With the festivities out of the way, there’s no better time than now to reflect on what’s been a pretty eventful December.
The jewel in the crown has most certainly been our December advent campaign. As the name suggests, we’ve been testing out promotional trials every day this month and there was never a better opportunity to convert some of our longer term basic members with the lure of full member site experience at an unbeatable rate. And it worked.
The key to the campaign’s success is down to how many members decide to extend their stay beyond the trial duration and take up a standard subscription. It’s all well and good getting members on a Free Trial, that’s easy enough, but that’s not much good if they decide they don’t want to stay. Fortunately the strong member experience on all of our network sites meant that we never saw rebill rates below 50%. In fact, in some cases these rates were as high as 80-90%, especially on our growing Australian & South African networks.
The challenge with this campaign was to keep members interest levels high as we continued to send a variety of different trials throughout the month. An almost impossible task you might think, and admittedly we did see Open Rates begin to slump as we moved into the second week. However, after carefully reviewing what could be influencing these yields we made some adjustments to the subject lines and the time of day the emails were scheduled to send. As a result we saw Open Rates start to increase, which saw click-through-rates increase, which, in-turn, saw trial uptake increase and ultimately those elusive rebill rates.
Trials aren’t for everyone, but there’s no better way for our members to get a taste for online dating at a manageable cost and with less commitment. For those that didn’t take up the trials in December, or for those who were previously excluded from the Advent Campaign due to having been Full Members in the past – we sent to them a percentage discount offer they could take up anytime between Boxing Day and New Years Day. This performed fantastically and helped us achieve one of our biggest ever revenue days on December 30th, along with the typical spikes we see around Christmas and month-end generally.
All in all, we’re in an enviable position moving into January and the New Year. Let’s make it a good one!
Toby Prior
Senior Email Marketing Manager