You’ve just successfully created your mobile game and are unsure of how to get more people to download and play it. You know that you can’t rely on organic growth, but the cost of paid advertising can be daunting. Well, there’s another tool that you can add to your inventory of marketing strategies: email marketing.
Read on to learn why email marketing is effective, especially today, and how to leverage it to create a successful email campaign for your mobile game.
8 Reason Why Email Marketing is Still Effective
Email marketing is more effective today than ever before – just check out this list of detailed statistics from HubSpot on the state of email marketing in 2020!
Here’s why you should be using email marketing to promote your mobile game:
1. It’s Easy to Measure the Results of Email Marketing
With email marketing, you can use analytics to measure the success or failure of your strategies. Email marketing, unlike other conventional marketing tools, gives exact and absolute results through helpful and accurate metrics. In fact, 90% of content marketers mention that they rely on email engagement to determine the success rate of their content!
Email marketing enables you to track bounce, delivery, click-through, unsubscribe and open rates, giving you a more accurate understanding of how your marketing strategy works and how you can improve it. It also provides insight into your users’ interests and behavior, enabling you to fine-tune the messages you send out.
2. Emails Are Easier to Share
Email marketing is among the easiest marketing strategies to exploit. Emails are easier to share with your users at the comfort of your phone, even when on the go. With emails, it’s also easier for your app users to share your message with friends and family and convince them to download the app
3. Email Marketing Helps Increase Brand Awareness
Most people don’t know that social media isn’t the only online platform where you can grow your brand awareness. If you have someone’s email, be it a frequent user or a prospect user, it means that they must have shown some level of interest in your app.
Email marketing enables you to increase brand awareness and interest levels by staying on the user’s mind. However, to grab your users’ attention doesn’t mean you should keep sending multiple emails a day to every person on your email list. Doing this will only drive them away.
Instead, focus on using email marketing strategies that promote your activeness in the community. Don’t just focus on getting your users to purchase products but rather try and build a relationship with them.
4. Email Marketing Has a Global Reach
Almost every mobile game user has an email address. With emails, you have the potential to reach thousands, even millions, of prospect app users all over the world easily and quickly. According to Statista.com, the number of global daily email users is expected to rise to 4.3 billion by 2023.
Although social media is also a great way to reach a global audience, it doesn’t show you the exact people who showed interest in your app.
5. Email Marketing Enables Targeted Messages
Email marketing solves all the fundamental problems of conventional marketing campaigns targeting the wrong audience. It gives you the ability to send specific emails to certain audiences and confers the ability to choose who sees your message, unlike most other marketing strategies.
Email marketing enables you to target specific leads through relevant demographics, allowing you to get the right messages to potential users with ease. It gives you the ability to send personalized messages to your users, making them feel appreciated and hence cultivating loyalty for your brand.
For example, you can refer to your users by their names, nicknames, games they love, teams, and more. This makes your users feel a sense of belonging and builds trust.
We know that targeted marketing works, but research also shows that personalized emails deliver six times more transaction rates, while those with personalized subject lines get a 26% boost in open rates.
6. Email Marketing Allows You To Reach Your Users Instantly
With email marketing, you can reach your users immediately. Emails produce instant and meaningful results once sent to potential app users. You can use email promotion to create awareness for users before launching the mobile game or upcoming upgrades.
Also, you can use emails to keep your users updated or mention new promotions and offers for in-game products. Doing this creates a tremendous sense of urgency for both current and potential app users.
7. Email Marketing Is Cheap and Has a Huge ROI
Email marketing is among the cheapest marketing strategies for creating awareness for a mobile game. It’s quite affordable compared to advertisements that you have to pay for your app to be advertised or posted.
With email marketing, even if you decide to hire an email marketing firm, it will cost you very little. It’s advisable to use email marketing for a pre- and post-campaign of your mobile game. Typically, for every $1 you use to send an email, you earn around $40 in return.
8. Email Marketing Allows you to Stay In Contact With Your Customers
With emails, you can keep in touch with your users as often as possible. This gives the users the impression that you’re thinking about them and also offers them a channel to reach you as quickly as possible.
Plus, if you have interesting, engaging and informative content, your users will be eagerly waiting for your next email, and the chances of them sharing your message with other gamers will be higher.
Key Takeaway:
Email marketing is still effective today and you should make it one of your key strategies for game marketing campaigns. It can particularly prove effective if you already have an active mailing list of gamers who have previously subscribed to your services.
How to Build an Email Marketing Campaign
Creating the right email campaign will determine the success of your emails. Here are the key points to note when creating an email campaign.
1. Set Your Goals
Ask yourself what your goals are. Your objectives can include any of the following:
- To get new signups for a webinar or newsletter
- To sell products
- To encourage more downloads
- To get support for a cause
When you figure out your goal, it will help you determine the type of campaign to embark on, the content to generate, and the method you’ll use to measure success.
Setting your goal will also help you know what to send out and to whom. It will also help to make your email marketing campaign target-focused and productive.
2. Build Your Email List
You need to create an email list, but not just any random list. It should be people you have an existing relationship with, such as people who have downloaded your app or expressed interest in downloading it.
