TV Still King For Attracting Affluent Clients: eHarmony

Online dating site eHarmony has announced – somewhat ironically, really – that it will focus its marketing spend on TV as its global research has found it attracts a more affluent and engaged customer than digital.

The American-owned dating site claims to have over 2 million Australian members and an annual local marketing spend of $US20million.

The company’s COO, Armen Avedissian, told B&T by phone from the US that the results it got from TV in the States mirrored that of the Australian market.

“We’ve found the same characteristics in all our other global markets we’re we’ve had online and offline spends,” Avedissian said. “We go after the higher-end, premium match-making and people are definitely willing to pay more and stay longer and we have found that people who’ve seen an ad on television have much higher customer lifetime values and retention.”

Not that the online site has ditched online for good, with Avedissian revealing 30 per cent of the local marketing spend will still be in the online space. “It’s not to say that we’ve completely removed online but because of the inadequate traffic we’ve shifted it to television,” he said. “Search still works very well for us; things like SEO, and certain mobile and affiliate display ads work well, just not to the scale of television.

“The conversion rates we’ve found from TV are more affluent or of a higher quality. They pay more, they tend to renew more, and they tend to engage further and stay with us over the lifetime value which is much higher than our online channels. Therefore we’re able to pay more to get these TV viewers and hence they over index for us,” Avedissian revealed.

Nor was he worried about the proliferation of new, free sites such as Tinder or OKCupid. Avedissian believed these sites meant the user has to do all the work, which he added “can be dangerous”, whereas eHarmony does the matching for the client. He believed that once people “had exhausted these free dating apps, they come to us (eHarmony) when they’re ready to settle down”.

Avedissian also said the company wanted to reinvigorate the creative to its Australian campaign revealing only that it would be “lighthearted, more humour and will try to appeal to a broader audience”.

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