Swipe Right to Convert: 3 App Retargeting Tips for Dating Apps

This Valentine’s Day, we’re celebrating the marvel of Dating Apps. Whether they’re used for casual flings, platonic friendships, or long lasting love, innovations in dating apps have made it easier than ever to meet new people.

The first major online dating platform, Match.com, launched way back in 1995, required users to fill out lengthy questionnaires in order to find romance. Now, almost 25 years later, users supply only a short bio and a handful of pictures and rely on a complex system of algorithms to find their perfect match.

These algorithms vary from app to app.

• Paris-based app happn uses location data to match you with people you’ve already come into close contact with, so you can meet people who frequent the same bars and stores as you.
• LoveFlutter, a word-based dating app founded by Daigo Smith and David Standen, scans through your twitter feed to match you up with people who use words in a similar way to you.

Whatever the method, dating apps are big business. Last Valentine’s day, App Annie reported that consumer spend in dating apps had doubled in the space of a year. The top grossing dating app of 2017, Tinder, had the second highest consumer spend in apps outside of games, succeeded only by Netflix.

Dating apps also nabbed the top spots in the consumer spend rankings across a number of countries coming in first in the UK and Germany and taking a whopping 6 of the top ten spots in the ever-romantic France. Ooh la la.

Dating apps monetize through subscriptions services and gamified features which enable the user to stand out to potential matches, extend their window of opportunity, or customize their privacy settings to hide their profile in certain circumstances.

Remerge is proud to work with a number of dating apps on their re-engagement strategies.

So what are some of the major considerations when it comes to re-engagement strategies for Dating Apps? We caught up with our Senior Account Manager, Aleksandr Bajev, to find out.

Finding the right audience in scale for your dating app could be challenging for app marketers if they’re a niche player (matching single seniors, premium dating for serious relationships, religious dating, etc.), whereas for universal apps, it’s challenging to keep the balance between different age groups, gender ratios, and dating purposes.

However, dating apps are not much different than any other app - the main goal is to maximise the return on a marketing dollar spend.

For dating apps, it’s best to maximise the engagement within their already existing audience. By leveraging first-party data we can help push users to move forward with their first purchase. This includes users who installed the app but never registered, or users who never returned back to the app.

Retargeting users to make their first in-app payment is one of the most effective ways to maximize revenue. Think about the users looking to find a match or more (we’re not judging) and tailoring the creatives to get them to buy more time, to have unlimited likes, or to go through the fast-lane and see all their super swipes.

Though churned paying users is another possible segment, chances are that some have successfully found their long-term match within the app. For retargeting active users, running an incrementality test alongside will guarantee that retargeting doesn’t cannibalize organic conversions.

Test various segmentation strategies but also try to differentiate KPIs for these segments.

While it would be easy to generate an extremely high ROAS from your paying audience, converting users to go through with their first payment might be harder. Still, in dating apps, converting towards the first purchase is important for setting up a scalable retargeting campaign. These campaigns require much more sophisticated optimisation strategies and take time to fine-tune them to start bringing high value. But as far as we’ve seen, they’re definitely worth the investment.

Check out our article on data privacy and things to look out for or drop us a message at hello@remerge.io Happy Valentines!