Acquiring Customers

The number rule for acquiring customers is to make sure that you can contact them again in the future. For decades, games publishers have considered customers as disposable playthings, to be courted for a new game and then discarded as the marketing team move on to the next project.

How wasteful.

Developers and the new breed of publishers have realised that, as a strategy, this is barking mad. No longer are consumers disposable, only fit to be spoken to every 12-24 months as each new franchise iteration is launched. They are now customers of an ongoing service, and need to be treated as such.

Being able to contact a customer again can take many forms. It might mean asking the consumer to:

• Provide an email address
• Become a Twitter follower
• Sign up as a Facebook fan
• Subscribe to a YouTube channel

Each one of these methods means that you can communicate with those users again. Which means you no longer need to pay to re-acquire them. And that goes a very long way to making your business successful.

Marketing Emails

Photo by Biscarotte

Email is often the most powerful marketing tool. It is flexible, under your control (and not subject to arbitrary changes of rules like the Facebook platform), and can have great response rates.

It can also be difficult to persuade consumers to give you their email address, can get you labeled as a spammer and can be tough to deliver.

I generally recommend using a third party supplier like AWeber, MailChimp or GetResponse. These companies are heavily focused on “deliverability”, helping you ensure that your emails get through to your consumers. MailChimp provides an extremely helpful guide to email marketing for free on its website. (For more useful links for your games business, go to the resources page)

If you want to do it yourself, go ahead. But it won’t take long before you are labeled a spammer.

The importance of auto-responders

Gathering email addresses will be useless if you don’t do anything with it. Auto-responders are an easy and critical way of following up.

Put it this way: do you put expect to sleep with someone the moment you meet them, or do you expect there to be some romancing involved?

Buy How to Publish a Game

You, as developers, are no longer looking for one-night stands. You are looking to build steady relationships. You want your gamers to start to trust you. To give you things (like personal information). To spend with you.

You need to earn their trust.

So you start with the basics. They give you an email address in order to get something (a trial, a login to a free-to-play game, a free sample of a book on How to Publish a Game).

Your autoresponder hits them with a “Thank you”. An automated message that confirms that you view them as a valued customer.

The next day, you might send them another automated message. It might say “We hope you’re enjoying our game. Here is your first of three emails introducing you to our world.”

Make the email valuable. Make it fun. Offer good, constructive advice. Do that for several days and your gamers will start to trust you.

So make sure that you keep earning their trust. Don’t spam them. Try to send them things that they value. Don’t drive conversion by lowest common denominator marketing, or by thinking that if you send enough emails, some people will eventually pay you some money.

Photo by Michael Gil

That’s spam thinking. And if you think like that, take a long, hard look in the mirror. That’s the face of a spammer.

Market by sending them things that you would like to receive. Build a loyal following. And then those gamers will seek you out. They will choose to spend money with you to reward you for the value you have already given them. You’ll be more profitable AND you’ll be able to look at yourself in the mirror every morning.

Autoresponders are your friend. Use them wisely.

Email Marketing Tips

• ASK users to add your address to their address book. This will help with deliverability and potentially white-listing
• BE yourself. Say what your email is about. Don’t use hyperbole “FREE! MUST END SOON! CLICK NOW!”
• ONE exclamation mark is enough (in fact, it’s probably too many)
• AVOID writing, “free” or “click here!” or “click here now!” or “act now!” or “limited time!” That looks like spam.
• INCLUDE a real physical address. (This is a requirement of CAN-SPAM, the US email marketing legislation).
• UNSUBSCRIBING should be really easy. Your recipients can either hit “Unsubscribe” or “Report as Junk”. You *really* don’t want them to hit “Report as Junk”. Do not make them login to unsubscribe.
• RUN your target email through SpamAssassin. It’s not perfect, but it will give you a sense of how spammy your message is.

