After The Blast: Email Games Marketing Gets Relevant

Electronic Gaming Business, July 16, 2003

Email marketing is as easy to use as it is to abuse, say online marketing executives both in and outside of the games industry. Many game companies are just beginning to explore email newsletters and electronic customer relationship management (eCRM) wisely and so EGB surveyed marketers at several companies on their best practices.

Keep a tight, clean database of truly interested customers by asking for email addresses at just the right point and offering gamers real value in exchange for access to their in-box, most say. The most sophisticated marketers are moving away from stark email promotions and towards making full-blown editorial products, and some are dabbling in cutting edge technologies that literally assemble custom email missives to gamers according to their click history and declared tastes.

Most of all, the day of the email "blast" is long gone, replaced now by relevant, targeted messages of value to customers, says our panel of expert emailers: Amy Chen, database marketing manager, Vivendi Universal Games, 310/431-4347; Gordon Currie, online marketing manager, The Adventure Company, 416/638-5000; Guy Welch, Web marketing manager, Vivendi Universal Games, 425/638-5209; Gabe Zickerman, vp Marketing, Trymedia, 415/255-3060 x101

Taking Names

Stay in-house and cultivate internally-generated email lists rather than using third- party rentals to acquire new customers. "We haven't seen a list rental so far that has been successful," says Chen. Experts in the larger brand marketing field argue that response rates for customer acquisition campaigns are falling and the clear trend is toward relying on email instead to deepen relationships with the existing base.

In registration, only ask for what you need to create as low a barrier to entry as possible (preferably just email address, name and age) to get a member up and running. "The less you ask them the more our opt-in rates go up," says Vivendi's Chen. Add data points to their profile over time and in exchange for value such as clickthrough access to trailers or demos.

You can't start too soon when creating specific newsletters for upcoming game titles. "Just getting out there early makes a big difference for us in creating a list," says Welch. Vivendi launched a monthly e-letter for its Middle Earth Online title after E3 even thought he title isn't slated for release until late 2004, and it has already generated a core subscriber base that responds to the emails with extremely high click through rates.

Take a poll. Web site surveys are among the most successful means for gaining new email opt-ins from a Web site. According to Currie, opt-ins for the Adventure Company Newsletter from surveys have gone as high as 45% to 65%. He finds that the most successful surveys don't just dwell on games (i.e. seem like free market research) but also try to find out about the whole consumer by mingling lifestyle questions (favorite authors, movies, etc.) in with gamesrelated questions.

Not surprisingly, online contests are also great for garnering names, but Currie finds that offering customized items as prizes rather than simple posters or CDs is much more attractive to gamers.

Distinguish shoppers from buyers. If you host an online store, include a data point in the database about whether a customer actually buys online, because this prior behavior is the most predictive of brand loyalty and future purchasing. At Adventure Company, Currie maintains a special database for online buyers "so we can target email campaigns directly to product specific customers." Likewise, peer-to-peer download distributor Trymedia only takes names at the point of sale, and finds that users who are buying something online always need a receipt and so are much more likely to use their main email address (rather than a temporary Hotmail or Yahoo address), and so their addresses become much more reliable and long lasting.

Massaging the Database

Target, don't blast, says Currie. "When we split our main site nine months ago into The Adventure Company side and the DreamCatcher action games, our targeting and ratios increased. Our success rates (conversion, retention of subscribers) increased by 30% to 40%. Adventure gamers were specific about what news they wanted and how often." Targeting is not just critical to the success of a single email but your whole program, warns Zickerman. "The more relevant your email, the more likely the user will open it the next time, and that's incredibly important."

The two most important vectors in targeting emails to previous game buyers are, first, series loyalty and, second, genre tastes, says Zickerman. "Usually the most successful strategy is to have the game [title] they already purchased in the subject line, not the one we are marketing," he says, "because it is all about alignment," the customer being able to identify quickly with the email topic. Trymedia marketed Pearl Harbor: Defend the Fleet specifically to users who had purchased the similar Beachhead 2002, that buyers of one would probably like the other. Trymedia not only realized a 15% sell-through on recipients of that campaign but 5% of those who opened the email bought the title immediately, without even downloading a trial version first.