arrives (hopefully!) in the UK, Ireland, US and Canada, we’ll be turning up the volume on our user engagement campaigns. Stay tuned for news on the exciting and innovative campaigns planned for April!
Matt Harman, WhiteLabelDating.com Comms team