Paul Hyman – Repeat Business: Its The Name of the Game

One sale from a customer is good. Convincing that customer to stick around and buy more games is, of course, better. And generating new customers from existing ones is best. In other words, in todays challenging marketplace, repeat business is the holy grail. You want to attract clients who love your games (and why shouldnt they?)and then foster a relationship with them so that making incremental sales afterwards is a breeze. Heck, once gamers are convinced of your studios brilliance, all you should need to do is remind them youve just released a new gem and there should be no reason to convince them again. Not only will they buy, but hopefully theyll also tell their friends, wholl tell their friends. . . .

There are many tools you can utilize to ensure you are top of mindfrom proper branding inside your game to ensuring premium placement of new games on all the top portals. One trick often overlooked is to stay in touch with your customers and to make them part of your communityand one of the best places to do that is online. Gamers are already downloading your casual games online, theyre coming to your website, and so it makes sense for you to send them some kind of additional online communication to help grow your relationship with them.

Arguably the communication tool of choicethe one that is most cost-effectiveis an e-mail newsletter, delivered, say, once a month or corresponding to new products launches. With the correct platform, the right message, and a good e-mail subscription list, you can maintain a consistent message and stay top-of-mind with your clientele.

Successful e-mail marketing programs arent only about getting high open rates. Theyre about building strong, long-term relationships with subscribers. Here are some tips for doing it right: It All Starts with the DatabaseWhile getting users to your website is not an easy task, Ernie Ramirez from Reflexive and Paul Thelen from Big Fish Games are both strong proponents of the power of using your game brands to drive users to your website. If you create a great game and distribute to the major portals, many users will find your website without you tryingby employing a simple Google search.

So, when one of these gamers arrives at your website and gives up her e-mail address to download your game or register it, youve already established a certain level of trust and begun a relationship with her. But is this going to be a one-night stand or a marriage? That depends on whether you can wow her so that, when youre ready to pop the question on your next game, shes most likely to say yes.

If your website doesnt currently capture e-mail addresses of visitors, you need to do something about that, pronto! Make it necessary for visitors to your site to sign in with their e-mail addresses, or create a contest or giveaway that requires them to provide their addresses. Then make sure to get those addresses into a database so that they can be used for further marketing. Ultimately a sale on your website is worth more in both customer loyalty and increased sales price than a sale on a major portal. Your database should be a growing gold mine, the place to which youre going to keep coming back for more gold. The bigger the mine, the more gold youre going to find.

Keep The Conversation GoingIf gamers loved your most recent game, theres a good chance they are looking around for something else you created. Have something to offer? Or is the next game still in production? If the latter, youre going to need to keep your fans enthralled until the release date, which means giving them some value or some extra fun.

Theres plenty you can offer your audience in between games: tips and tricks, contests, coming attractions, gamer reviews and comments, interviews with your design team, screenshots of upcoming games, and so on. Remember that the goal is to establish a long-term relationship because long-term means more money from a repeat customer.

Dont Get Tongue-Tied! But lets face it. Your studios strength is creating great casual games, not sending out e-mail marketing campaigns. There are many companies that started off with good intentions of building their own e-newsletters and then, two or three months down the road, when they got busy with their own core activities, the online communication fell to the wayside.

Before you launch a community-building e-newsletter, have a solid plan of how youre going to execute it. A meeting with your team is a good idea to decide what its going to take for you to design, write, produce, deliver, and track something professionaland to keep your database up-to-date. What will it take to have someone who can take a few days each month to do the job right? Or will you send less-frequent e-mails just around product launches?

Like A Jigsaw PuzzleIts important to understand that effective marketing is made up of multiple pieces like a jigsaw puzzle; its a portfolio of activities that you are employing to create awareness of your brand, to stay in touch with your customers and prospects, and to get feedback from them as well.

If your only communication with your fans is through your website, or via advertising, an e-newsletter can offer one advantage that the other vehicles cant: you control the timing and content of the message. For example, if you have the portfolio to support it, the newsletter could be sent every month on an ongoing basis. You cant guarantee that people will look at your website every month. And you may not be able to afford to advertise every month. But you cant afford not to communicate with your clients at critical junctures. Thats where e-newsletters come in!

Whats the Upside? Most game companies that have launched successful e-newsletters find that there are three advantages to keeping them going: (1) Your database grows. One of the first things gamers tend to do when they think a game is really coolor when they get a new piece of information about a gameis tell their friends. And if their buds recommend a game or a studio, you can be sure that other gamers will follow. (2) A bigger database means more sales. Now youve got more gamers who know about how much fun your games are. If you continue to interest them with good content and more great games, sales are likely to increase. (3) Brand equity expands. An investment in brand-building is an investment in future sales growth. As more people learn your companys name and associate it with quality games, theyll be more inclined to buy your next offeringoften simply because youre offering it.

What Might Be the Downside? One obvious downside to e newsletters is that they cost money (and time) to create. Thats money and time that could be used for other purposes. So if youre not in the mood to increase your e-marketing activities right now, or if youre considering cutting your ad and marketing budgets, you might see an e-newsletter as an unnecessary expense.

At the same time, many developers have outsourced most of their marketing and relationship management to a publisher or to major portals. They dont have direct customer relationships or a website that would enable them to begin cultivating such relationships. Before they could even think about creating a newsletter, significant work would need to be performed on their own website to allow for the purchase of the games, the gathering of names, and the building of a database. For such developers, an e-newsletter would require more than just time and expense; it would require a whole new way of doing business.

It Takes Work Casual game developers are fortunate. Your fan base is out there talking to each other, enjoying your products, asking questions, and anticipating your next game. That doesnt happen very often in other businesses. Youre selling fun to a community that is passionate about what you do. And communitiesespecially passionate communitiesbuild databases. And databases generate prospectswho buy even more gamesbut only if you take the time and make the effort to reach out to them. Remember, as in real life, relationships only work when you work at them.

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Paul The Game Master Hyman has covered the videogames industry for well over a dozen years; he currently writes for Gamasutra. com, Game Developer magazine, and The Hollywood Reporter, among others. He is also editor-in-chief of www.OpenMoves.com/games, an enewsletter marketing firm whose clients include videogame companies. E-mail Paul at paul.hyman@casualconnect.org.