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.

Consider third-party email management on a number of grounds, Zickerman recommends. Maintaining good relations with ISPs and ensuring mail gets around increasingly aggressive spam blocking can be a massive task. Companies like CheetahMail and @Once have dedicated ISP relations staffs and are on ISP "white lists" so that email originating from their servers gets through. If only one user raises a complaint with his ISP about email from your corporate domain, that company can block all emails to all customers coming from your company. Because it also has invested in an elaborate back-end database system (Epiphany), Chen says Vivendi is handling filter-fighting chores in house, but "it is very time-consuming" to contact ISPs individually to assure your emails are delivered properly now.

A Newsletter, Not an Ad

"At the end of the day, it's all content and how you call out that content," says Chen. Users stick with email they can look forward to, and that means providing editorial of value. Vivendi gets excellent feedback on its newsletter for edutainment titles, but it is now 95% non-promotional editorial, including non-game items like spring break activity suggestions and math homework tips.

"The idea is to maintain contact with the consumer," says Chen. "We get better clickthrough rates and the audience doesn't feel as if someone is always trying to sell them something." Exclusive interviews with designers, developer diaries, cheats, or even featured fan sites are all more welcome by customers than a screen of breathless sales copy.

Think outside the promotional box. One of Vivendi's most successful and viral emailings involved a Lord of the Rings e-card for Bilbo Baggins's birthday (Sept. 22). Passalongs of the note caused a rise of 500% in traffic to the landing site over the usual emailings, says Chen.

Anything downloadable kills in games-related email and enjoys the best CTRs in Vivendi newsletters. Gamers love getting tangible value in exchange for their attention: demos, trailers, screenshots, wallpapers. Anything downloadable is the electronic equivalent of an E3 booth tchotchke.

Be consistent, says Chen. In order to look forward to your newsletter, gamers need to know what to expect and where to find what they like most, so settle on a design format, a time of week or month for delivery, a feature set, and locations for various editorial and promotional elements and stick to it.

Recognize that it's the title above the brand. Like Hollywood studios and media conglomerates, game publishers delude themselves into believing that gamers are loyal to the corporate brand, when in fact gamers are mostly loyal to specific titles and game franchises.

Always put the titles of the games in the newsletter, not the corporate identity, in the subject line of the email. Email has roughly one second to defend itself against the dreaded delete key, so you must make the case quickly using only the From: and Subject lines and the first few visible lines in the email itself.

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."

Currie warns about user overload when it comes to come-ons at Web sites to opt-in. He runs 10 contests and 3 to 4 surveys a year to grow the subscriber base and finds that the lower frequency yields better response rates.

Baseline

What sort of baseline numbers can game marketers expect in their email campaigns? Vivendi's Amy Chen shared some of her averages.

* Typical CTRs in Vivendi newsletter stories range between 15% and 45%

* 80% to 90% of subscribers can handle HTML email

* Email open rates are "always above 50%"

* Typical passalong rates are about 5%

* 100K is the upper size limit on emails

[Copyright 2003 PBI Media, LLC. All rights reserved.]

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