Related posts:

1. Be Honest, Be Nice: Marketing And PR For Indie Developers
2. 12 business tips for indie game developers
3. To those arguing about marketing vs creativity: Marketing IS creativity

The logo for your mobile app is as important as the cover design for a boxed game. Just like a shelf in a physical store, your customers browse the app store, waiting for something to stand out and grab their attention. Don’t get lost in the sea of icons. Here are some key design features of top logos from the iOS app charts:

1. Show the object of play
   The majority of touch-screen games are like toys. They are easy to understand because they centre on one object of interaction. Your logo should clearly show the object that users will play with. The
   Angry Birds  logo doesn’t show the slingshot, it shows the bird.
   At the Mobile Games Forum, Michael Schade from Fishlabs mentioned that he wanted the logo for their Volkswagen games to be an image of the car, but Volkswagen insisted on using their company logo. He was pretty sure that an image of the car would have further boosted their success.
2. Represent what users will do
   This is secondary to showing the object, but it does help if you can graphically symbolise the action of play. Cut the rope features a ‘cut here’ sign with scissors and a dotted line, but more subtle cues also work. Fruit Ninja shows the blurry shape of a blade in motion, while Angry Birds uses a comic-book background effect to imply propulsion.
3. Jump outside the frame
   This is another great comic-book trick to emphasise movement. First, you need to include a frame. These are usually white or silver, so as not to get in the way visually. Then, you want to make the object extend beyond it. The logo for NFL Flick quarterback shows the footballer leaning outside the frame. The juice splatters on Fruit Ninja appear to have landed right on the frame itself. The clouds in the Angry Birds logo are a frame and a background at the same time.
4. Point toward the player
   Just like the famous ‘I need YOU’ poster, many top app logos point straight at the viewer. Monopoly shows the mascot gesturing out towards you, his hand outside of the frame. Words with Friends has letter tiles flying out, the edge pointing towards the customer. In contrast to logos that use this effect, many others look flat and motionless, causing them to fade into the background.
5. Use primary colours
   This is a must for the majority of games, with notable exceptions: if your game is meant to look charmingly primitive, like Hatchi or Stickman cliff diving, use plain white or grey. The point is to either go for bright, strong colours or no colour at all; there are very few pastels in the top apps charts.
6. Don’t use the name
   The name of your game is already written next to the logo, so you have no good reason to include it in the logo, unless your game is already famous. Grand Theft Auto? Fine. Anything else? Probably not.

Related posts:

1. Three ways to market your indie game
2. Improve your revenue with the GAMESbrief free-to-play game forecasting spreadsheet
3. OnLive has only 2 potential customers: Microsoft and Sony

Justin Bieber on WeeWorld

1. Use established intellectual property – whether it’s taking up old ip that is unlikely to cause legal trouble, or taking on a contract from an established entertainment brand, established ip is essential. Advergaming cannot attract new customers, but it will increase brand engagement.
2. Make participation frictionless - no downloads, simple gameplay, and easy interfaces that allow the user to feel like the co-creator of the media product. For example, XMG’s project with Teen Nickelodeon’s Degrassi allowed users to create music videos and mix karaoke versions of songs from the show using a simple, intuitive interface.
3. Create engaging brand experiences - you’re not using the game to promote the name or image of a brand. Advergaming is fundamentally different to poster design. High engagement levels are essential to what you’re offering to ip owners, so make sure that your game brings players back time and again for more brand experience.
4. Focus on action as narrative - in order to create meaningful brand experience, don’t simply plaster the brand name and image onto an arbitrary game mechanic; identify the key actions performed in the narrative of existing products using the brand’s ip, and turn those into your game mechanic. For Degrassi, it was making music. For Volkswagen, it was driving. For the celebrities featured in WeeWorld, image and identity are the primary activity.
5. Mirror how the audience already interacts with the brand - some audiences will balk at signs of obvious product placement, but for other audiences this is okay. Middle-aged women who watch American soap operas might not find product placement so unusual, and could respond more positively to it.

For more advice on creating games under contract from entertainment brands, read the GAMESbrief guide to Marketing and Games and Transmedia: is it just brand extension?

No related posts.

