Urban Social: success through instant satisfaction

The nation's compulsion to chat, gossip and flirt online with friends or complete strangers is good news for owners of social networking sites.

However, in such a competitive marketplace, success relies heavily on people wanting to return to and interact with your website – and as most of us know, encouraging repeated return visits is easier said than done.

Urban Social’s innovative use of email marketing was key to their success in achieving this elusive 'sticky' online presence.

Dating with a difference

Created three years ago, Urban Social provides young urban professionals with an online dating service geared specifically towards their tastes and interests.

As well as the ability to create a profile, connect and chat with others, the site also promotes its speed dating, wine tasting and other events.

The proposition has proved a success, with a user base that has consistently doubled every six to nine months since the site's launch.

Urban Social’s growth rate is impressive and generating and maintaining new signups is essential to their success; they rely on upgrades from free accounts to paid subscriptions as their main source of income.

Email delivery problems

Email has played a central part in ensuring more people join and continually return to the Urban Social website to browse and connect with other people.

In the early days, their email marketing wasn't proving to be a reliable tool. Using their in-house mail server, many account activation emails, crucial to getting new members using the site, were bouncing and subsequently being marked as spam.

This meant that only around 65-70% of those who signed up on the site were authenticating their email address and completing the process.

Professional help

Urban Social realised the most effective solution would be to move their email operations to a professional email service provider (ESP), in this case Pure.

This meant they could firstly address the issue of deliverability and secondly track whether their emails were really doing their job.

This was only their first step towards success. They still needed to improve their site's 'stickiness' to increase return visits and drive conversions from free basic accounts to paid subscription upgrades.

Instant gratification

Urban Social worked with their ESP to develop communications that would bring their users back to the site as quickly and as regularly as possible – without becoming an irritation.

They decided the key way to achieve this was to combine their one-off notification emails, previously only used to activate accounts or send password reminders, with the most addictive element of their site – seeing who's eyeing you up.

Paid subscribers to Urban Social can send messages to people whose profiles they like the look of but crucially, the only way anyone would know if they had a message was if they’d logged in online to check.

Pure developed a bespoke solution that would automatically notify people with a personalised email every time they got a message from someone.

This now presents an instant incentive to log in to the site and find out who's checking them out and what they’ve got to say. Should the recipient not have a paid subscription and want to follow up this new-found interest with a reply it gives them an opportunity to upgrade.

A match made in heaven

The combination of an outsourced email provider and innovative new communications proved a success.

With emails now sent over dedicated, white-listed servers, using a system that checks for problems that might see messages heading for the junk folder, authentication and account activation increased by 12%.

Appealing to the natural curiosity of their members also paid off. Now that alerts are delivered the moment a message is posted on a user's profile, return visits to the site are up by 15% and paid subscriptions have also increased by a further 10%.

The key to Urban Social's success? Responding to the public's innate desire to know instantly who's checking them out and what they've got to say.

Jim Strong, Director of Urban Social, believes looking outside of their own resources was a wise decision: 'Outsourcing the instant notification aspect has proven to be a very successful solution for us.

'Working with Pure has enabled us to better meet and understand the needs of our growing user base in the age of the social network. We're using this to inform many of our decisions, including a new face for Urban Social that we're looking forward to launching soon.'

Contact Pure to find out how to increase return visits to your website, integrate your email marketing and use event triggers to retain more customers.