The Business Of Love

So how successful is this method of matchmaking? “Well that’s a very difficult question to answer, as all online dating agencies will tell you,” Roland says. “Many of our clients are quite private about it and they don’t want to jinx a relationship by telling too many people in the early days, we don’t always hear when we’ve been successful.” On the other hand, he has received a number of thank-you letters and even some wedding invitations and admits when that happens it’s one of the best elements of the business.

Our staff think it’s the best job in the world. Some of the letters you get are hard to beat. I suppose we are romantics really – practical romantics I would say – and it’s one of the things that interested us in the business in the first place

While the idea of working in the love industry may have appealed to the romantic side of Anne and Roland, it was actually the traditional business model that appealed to their practical nature. Their accountancy backgrounds gave them a huge advantage in being able to assess the viability of different options they were looking at, and the monthly payment system of RSVP provided a more sustainable business model than others. Another interesting aspect of the business model is the idea of having “lifetime members”, when surely the very nature of the business would demand a short- term client relationship.

But actually, RSVP has positioned itself to instigate long-term relationships where clients can reactivate their membership whenever they like and just start paying the monthly fee again. Although Roland points out it’s only a low percentage of returning clients, getting any kind of repeat business in this industry is unusual.

It’s one of the nice things about how we operate. You might have an absolutely brilliant relationship that goes on for six years, but then you might drift apart, or move. And if that happens you can just come back to us and start up where you left off and meet new people

From a customer point of view, there is also something to be said for doing things in a more traditional fashion. While the stigma attached to online dating is certainly waning, it still tends to be a younger demographic who are logging on, whereas RSVP has attracted a slightly older clientele, with the majority in their late 40s to early 50s.

There are a few reasons for this. One reason is that because we are a more expensive service than some, you need to be reasonably well established in life to justify spending money on a service like ours. And secondly, I think we appeal to people whose route to meeting single people is now closed. You know, if you’re 20 or 30 you might go down to the local pub, or have friends that are single, so there are natural routes to finding people who are single. Whereas I think as you get into your 30s and 40s those routes kind of get closed off and so I think people need us more

Inheriting a slightly older clientele has actually been a huge learning curve for Anne and Roland. Marketing to the over 50s was a new concept to both of them, and in the early days they completely misjudged their customer and learnt a very valuable lesson, as Roland explains:

“When we took over RSVP, the previous owner, (Peter MacDonald) had a concept of developing a sub brand for the over-fifties market and we spent a fair amount of time pursuing this sub brand ourselves. But it became pretty obvious to us that in fact this is precisely the opposite of the way you should market to the 50 plus group, because people always see themselves as slightly younger than they actually are! For example if you showed somebody who is 60 an image of another 60-year-old, they would think that person looked older, whereas if you show them a picture of someone who looks 50 they’ll think – yeah, that’s about my age. So they’ll identify with the image of the person who is 50 much better than the 60-year-old. And that’s been the lesson I suppose. It took us a while to discover it but it’s been fed back into our marketing. We completely abandoned the idea of a sub brand at all, and now we market to all age groups in exactly the same way, from 25 upwards, and it works much better.”
Roland regards these challenges as opportunities and has thoroughly enjoyed learning different skills to deal with the new sector. While Roland has taken over the behind-the-scenes aspect of the business incorporating things like marketing, advertising and IT, Anne handles the client-facing side of the business. Roland believes that having clearly defined roles helps them to juggle the delicate scenario of running a business with your spouse and claims it’s quite rare that there are any disagreements. Both also enjoy the flexibility afforded to them by being able to carve out free time that suits them, although there hasn’t been much of that recently as Roland laughs: “The period between Christmas and Valentine’s Day is always rather manic!” On that note, we best leave Roland to return to his role as Cupid.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

www.rsvp-uk.com 

01604 585999

RSVP
2 Saddlers Court
Oakham
LE15 7GH