How to succeed in dating app marketing in
Adjust Team, Content & Insights, HQ, Feb 08, 2021.
Dating apps — and meeting people online — has gone from a social taboo to the most normal thing in the world. Half of US couples say they have met online. And it’s big business too, with the market expected to continue growing and hit a projected market size of $8.4 billion by 2024.
Our Dating App Guide 2021 is now live, and can be downloaded here. For any marketers looking to break into the lucrative dating app industry, we’ve also put together some bonus tips that you can read below.
Strategies for dating app marketing success
Focus on ASO
ASO, or App Store Optimization, is vital to make sure that your app is discoverable in app stores, especially by your target audience. Dating apps are a highly competitive vertical, so making a good first impression, and ensuring you’re suggested when users are searching for dating apps, is a key success factor.
Here are five all-important areas to focus on when implementing ASO.
- Include keywords (dating and your niche) in your app’s name
- Add keywords to your app’s description
- Localize content for best results
- Use primary and secondary app categories to reach more users
- Include screenshots and other useful images to attract organic installs
You should also encourage satisfied customers to review your app in the app store, giving your app another reason for users to install. For example, you could prompt users to rate your app after they have matched a certain number of users, ensuring that the most active users are promoting your product.
Dive into custom event tracking
Micro-moments are points where you catch consumers at key events within their customer journey. These are the moments when we turn to a device — often a smartphone — to take action on whatever we need or want.
These moments; "I want to know", "I want to go", "I want to buy" and "I want to do" are full of intent and immediacy.
Try to work out what these moments are for your app. How do they correspond with actions inside your app? ‘I want to connect’ — perhaps you could track the first time someone sends a message to a potential match. Do users that successfully send a message in the first 24 hours stay for longer?
With information like this, you can identify users that are likely to be valuable, and prompt those that are slow on the uptake to return and do more actions in-app. You can set up all your custom events right from the Adjust dashboard.
If you’re monetizing your dating app through subscriptions, the customer journey looks more complex. Adjust’s Subscription Attribution solution gives you access to a whole host of extra events, so you can easily track a subscriber’s user journey — and the revenue they impact. You can see when:
- A user started a trial.
- A user converted after the trial.
- A user subscribed with a discounted offer.
- A user experienced issues paying their subscription
- A subscription was renewed — or not.
Build lookalike audiences
Armed with an idea of what a ‘good user’ looks like, from tracking behavioral patterns and calculating LTV accurately, you can optimize your campaigns for long-term success. With Adjust’s Audience Builder, for example, you can segment audiences using your Adjust data. This enables you to create lookalike audiences and build upon your most successful results.
By using the data you have from your existing users to segment and target properly, you’ll be spending less and getting more. The users you obtain will also be far more likely to commit to using your app long term and converting to paying, subscribed users.
Tools that can help you meet your goals
Craft a perfect push notification
No matter how perfect your creative is, your push notifications are worthless if users have not enabled you to send them. However, 65 percent of users return to an app within 30 days when push notifications are enabled, so persuading users to opt-in is critical.
Rather than sending a default permissions request to new users, it’s better to build a relationship with the user first. They need to trust your product and know that you won’t take advantage of having access to push notifications.
To avoid users from choosing to keep push notifications disabled, you also need to ask permission with optimal timing. It’s important to note that opt-in messages are not customizable on iOS, but you can create your own splash screen.
You should use this as an opportunity to share your most persuasive creative, sharing why users benefit from opting-in for push notifications. There are tools available that can help you with this process, such as Leanplum’s Push Pre-Permissions.
Battle back bots
We’ve previously covered the dangers of the ‘bot as a service’ model to gaming apps — but these off-the-shelf bot solutions target dating apps as well. Without much technical knowledge, bad actors can infest your platform with bots, frustrating your users and leaving them open to cybercrime.
Fake accounts are automatically generated on a big scale, often to be used for spreading spam links to illicit or explicit sites. This can destroy the user experience for your customers.
You can find out the full details of how much money is lost to ‘romance scams’ in our full report here, but the advice is very clear: behavioral biometric bot detection is the gold standard for bot fraud prevention.
Using a combination of sensor data, Unbotify’s machine learning models can analyze a combination of biometric indicators that are so complex it is almost impossible for fraudsters to spoof. And by separating the patterns and behavior of real users from those of bad actors, you can ensure your users are protected.
Benchmarks
To bring you all the insights you need to succeed in this highly competitive industry, Adjust has released our annual Mobile app trends report, giving some practical insights into how to target and retain users.
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