Cost per Loyal User Index

Fiksu’s Cost Per Loyal User Index, a measure of how much it costs to acquire a customer who will open a mobile app three times or more, rose to an all-time high last December at $1.81. This is still lower than the CPA reported by developers for other platforms such as Facebook; Rick Thomson of Playdom said last October that it cost between $2 and $3 to acquire a customer, while at the Social Games Summit last November Kixeye reported a cost per acquisition of $4. These figures are available on our CPA page and are updated regularly.

Mobile Beat points out that the high cost of customer acquisition last December will have been partly caused by the rush to reach a top position in the app charts before Apple’s rankings freeze between 25th and 28th. Those top in the charts by 25th would benefit the most from the 6.8 million iPhones and Android devices activated on Christmas day alone. This momentary hike nevertheless came during an upward trend in CPA, as virality has become less attainable and competition has increased. To forecast what rising CPA means for your games business, use the online games spreadsheet.

To learn about how CPA is calculated and get updates on the latest CPA benchmarks as they come in, do check the CPA, CAC and Customer Acquisition Cost page regularly.

Related posts:

1. CPA, CAC and Customer Acquisition costs
2. How much does it cost to acquire a Facebook customer?
3. If it costs you $1 to acquire a customer, how can you make money charging $0.99 for a game

I thought it’d be nice (and a bit of a reassuring cliché) to do a roundup of the Hard Lines story so far, and take a look at some of the interesting facts and figures that have come to light since we launched Hard Lines in June of this year. Of course this would be redundant without some sort of insight from me that wasn’t revealed before (or has simply occurred to me in the time since the original posts) so you’ll still learn a few things I’d hope.

It’s been a pretty amazing few months, and I’m sure there are plenty more to come. The power of twitter has been fully revealed to me, the Android market has been dipped into with a tentative toe, and all kinds of fun, interesting and friendly people have been met. So sit down with a mince pie, some mulled wine, and read on.

Launch weeks

Within two weeks of launch, Hard Lines had 470 sales, 14 games press reviews, and average rating of 9/10 from the press, and an average user rating of 5 stars. All of this critical praise seemed overwhelming, and is still a source of great pride, but obviously it didn’t really translate into sales to speak of. Unless I release a game without any PR at all I’ll never really know if the PR and reviews helped boost it over the norm, but I’d also be very worried if a new game has sold less than we did just for being ‘new’.

Then of course got featured by Apple in the New and Noteworthy section. As we all know now, this is the way to get the kind of sales that can support a small studio like Spilt Milk. For three or four weeks we saw the benefit of this promotion. Each week we’d move a ‘page’ away from the front, and each week we’d see a drop of about 200-300 sales each weekend. This regular and distinct correlation is very interesting, and not something we saw with any other promotion we received (from Apple or otherwise).

We saw a peak of about 650 sales per day during that first week, and then each successive week we dropped down to 450ish, then to 150, then the weekends dropped down more slowly. First 120, then 105, then sub-100 sales per day for the weekend. At .99c/59p you can tell we needed a kick to really make this financially viable.

Sales since launch

Freemium is the best way forward

Many see the race to the bottom for prices on the App Store as a one-way route to failure. Even though the occasional success story like Whale Trail seems to buck the trend, I’m pretty confident that the only reason I’ll launch a game paid on iOS will be because a) it’s aimed at an established audience (branded or uber niche appeal) or b) it means it gets more reviews, as it’s seen as a more ‘serious’ game or c) I want the bots and twitterverse to give me more PR when I swap it between paid and free alternately over the lifetime of the product.

So, what is the answer? IAP and freemium is the best way forward. Not only is it an interesting design challenge, you allow your game to reach and appeal to a much wider ranging group of people much more easily. If every barrier to people spending money on your game is one worth destroying, then surely the first and most important is the upfront price. With no demos and the trend for Lite versions seemingly less prominent, making your game free is a no-brainer.

