• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 6, 2016

As director of revenue marketing at Spark Networks, the parent of faith-based dating and content platforms such as ChristianMingle and JDate, Allyson Lutz is an expert on both data and dating. During a keynote presentation at the Email Marketing Summit on Amelia Island, FL, this morning, she pointed out that more Christian and Jewish marriages were the result of Sparks dating sites than all other dating sites combined.

So how does this relate to email marketing? Because the No. 1 way Sparks’ sites keep their members informed is via email, including daily updates on members’ “daily matches.”

It’s also how Sparks keeps its members coming back for its own consecutive dates, you know, membership renewals.

The Sparks dating sites are free for anyone to peruse, but only paying subscribers can use it to actually connect with other members, and they offer those subscriptions in increments of one-month, three-months and six-months. Not surprisingly, one of the main focuses of Lutz’s revenue marketing is getting members to renew those subscriptions and her No. 1 tool is an outbound email to them.

Making sure the right message gets to the right member at the right time is all a function of Sparks email marketing databases, and 18-year-old company has been going through some data growing pains vis a vis the accumulation of multiple subscriber lists via acquisitions.

In an effort to become more integrated, she said Sparks went through the process of sourcing a new email marketing platform and began taking steps to integrate its existing databases in order to have a more complete picture of its customers.

The process hasn’t been perfect, she said, noting that, “ultimately, we ended up with a lot of temporary patches that ended up being permanent.”

The result was inconsistencies that led to a “lack of faith in our customer data,” she said, telling summit attendees, “We realized we were going to need to rebuild from the ground up.”

Ultimately, she said the company moved to an API -- or an applications protocol interface -- that sat on top of its disparate member databases so that “data attributed could be transferred across databases.”