Today, on Monday 5th November, ‘Cities’ went live. For those of you who didn’t attend the Partner Conference, I will try to summarise this absolutely giant, Herculean project.
It involved a 17-strong team and a quarter-of-million pound investment. If that hasn’t done enough to highlight the size of the project, carry on reading to see how Cities could change your business and increase your revenues.
Pre-Cities, our database listed 200 regions across all 7 territories that we operate in. This was not enough to fulfil the international domination that WhiteLabelDating.com aimed to achieve. And so came the birth of the Cities project, which we kicked off to populate our database with all towns, cities and suburbs across the UK, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada and, of course, the big boy – the USA.
Cities will affect the platform in a number of ways…
Members
- Members will now be prompted to add a postcode and location to their profile, which will display within search and all areas of the site itself, for example, Preston, Lancashire.
- Members will be able to find more matches faster through clearly defined locations, as they can break down the current counties and states into regions relevant to them. More matches equal higher conversions!
- A better population of regions within member profiles will improve the user experience.
- Icebreakers can only be sent and received by users who have registered their postcode. With all new members and the majority of already registered members adding their location and postcode to their profiles, more icebreakers will be sent and received. Therefore, levels of engagement and upgrades will increase.
Partners
- Partners can now set up even more closely-targeted niche sites, using the 90,000 additional regions within our database: i.e. Brisbane Dating, LA Dating, Dating in Birmingham.
- Partners can develop and launch regional landing pages and search widgets, allowing member feeds to become more relevant to the content of the page i.e. a landing page for Windsor can contain member feeds with users from Windsor only.
- Partners with existing regional niche sites can update their niche settings to reflect the true regional brand. There will be more members registered to specific regions, therefore, increasing the data for niche sites.
The project will impact both desktop and mobile, so there’s now even more reason to continue your efforts with mobile marketing.
So, this week is the time to get on the phone to your Partner Manager and put a 3 month plan in place so that you can start monetising on Cities. As of today, the database will steadily start populating member profiles with the new locations and existing users will be encouraged to update their details. This will be supported by a campaign from the WhiteLabelDating.com in-house Comms team, that will push members back online to maximise this new feature.
If you’re looking for a project for Christmas and the New Year, then this is it; register local domains, update existing sites and ensure that you have marketing campaigns to support all of these changes and maximise on this great opportunity.
Lauren Barnes, Senior Partner Manager at WhiteLabelDating.com.