When you already have an existing relationship, you have implied permission to send them email marketing messages. Don’t just send random emails to strangers. You need to first get their permission. Such consent is known as express permission and is acquired when someone agrees to receive emails from you, mostly by filling out a subscription form, perhaps for a newsletter, on your website.
Don’t forget to use double opt-in to ensure that your customer explicitly agrees to receive emails from you. A permission-based email list will help you increase open and click-through rates and boost downloads from your email marketing campaign efforts.
3. Determine the Type of Campaign You’ll Use
The type of email you choose to employ in your marketing will depend on your goals and also determine the success of your campaign.
Marketing email campaigns fall under three main categories:
- Promotional Emails: These are generally about new sales and offers. Examples of promotional emails include in-game product offers, announcements, and event invitations.
- Transactional Emails: These emails are prompted by an action (such as making a purchase or signing up) your subscribers took when visiting your website. They include welcome messages, confirmations of orders or purchases, acknowledgment of changes to subscriber details, and signup confirmation.
- Relational Emails: These emails are all about keeping in touch with your subscribers and delivering your promises. Examples of relational emails include newsletters bearing information that is helpful to subscribers.
4. Design
After you’ve set your goals, built your email list, and settled on the type of emails to use, it’s time to design your email.
Here are some tips to help you optimize your email marketing campaign:
Tip #1: Make it readable
It’s not that people are so scatter-brained, but there’s just so much in people’s minds today, making it difficult to pay attention for an extended period. Therefore, you need to structure your emails so that they hold your readers’ attention quickly and longer.
Here’s how to hold your readers’ attention:
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- Visuals: These include videos, infographics, images, and posters, accompanied by minimal text. Visuals make content appealing and easy to digest, and there are several benefits of using visual content. For example, people remember visual content way more than they do text-based content.
- Catchy Subject Line: Your subject line should consist of powerful words that capture attention and perhaps evoke emotion. Also, including a number in your subject line results in a higher open rate.
Tip #2: Personalize your emails
Rather than come up with a same-fits-all email, tailor your material to suit each of your readers’ needs—at the appropriate time. Such emails are more well-received and effective because they’re relevant to your readers’ needs or interests.
A simple way to create emails that suit each of your readers is to use segmented campaigns. Segment your email list and plan content targeted to each of those segments. Base your segments on the following:
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- Geographic location: This is suitable if you’re targeting specific markets.
- Interest: Suitable for differentiating subscribers according to their interests. It will help you tailor your email to specific content.
- Activity: This is suitable for classifying your subscribers according to their past open and click-through behavior. A study of subscribers’ past behavior will help you organize your content for future email marketing campaign
You can use the following approaches to segment your email list:
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- Use the data they entered when signing up to classify your subscribers into the different segments.
- Use separate signup lists to enable your subscribers to automatically segment themselves.
Tip #3: Consistency
To subscribe to your email, your subscribers most likely downloaded your app or were referred by a friend. So your emails are not the only means mobile gamers will have heard about your game.
Therefore, ensure your emails match the colors, fonts, and branding across your social media page, website, and mobile game. This way, your readers have a consistent experience.
Tip #4: Device-Friendly
When designing your emails, remember many emails are read on mobile devices, so ensure they’re optimized for that. People don’t usually open emails that aren’t mobile-friendly.
Tip #5: Time Your Email Sending Strategically
When you plan your email’s timing, it helps you avoid long periods between sends, as well as cluttering of client inboxes if emails are sent too frequently. If your emails are too few—because of long periods between sends—you run the risk of losing your subscribers’ attention.
On the other hand, cluttering your subscribers’ inboxes with too many emails will drive them off. They will flag you as spam or unsubscribe.
Tip # 6: Promotional Content
Many gamers choose emails as their choice of communication with mobile game developers, so email does rule over social media and online ads. But that does not mean you can bombard your readers with blatant promotion content.
When creating your email content, strike a balance. Aim for a mix and devote most of your content to useful information and value, and the rest to promotions and sales.
Here are some content ideas that will help you craft useful and valuable information:
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- Product updates: Frequent mobile game updates or new game releases.
- Support: FAQs, customer feedback, and community events.
5. Measure Your Results
Once you have created a fabulous email and sent it out, it doesn’t end there. It will help if you track your campaign’s success.
Employ the following tools to track success:
1. Email Marketing Tools
These are tools like Campaign Monitor and MailChimp. The reports section of these tools will give you details such as the number of opens, bounces, and unopened emails, as well as open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates. You can also get to learn about the number of shares.
These details give insight into how people reacted to your email campaign, which can help you determine its success. It can also help you compare the success of one campaign to another.
2. Website Analytic Tools
These are tools like Google Analytics. Analytic tools show you details of visitors who landed on your website because of your email campaign and features such as the pages they visited.
With the data you get from these tools, you can make any necessary changes or adjustments to your emails to improve open, click-through rates, and downloads.
Key Takeaways:
With the above key tips, you can easily build an email marketing campaign for your mobile game that will not only help you increase your downloads but also keep in touch with your clients. This way, you can offer them more resources and interact with them at a personal level to know how best to improve the product.
In Closing…
Now that you know how effective email marketing is in promoting mobile games, you can go ahead and begin your email campaign. If you follow the above steps, you’ll be able to craft a killer email campaign for your mobile game.