Find a Date. Make a Sale.

Why don’t more companies leverage the dating sites for marketing? You’ve got millions of highly involved members, all looking for things they have in common, or ideas for what to do on those dreaded first dates.

Relationship sites have done a great deal of partner marketing in recent years, most notably Perfectmatch’s partnerships with movie studios, Lifetime, Today, etc. But if you consider the absolutely colossal populations on Match, eHarmony, and Perfectmatch, just to name three, its absolutely crazy that more brands haven’t jumped on the bandwagon.

I’m not talking about banners. Well, that’s not right. Banners would be OK for an awareness campaign, but I bet click metrics would be dismal. If I’m there checking out potential dates, I’m not going to be clicking on mortgage ads.

No, rather, I am talking about deep integrated partnerships. Like what? Here are a few ideas:

1. Coffee Dates: Work with the backend of these sites to identify the Starbucks that is most convenient for both people. Then, give the asker a pretty ecard to send to their prospective date, asking for a meetup. This’d also work for a beer or wine or spirits brand.

2. Movie Dates: If you’ve ever done online dating, you know one of the challenges is to figure out what to do on those first couple of dates. What about making evites to invite your love interest to the opening of a flick. It’d tie in well with the hype strategy of most movies to get butts in seats on opening weekend.

3. Outfit apps: Have an apparel company work with a site to help people decide on what to buy and wear on their date.

4. New year diets and exercise: Work with a fitness company to help members improve their appearance and their first impressions.

It’s easy to come up with ideas like this. And I suspect that given that the category growth has slowed, many dating sites would be only too happy to develop new revenue streams. This stuff isn’t rocket science but it could be enormously powerful in the lives of singles. Think of the implication of being the place where millions of people had their first coffee date? It makes my heart go pitter pat.

This stuff might require a bit of back end integration, but it doesn’t require a leap of faith about what people will be doing in six months online -- meaning you don't need a crystal ball to identify what the single will be doing online ain six mos. About 50 million of them will be looking for a date. Dating sites aren’t going away anytime soon. And it isn’t getting any easier to break the ice and get the dating ball rolling.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to write.