We introduced IAP into Hard Lines in late July, first with the iPad version and then later with powerups and in-game currency. We’ve seen some good success with the IAP and will be sure to both expand upon and tweak the existing stuff in Hard Line, but also include it in all of our future games, from launch. It’s a lot harder to incorporate sensible elements post-release that actually enhance the game unless it’s planned from the start. Sounds obvious, but it really should be hammered home. It doesn’t mean you must strip out features to ‘sell’ later, but rather think of ways that players would potentially be interested in expanding their experience. Also, never charge for stuff that cannot be ‘bought’ for free. That just alienates consumers in the blink of an eye.

As reported in the last diary, our IAP breakdown is as follows:

Game sales: 71.3% (£0.69)
Small IAP: 1% (£0.69)
Med IAP: 3% (£2.99)
Large IAP: 7% (£5.99)
Huge IAP: 18% (£54.99)

Big IAP

Download – play ratios

So here’s an interesting brand new bit of info. We went free twice, with two different promotion – Free App A Day, and Free Game Of The Day. The first was considerably more effective (peaked at 82k downloads in a day, versus 8k) but that’s not the stunner.

Comparing our Flurry stats for the week of the first promotion to the number of actual downloads, we see some interesting stuff. Looking at the first two (and the biggest) days, plus the week as a whole, we can see something a bit odd.

On the 15th August, we had 80k+ downloads, and 60k+ plays.* That week starting the 15th August, we had 195k+ downloads, and 166k+ plays.(*here I’m guessing the 65k plays on the second day, outnumbering the downloads, is down to a hangover from the previous day, as well as the fact that the ‘plays’ are not unique)

This tells us that way more people download these free apps during promotion than play it, even once. There is a significant amount of people out there who will download something that is free, and then simply not even use it.

At a minimum, we’re looking at 25% of the people who take advantage of the free promotions do not even open the game once. The percentage is likely a LOT higher than that too, as the plays are not unique users. I don’t know about you, but the word that popped into my head was ‘oh?!’.

So I thought I’d spend a few words addressing something that’s bugged me since launch. We’ve constantly said we’d do tons of new content and features, and despite how it may seem from the consumer’s point of view, the rate at which we’ve released new stuff (patches, modes, new features) has been terribly lacking and it’s something I hope to rectify in the future. Who knows what will happen and when, but I can say with honesty it is my intent to change this side of development as I believe it’s one element of self-publishing games digitally that we’ve severely under-exploited.

Until next year, Merry Christmas one and all!

Fun facts:
Fact 1 – total downloads to date 258,262
Fact 2 – total plays to date 1,818,591
Fact 3 – total 5-star user reviews to date 177
Fact 4 – Metacritic score: 86%
Fact 5 – total refunds to date 22

Related posts:

1. Spilt Milk Studios Development Diary 12 – Hundreds and Thousands
2. Spilt Milk Studios Development Diary 15 – Freedom Part 2
3. Spilt Milk Studios Development Diary 17: Tale of Tails

• Be nice.
• Market to the platform holder, as well as your fans.
• Use Twitter.
• Be confident in your voice.
• Open up a conversation.
• Believe that everything you’re doing is interesting to someone, somewhere.

You should read the full piece, it’s very good.

Related posts:

1. Indie Marketing: Tell the World! (part 3)
2. Indie Marketing: tell the world! (Part two)
3. Email Marketing for Game Developers

intro | MAUs | DAUs | engagement | retention | conversion | whales | ARPPU | platform

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The costs of acquiring customers for Facebook, browser and mobile games is soaring. At the same time, virality is ever more elusive as Facebook shuts down spam messages and mobile has still not harnessed the social graph on a technical level (although word-of-mouth is still very effective).

The cost of acquiring a customer (often called CPA – Cost Per Acquisition – or CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost) is definitely rising. But how far?

That’s a very difficult question. Not least because the difference between CPA and effective CPA (eCPA) is so critical.

What is the eCPA of a social, browser or mobile game?

CPA is the amount you actually spend on acquiring a customer. Let’s imagine you use some sort of affiliate or CPI (Cost Per Install) scheme where you pay $1 for each user who registers for or installs your game.

So the CPA is $1.

