Alerts, follow ups, newsletters- useful tools to contact your customers.

Alerts and follow ups mean much in your Dating Site development. Alerts bring people back to your site and follow ups help your customers know what's going on.

Follow ups are mostly used for the companies that provide service or products. Those emails make users more loyal and the company trustworthy. In the case of Online Dating we, as site adminnistrators, also provide service but it's a bit more complicated that software installation and bug fixing. We're working with people who are looking for love, friendship and so on. It depends on the site ;)

In such a situation follow ups are not so effective on Dating Site as alerts. Alerts inform members about the new things that have appeared at the Dating Site while they were away, like new user regiatration, news item, perfect match partner, new email or kiss. It's very convenient in fact. The alerts are the outside source to communicate with clients.

They have several advantages:
* they are short and informative
* they represent your Dating Site design and attract users.
* they remind of the site itself and keep necessary info with links to the Dating Site that simplifies the access for members
* they are optional and every user can activate them when registering and unsubscribe when they are not necessary

There are of course some disadvantages:
* they can be too many and annoying
* if you do not update news sections or rss feeds then alerts can bring the same info and at last users may ignorate them.

Those disadvantages are results of our laziness or technical ignorance. Well, when you are lazy to update news and other sections of your site you can add an RSS feed that is active and regularly updated and set it in your cron tab. There should be RSS feed cron settled to have this option at your Dating Site.

Most of the problems you can get with Cron Tab setting. First, you should note that on different servers cron jobs are set differently. Windows servers usually offer Sheduling. It's the same but hosting company can set them for you. All you should do is to contact them and tell when and how often your alerts should come, plus your site url.

Linux and Unix servers offer an opportunity to tune Cron Jobs yourself. Sometimes it's confusing. At first you should write a correct command for the bunch of files that should be run by cron jobs. Then you should settle the time periods. I would advise you not to make them come too often. I mean once in 2 days will be fine. Sometimes you need to define days, minutes, months, hours. In that case there are signs to make them come every period of time (usually *) and numbers to indicate days of the week (0-7) and months (1-12). So you can try to insert them but anyways there's a help area. You can try to read.

In case you have problems it's necessary to be sure that your vendor company is ready to help you and set them up for you. So you should try ;)

And the last source to attract users' attention is Newsletter. It goes out not very often but anyways should have a steady schedule to make your members wait for it. It's essential to make it informative, well designed and interesting. What can be interesting?

Suppose, updates on new features, options for users, new members and best membesr. You can even invent a quizz and then get answers from your memebers, give prozes. It's a very effective tool if you're creative and ready to work hard. It's very convenient if a new user gets into the mailing list automatically. In this case you should think about a newsletter module that is integrated into the Dating script and can be easily managed from the administrative mode. Well, using those tools will help you save your time and effort and get good results.

At last I want to say that there're many ways to contact your members at a Dating Site but all of them are useless if you don't like the thins you're doing. To be successful in any business you should love it and be ready to work.