Written by Pini Yakuel, CEO of Optimove
One of the holy grails of personalization is the ability to implement real-time, data-driven player marketing. In other words, social gaming publishers that can deliver highly-relevant messages to individual players at the exact moment of greatest relevance will thrill those players, engender more loyalty, and gain an important edge in this competitive space.
Instead of presenting generic offers at predetermined times, publishers can base highly-personalized (and highly-effective) messaging on specific player activity and behavioral triggers. Given the brisk activity level among most players in the social gaming world, it is critical to deliver the perfect message at the perfect time. Messages, offers and incentives can be personalized to individual players based on their last action, their particular game-play history, win/lose patterns, spending history, customer life-cycle stage, predicted future value, risk of churn, and many other factors.
Understanding Real-time Personalized Messaging
The differences and advantages of real-time, trigger-based marketing versus traditional “batch” marketing are not always obvious. Let’s delve into these differences a bit. Batch marketing involves the combination of player + message + channel + time. For example, a social gaming publisher could run a campaign targeting night-time players (the players) with a 50% match-up bonus on their next day-time payment (the message), sent to them by email (the channel) on Tuesday at 10 AM (the time).
Real-time personalized messaging follows the same basic formula, but replaces time with a real-time trigger. Examples of real-time triggers include:
- A player plays a particular game for the first time.
- A VIP player logs into the game for the first time in more than three months.
- A player lost a particular game two times in a row.
- A new player invited three friends to play a game.
- The account balance of a long-time “VIP,” who is now predicted to churn, just dropped below $100.
So, taking the last example here, a marketer could define a real-time campaign that shows a pop-up box (the channel) when the account balance of any such VIP player (the player) drops below $100 (the trigger) offering “100% payment matching up to $250” (the message).
The power of this personalized, real-time messaging is enormous. Instead of focusing marketing efforts only on acquiring new players, the player is already in the publisher’s environment. Plus, the marketer has a very good idea of what the player wants (or needs or would appreciate) at that exact moment in time. Of course, this level of personalization requires an intensely data-driven approach, so that each player receives the most relevant and enticing offer possible every time.
The Real-time Marketing Challenge
Achieving this degree of real-time, data-driven personalized marketing requires four integrated components:
- Player segmentation – Dynamic selection of players to be eligible for a real-time campaign, based on high-resolution, behavior-based micro-segmentation
- Trigger detection – Real-time collection of data about relevant player activity, as it happens, along with an analysis engine to calculate when the trigger occurs
- Message & channel – The offer/incentive along with the mechanism to serve it (i.e. in-game message, website pop-up, mobile push notification)
- Campaign evaluation and optimization – To accurately calculate the effectiveness of each customer-trigger-message-channel combination, the marketer must utilize test and control groups so that the actual uplift of each the real-time campaign can be evaluated and optimized.
Real-time Personalized Messaging is in Your Future
You might be thinking at this point that the concept of real-time personalized messaging sounds like a great idea for your business, but that the practicalities are a bit intimidating. In fact, real-time personalized messaging is no longer the future of player marketing – it is here today! Whereas in the past, achieving real-time personalization was extremely difficult, the latest technologies actually make this straightforward. Within a year or two, every social gaming publisher will routinely use real-time personalized customer messaging. If they don’t, their competition will trounce them.
Pini Yakuel, founder and CEO of Optimove, a profitable and rapidly-growing startup, has over a decade of experience in analytics-driven customer marketing, business consulting and sales. His passion for understanding what drives customer behavior led him to spearhead the development of Optimove, the industry’s leading customer retention automation software, empowering marketers to maximize their customers’ value. Optimove is used by 150+ brands, including Zynga, Williams Interactive, Dragonplay, and Jelly Button Games.
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