It's business as usual here at White Label Dating. With the current pandemic affecting the daily lives of many, we have taken crucial steps to ensure that there is no impact to the level of service received by partners at the same time as ensuring the continued safety of the White Label Dating team. 

This month we’ll be reviewing where we’ve been in recent weeks and highlighting how we’re supporting our partners' growth as they help keep people connected.

What's new

How we’re keeping people connected throughout COVID-19

The World Health Organisation recently declared the coronavirus, or COVID-19, a global pandemic. In light of such unprecedented times for our society, we’re committed to keeping people connected. As more people are online, at home and bored looking for entertainment and connections, there is an increased volume of people looking for an online dating and networking service - this is where we come in!

Although this will be a very tough time for many B2C and B2B businesses, we’re thrilled to see our award-winning platform remain stable with both registrations and conversion rates growing as a result of more people being at home and online. 

Despite a slight drop in conversion rate in early March when the pandemic was becoming increasingly talked about across the media, we’re seeing that people have reached a new norm with interests turning back to dating and people looking for entertainment online. In March, we saw our highest day for same-day conversion rate, across both our Mainstream and Casual networks combined, this year. This was a huge +19% increase from our third highest day back in Feb and +5% increase from the second highest day, earlier in March.

We ran some searches on Google Trends to see if there had been a shift in search traffic as a result of the current global crisis and we found that there was. We compared generic online and offline dating search scenarios, ‘date online’ and ‘online dating’ vs ‘speed dating’, across the UK and US since the start of Feb 2020. Since the pandemic was announced and as it continues to progress, it is clear that the volume of online dating searches have maintained themselves, and are even on the rise, while searches for offline dating terms have dropped drastically.

Learn more about what the White Label Dating team and its partners are doing to keep people connected.

We’re encouraging partners to expand their portfolios and broaden the opportunity for those stuck at home to connect

With more and more people online there is an increased volume of people looking for entertainment and connections. We’re encouraging our partners to reignite their online dating business and expand their current portfolios - there really isn’t a better time to help keep people connected. 

Our site creator’s ‘duplicate site’ feature, within the White Label Dating partner portal, means sites can be replicated in a matter of seconds. Our free and easy to use landing page design tool will help partners to build new landing pages, all of which utilise our SEO tool, automatically providing our partners with location based SEO content to help boost their organic ranking for keywords that they already have ranking. Our partner team is on hand to support the creation and activation of all sites and campaigns. Why not use them? 

Google's EU user consent policy - what we've done to make sure you're compliant

Under Google's updated EU User Consent Policy, any landing page that collects data must make certain disclosures to its users in the European Economic Area (EEA) obtaining their consent for the use of cookies or other local storage where legally required, and for the collection, sharing, and use of personal data for ads personalisation. 

Following the update, partners that were deemed by Google to be outside of the policy were sent a warning, enforcing that a notice obtaining permissions is applied to all pages that collect data. 

We wanted to make this as easy as possible for our partners to comply with and worked hard behind the scenes to ensure compliance with Google’s policy so that partners didn’t have to manually undertake too much of the actions themselves. We acted fast and made changes to the registration form signup script platform wide to ensure a required banner appears automatically, therefore ensuring compliance. As all of the landing pages linked to the White Label Dating platform, whether on our design tool or manually coded, use the signup script it meant that our partners could rely on us to resolve this for them.

The initial deadline for this was April 30th, however, in light of the challenging circumstances facing many businesses currently due to COVID-19, Google extended the deadline to put in a compliant consent mechanism to May 21st 2020, leaving us hugely ahead of schedule. To find out exactly what our partners need to do to ensure compliance following our recent updates to the signup script, read more here.

Our Team

We’ve improved our sign up forms

We’ve tweaked our sign-up process to make it simpler for users. We did this by making changes to the password field to display the prompt ‘8 or more characters’. This change will avoid the risk of a member having to restart the form completely if they didn’t enter the correct number of characters the first time around.

As a result of removing this potential hurdle for some members, we anticipate an uplift in registrations. 

The Business of Love in Lockdown

We closely monitored the COVID-19 outbreak from the start and following  guidance from the government to move to remote working and ensure social distancing, fortunately, our team has been  able to remain fully operational. Since the end of March the White Label team have all been working from home and there has been absolutely no impact to the level of service our partners are receiving. Being an online b business, with all the latest tools in place to run remotely has meant we’re fortunately unaffected.

With employees spread across the world and our UK employees now joining them in working remotely, we’re doing everything we can to stay connected as a team to service our fantastic partners. Each and every member of the team joins a company-wide virtual meeting at 9am every single day, followed by a closing ‘wrap-up’ meeting at 4pm.

We’re making sure that despite the distance that everyone’s daily activities are aligned to the same goals to help benefit our partners. As well as daily catch ups, each department is logged into a virtual meeting room all day long to ensure that there are no delays in our usual team communication. With many kids and more importantly, dogs, joining the team daily, the ‘office’ has never felt so homely and the team have adapted fantastically.  We’re ecstatic with how well it’s working! 

In the spotlight with... Daniel, Partner Manager

We recently caught up with one of our partner managers, Daniel, for a quick Q&A. Daniel plays a vital role in this business, supporting a portfolio of our fantastic partners with site creation and management as well as acquisition and optimisation. We were keen to learn more about what his typical working day looks like and which of White Label Dating’s pipeline projects he’s most excited about.

Daniel has been part of the White Label Dating team now for 5 years! Starting out in our Customer Care team, he joined the Partner team in 2017 with a huge passion for front end web development. He’s helped our partners go from strength to strength in the last three years. Read more from Daniel’s Q&A here.

Stay tuned to see who’s in May’s spotlight! 

GDI New York in March

Last month, the WLD team headed to the ‘Big Apple’ for Global Dating Insight’s first ever New York Dating Conference. The event, that took place at the Dream Downtown Hotel, was an exciting day full of insightful talks and presentations from many industry-leading speakers.

Ahead of a huge push into the USA later this year, the conference couldn’t have come at a better time. We’re hungry to make our platform even more profitable for our partners.  The opportunities that presented themselves are an exciting prospect for our partners operating within both our US network, as well as all other territories alike. 

We learned a lot and returned with a tonne of knowledge to help our partners stay current in an ever evolving online industry to grow their online dating businesses. We’re excited to incorporate many of our exciting learnings from the event into our H2 roadmap to further enhance the plans we have for our award-winning platform. 

What’s to come

Partner portal 

Following last year's Partner Conference, we shared plans to launch our brand new partner portal in 2020. Our plans are well underway! 

The new tool will encompass industry-leading analytics, offering our partners unseen reports to help them review their metrics and campaign performance with ease, across any device. As well as new and improved reporting our partners will have access to enhanced forecasting and ROI calculations, phone and tablet apps for both iOS and Android devices to provide optimised reporting and full site management on any device, the ability to send scheduled and event-triggered reports and alerts, and lots, lots more!

As part of the plans to relaunch our partner portal, we’ve completely redesigned our site creator. With the new, improved tool, creating and duplicating sites will be extremely fast and easy! The project is progressing well and we’re excited to update a select few partners exclusively on our progress next month, ahead of a wider roll out later this year.

Keep your eyes peeled!

All the best,

The Team at White Label Dating