Date.com Moves Away From E-mail

Date.com is a victim of the fallout from spam. Once the primo prospecting method for the dating Web site, this year e-mail has been shoved behind other lead-generation tools.

None are standout favorites — yet. But the lineup of marketing initiatives shows how creative a Web site — even a profitable one in a popular sector — has to be in the current economy.

Date.com leapt on the e-mail problem last winter, cutting way back on that channel, while investigating affiliates, banner ads and buttons, pop-unders and more. It also found an easy revenue stream in list rental.

“A year ago, I would have said e-mail was critical to our business,” said Brad Shapiro, vice president of sales and marketing at the Toronto-based company. “We were sending over 100 million prospecting e-mails a week. But a lot of those e-mails weren’t getting through or the response rates were too low. Now we’re sending out 60% less.”

Started in 1997, Date.com relaunched on Valentine’s Day 2000 as a subscription service and has been profitable ever since. Today it’s worth about $150 million (although Shapiro won’t specify the privately owned firm’s revenue).

It has a database of 2 million active members. Actives are those who have logged on to the site in the last 90 days. People can register to browse other singles’ profiles and send an automated message to others for free, but to send and receive e-mails with that special someone, or to hang out in chat rooms, it costs $24.95.

The gender breakdown is 58% male/42% female and the largest age category (40%) is people between 35 and 50. The gay business comprises between 5% and 10% of members.

Critical mass of members is necessary to a dating site, and 2 million is fairly low, Shapiro admitted. Plus, the decline of e-mail has flattened out acquisition in the last six months, in spite of prospecting efforts. Date.com signs up some 300,000 new members a month, but the drop-off rate is about 25%.

As Date.com has diversified his marketing, one surprise has been pop-under ads, which appear beneath a Web site of a competing service. Shapiro said this method is among the most expensive. But the response is also among the strongest.

Gator.com, one of the firms that serves the ads, maintains a database of 36 million consumers who receive a free product if they agree to accept its ads. Gator tracks only their online behavior and serves ads relevant to that behavior.

So if someone is searching Match.com and Lavalife.com, they may be amenable to adding Date.com to their arsenal, said Scott Eagle, Gator’s chief marketing officer.

All the major dating site players are customers, he said.

Gator, of Redwood City, CA, targets based on consumers’ behavior, so if they have visited several sites, the pop-under may read: “You’ve visited 20, now try one that really works.”

It’s better targeted than e-mail, Eagle said. “And because of spam, the message is lost anyway.”

Date.com is testing another expensive area — banners and buttons on sites with heavy traffic such as America Online and MSN. Results weren’t in at press time.

Meanwhile, Shapiro routinely cleans out old profiles, because he knows that data is his most valuable asset. “When a member writes to someone, there has to be someone on the other end,” he said.

That database upkeep served Date.com well when Shapiro put a 4 million-name e-mail file on the market early in the year.

Potential list renters were incredulous — until the file started delivering 2% to 6% clickthrough rates, said Eric Bull, director of sales at Newton, MA-based Focalex, an e-mail database networking firm that manages the file.

Marketers like Johnnie Walker — which desire young singles — are among the satisfied clients, along with automotive, high-tech and financial services firms.

Selects include name, e-mail, age, ethnicity, geography, occupation and income.

Most surprised with results are business-to-business clients, said Bull. The occupation and income selects are valuable, particularly because they haven’t previously been marketed to. And for B-to-B marketers, used to paying upward of $300 per thousand base for an e-mail file, $75 per thousand sounds pretty good.

“It’s pure profit,” Shapiro said. Now his boss, CEO Meir Strahlberg, wants him to figure out the best way to put members’ postal addresses on the market.

Other ventures include affiliate agreements, such as the one with men’s interest site Askmen.com. And Shapiro’s running ads on radio network ClearChannel Communications’ Web sites. He’s even initiating talks with competitors to swap data.

And Shapiro is investigating offline — if not land-based — events for members to actually meet face to face. At press time, he was completing plans for a June cruise.