After The Blast: Email Games Marketing Gets Relevant

Electronic Gaming Business, July 16, 2003

Try region-specific email announcements. In tests at Vivendi, Chen got "phenomenal" CTRs off of an email about a local LAN party she was able to send only to Washington state customers in her database.

You can break the usual rules of email frequency and bandwidth limits but only when you know your audience really wants the content. In a seven-message Starfox Adventures campaign last fall, Nintendo was able to target 126,000 platform gamers with a mix of Flash content, surveys and even a bleeding-edge in-email streaming video of the game. Open rates for the campaign reached 57% and click rates went as high as 85%, but mainly in the final two emails, which were targeted to users who had clicked through on previous messages in the series and also contained highly interactive elements.

Feedback Loop

Optimize the value of the various kinds of feedback you get from users so that you are making best use of email's inherent interactivity. Attach unique promotional codes to all offers that go out so that you know that this specific email was responsible for a phone or online order. Likewise, don't rely on overall site activity to guesstimate how much more traffic a new e-letter is sending your way. Have newsletter stories link to unique URLs so that you can determine precisely the effectiveness of the newsletter generally and specific story elements.

Reward people for talking back. Don't reserve prizes or free games for contests. Adventure Company wants to build a loyal community of adventure genre lovers, and so it often sends games gratis to members who send in a good idea or suggestion. The company actually gets design hints from its email recipients. By asking subscribers how they go about solving game puzzles and with whom, Currie says the developers now have information they are using to make the adventures more conducive to family play.

Support piracy. Encourage viral distribution. Since a fair percentage of newsletter readers have had the email forwarded by a friend, always include a prominent "Subscribe" button in emails so that the unsubscribed recipient can add his own name to the list. Give that button a unique subscription page at your site so that you can track this sort of viral activity. Chen says that exclusive content nets the best viral distribution and new opt-ins.

Surprisingly and across all email newsletter categories, customer surveys are among the most clicked newsletter features. This can also deliver great ROI for the company. Vivendi has made a major investment in its database project, and part of the payoff is letting the R&D team survey select portions of the list on new game concepts.

What Are You Crazy?: The Don'ts

Do not offer a direct feedback mechanism to customers unless you are prepared to handle the wave of replies. Soliciting customer input without being ready to reply to this mail is a bad faith offer. In the case of newsletters for specific titles with a manageable audience, Vivendi will allow direct email feedback to marketers. "We have a button that goes right back into our forums," says Welch, "where developers and fans are there and all discussions are threaded. It's part of our normal business practice to go in there."