January has been absolutely the best month in terms new registrations and revenues, and the number of partners who joined our platform. Thank you for making it happen – we wouldn’t have achieved this without you!

We hope that our Marketing blog articles are useful for your marketing efforts. If you didn’t have a chance to read them yet, don’t forget to check out the case study on using promotional tools and PPC campaign analysis on a German disabled dating site.

There is also some valuable advice on Company insider blog.– Learn how to take advantage of the February traffic spike and on how to make your dating site into a community with the tools Dating Factory platform provides, and the National awareness days’ calendar.

We have also released many new features for both members and partners this January. You may have noticed that administration area is now available in German, and we will be introducing some other languages very soon!

Here are some other new developments:

More payment options for users in 14 countries – meet Wire-billing

Would you like to increase your conversion rate in 14 countries by another 1 to 2%? Adding new, and even more importantly, local payment methods to the sites, provides a broader choice for members who either do not have credit cards or do not wish to use them.

Many end users prefer direct transfer – bank transfer – to credit card billing, this is particularly true in some countries of the world. This is why we are launching another direct transfer payment solution on our platform – Wire billing.

Why is it so popular among users? A couple of factors. First of all not everybody has a credit card, many people operate solely on debit cards and not all the local credit, and especially debit, cards are accepted by CC payment providers. Second – people do not always like entering their payment details on the dating sites.

With direct transfers they can use their bank accounts and online banking back office they use every day, to pay for their dating membership. Lower chargeback rates are an added plus.

Wire-billing aggregates the most commonly used bank transfer providers of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Holland, Mexico, Poland, Switzerland, Sweden, UK and USA. It includes such names as Sofort in Germany and I-deal in Netherlands.

You can read more about Wire billing and its coverage and banks/payment options it supports here:

https://www.wire-billing.com/private/home/index/coverage

Easy resume membership mechanism released for your members

As many of you have noticed from the reports you run on your sites, there are quite a few members who cancel their recurring billing and then pay again for it the next month just because they are not comfortable with the recurring billing option or want to take a break from dating for one or two months.

For these members we have introduced the suspend-resume facility to make the process of paying again as simple as possible. Now when the user wants to stop recurring billing they are prompted to suspend the payments rather than cancel, but they can easily resume membership at any time without having to enter their payment details again.

Easy resume membership mechanism

What is in it for you? Increased renewals rate due to the offers that are introduced with the new mechanism and to the simplified one click payment process. And what’s best – revenue increase is assured.

In-depth member payment reports added to Wallet section

Many of you have asked us for more information on member payments on your sites so we are pleased to announce the new payment reports that arrived in your Wallet section this week. The “Payments breakdown” and “Active payment agreements” reports will give you very in-depth information about your members’ actions.

“Payments breakdown” report allows you to see the sales by date for any specified period of time:

In-depth member payment reports

Then you can click on a date and get the report by user for that particular date:

In-depth member payment reports

And after that click on member screenname and see the actions of this member on the site:

In-depth member payment reports

Basically this report gives you the ability to drill down to members’ behaviour on the sites and understand what behaviour triggers payments. For example it might spike after you send a newsletter or add some content on your site

The second report – “Active agreements” – will show you how many agreements of what kind were purchased or cancelled on given date, and will also show you the current number of active agreements that will recur in the future:

In-depth member payment reports

These two reports will allow you analyse and plan and budget your marketing activities more carefully and make your campaigns more efficient.

New St. Valentine’s headers and footers are now live

Do you think giving your sites a more festive look for the St. Valentine’s Day that is coming up within a couple of weeks is a good idea?

The Dating Factory team has prepared some great offers for members, and you can help getting your dating community in that festive mood by adding some special design elements to your site.

As always we have created some new festive headers and footers for your sites – add them via:

Sites – Edit – Special designs

As an idea to make it even more exciting – give your logo a face lift or change the main picture to give a site an even fresher look.

New St. Valentine’s headers and footers

iDate report

Our CEO Tanya Fathers and VP Marketing George Carter have participated in iDate conference in Miami, USA last week, and are back to their desks this week, tired but elated at the great reception our platform is receiving.

Check out the blog article for more – https://datingfactory.com/miami-idate-event-what-was-special-for-dating-factory-this-year/

iDate conference in Miami, USA

Meet us in Barcelona this March

We have sent you an invitation to meet us in Barcelona this March earlier this week, and we hope to see you there! It will be a great show!

Dating Factory is a Headline sponsor of Online Dating Summit and a Gold sponsor of The Barcelona Affiliate Summit, so we will be there for both events – from March, 2 till March, 8.

Join us for many interesting sessions on online dating and internet marketing, and don’t miss the YNOT carting Grand-Prix which we are also proud to sponsor!

These are the main news items for the month, and we will keep you updated on new developments via our newsletters that are going to become more frequent starting February. In the meantime don’t forget to stay in touch by…

…making sure you read our marketing and company news at our Blog:
https://datingfactory.com/blog/

…taking part in the discussion on the partner Forum:
https://datingfactory.com/forum/

…using your administration area tools to their full potential using our Tutorials:
https://admin.datingfactory.com/contact

…following us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/datingfactory
…joining our Facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=172005894013
…joining our LinkedIn group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=2416698&trk=anet_ug_hm
…and keeping in touch on Google+: https://plus.google.com/107876291608517033848/posts

With the best wishes,

Lisa Moskotova

Lisa Moskotova
COO, Co-founder
Dating Factory