But what about virality? Word of mouth? PR? How much does it really cost you to acquire a customer?

eCPA is often thought of as being the cost of acquiring a customer and all of the friends that they bring. So eCPA is generally lower than CPA, and is a function of the amount you pay to acquire a customer and the effectiveness of your viral channels. This shows how virality works to reduce your marketing budget, but also emphasises that you will need to seed your channels with marketing spend to kickstart the process.

The problem with eCPA is that it can be hard to measure. So there is another way.

What is the total marketing spend for a mobile, browser or social game?

A different way to look at eCPA is the catch-all approach.

Into your costs, throw in everything: PR spend, the marketing person, the cost of producing trailers, videos, press releases and assets, everything.

Then look at how many new customers you got that month. Divide one by the other and hey presto, total eCPA.

What should I use as a benchmark?

That’s a very difficult question. My guess is that most people who talk about the cost of acquiring customers are referring to the actual cash payment to a marketing partner for delivering a customer.

So when looking at the benchmarks below, I would assume that these are CPA, not eCPA figures.

Benchmarks

• “Users are expensive and it costs $2 to $3 to acquire each one” – Rick Thompson, former Chairman of Playdom, AllThingsD, October 10th, 2011
• On Kixeye the cost per acquisition is $4 – Social Games Summit, November 14, 2011
• In December 2011 Fiksu’s Cost per Loyal User Index rose to an all-time high of $1.81

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intro | MAUs | DAUs | engagement | retention | conversion | whales | ARPPU | platform

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Related posts:

1. If it costs you $1 to acquire a customer, how can you make money charging $0.99 for a game
2. How much does it cost to acquire a Facebook customer?
3. ARM yourself: how to reduce CPA and make more money

At the Social Gaming Summit, many were asking where to go next. There was a huge amount of optimism about mobile gaming, and speakers brought up a number of different options for approaching mobile. Fragmented platforms can provide smaller ponds for young projects to thrive in, but on the other hand iOS provides a large audience and, importantly, streamlined payments for in-app purchases. Android currently lacks a smooth payment system, but radical improvements are anticipated in the near future. The upcoming Kindle Fire has sparked a great deal of interest due to its low price point.

In the context of this rising potential of mobile, the role of Facebook is changing. Facebook is no longer an appealing platform for many social games devs, but it might still be an integral part of the sales funnel. Dan Borthwick of Playfish said that Facebook can offer a lot in connecting to a richer experience on more powerful platforms. As yet, no other service can rival it for permission marketing, social branding and removing barriers to sign-up with Facebook connect. Since mobile registrations are less likely to churn, greater integration between Facebook and mobile sign-ups would be very valuable. It could be that as the movement to mobile gains momentum, Facebook will become less relevant as a games platform while still being a vital part of the social gaming landscape.

Related posts:

1. Are consumers falling out of love with Facebook games? Engagement with Facebook Games Has fallen 25% since December 2010
2. What is Facebook scared of?
3. How much does it cost to acquire a Facebook customer?

Hello! That’s it for this entry.

Had you fooled huh? I’m in a playful mood because I’ve had a haircut.

A serious point will be made about this at the end. Promise. I’m just worried you don’t read that far. You meany.

Units

So in the last few weeks we’ve seen a period of very slightly declining sales. We’re sitting bubbling away at maybe 20 a day, with the occasional spike; being featured in the Popular Puzzlers section is a nice, if genre-confusing, treat. Noting to really write home about, and I’m refusing to moan either. We’ve not update the game significantly since the IAP launch, and despite the initial wave of negative feedback about some of the decisions we’d made we forged ahead and have since addressed most of them in smaller patches. Some of you may be thinking ‘units is less interesting than income’… and you’d be right, especially since we have IAP in the game.

So when we factor in the IAP – especially the ‘Lionel’s Hard Cash’ £54.99 pack – we get a much more positive picture (seen below) because of the wonderful effect this business model has. We seem to sell one or two packs of it every fortnight (so far at least) and this is enough to seriously skew our profits. I’ve done some maths. Are you ready? Since the IAP update, this is how the income from the various elements of Hard Lines breaks down:

Game sales: 71.3% (£0.69)

Small IAP: 1% (£0.69)

Med IAP: 3% (£2.99)

Large IAP: 7% (£5.99)

Huge IAP: 18% (£54.99)

IAP

So the eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed a downward trend in the unit sales. Shame isn’t it? We’re going to be fixing that soon, oh don’t you worry, but for now it’s interesting to talk about. It’s pretty flat overall, but a bit of forethought looking at the last seven days of sales gives the game sales of zero on the 5^th January 2012! Argh! That said, you simply step back to the last month and that trend line is almost perfectly flat. As is, crucially, the profit trend line.

Profits

So what have we been doing if not updating the game with amazing new modes and addictive new gameplay twists? Well, we launched another buggy update! Seems to be our ‘thing’ these days. We’ve got a fix in review, of course, but when we moved the £54.99 IAP off of the mode select menu, we also added a neat little ‘please rate the game’ prompt after a certain amount of plays. And iCade support. It seems some unlucky people have been getting a crash whether they agree to rate the app or not. Peculiarly mean of us, right? Well we did see a huge spike in reviews (good ones too!) after we added the prompt, but to get the crash out of there we chose to remove the prompt entirely and add it again when we’re less rushed.

What are we going to do to avoid buggy updated in the future? Well it’s obvious we’re not doing enough now, so I have decided to use  Testflight (join us!) in the future. After a day’s prompting people solely via Twitter and our newsletter we’ve got over 80 people signed up for our updates… admittedly with the promise of beta access to our next game (to be honest that was the main selling point) but regardless it took us 3 or 4 days to get 25 people willing to test Hard Lines while that was in Beta. This means a 4x increase in interest in our games (and obviously then 4x the sales for the next game, right?) that occurred over a quarter of the time. Brill!

To end on another positive note, we’ve still got loads of people getting every update we do:

Updates

So all in all, the kind of sales and behaviour over the past few weeks you’d expect from a game that hasn’t really been significantly updated in a while.

But what about my opening randomness? Well then. I’ve been asked about PR and marketing a lot since we launched to such critical acclaim, and widespread awareness of Hard Lines too. It gets me thinking. This diary is a PR exercise. A business chum of mine (not Nicholas!) often questions why I do these? Am I not sharing all of my secrets? Am I not endangering my competitive advantage? I give two answers.

One is that no – if you’re only learning from what I’m saying (instead of using the information to think ahead and push some boundaries for your own product) then you’re not going to be competing with me. The other is that I might be lying. When I said that I’m being weird because of the state my hair is in, you had to believe me. You tend to believe everything I put in this blog too. My frequent moaning about lack of funds on Twitter might even be a carefully thought out PR exercise!

If only I was that clever.

Fun facts:

Fact 1 – I’m running out of fun facts

Fact 2 – I’m not sure this will get through the editing process

Fact 3 – I’ve gained roughly 1000 followers since the launch of Hard Lines

Fact 4 – We have a list of over 23 potential new modes for Hard Lines

Fact 5 – We have a list of over 500 new quips ready to go

Related posts:

1. Spilt Milk Studios Development Diary 18: Christmas Roundup
2. Spilt Milk Studios Development Diary 15 – Freedom Part 2
3. Spilt Milk Studios Development Diary 12 – Hundreds and Thousands

I’ve added in a line to do just that. You can enter your discount as you like.

• Facebook: 30% if you are exclusively using Facebook Credits
• iOS: 30%
• Steam: 30% (as far as I can tell)
• Android: ??
• Browser-based: 0% (unless you wish to take your payment provider’s fees out before revenue, rather than after. But that will reduce your revenues, so I’d be inclined to put those in Cost of Goods Sold.
• PSN: 30%
• PlayStation Home: 30%

I’ll keep my eye on other platforms, and add them over time.

Related posts:

1. Which platform is winning the online war?
2. Holding your breath and going Freemium – Future Games of London share some stats
3. DoubleSix releases PSN sales figures and urges the platform holders to do the same