As online gaming increases in popularity, relevancy and deliverability remain the best bet for engaging with players, says Will Schnabel (pictured below).

The online gaming industry is a highly competitive environment, with many companies offering their services to millions of players.  For example, the UK Gambling Commission’s latest report indicates a total of 16 million customer accounts holding around £257 million. 

Since the vast majority of gaming sites’ marketing efforts are conducted via electronic communications, they must be at the top of the email marketing game to successfully compete.  

Studies have indicated that most marketers think their biggest challenge with email 

is spam, while most of those who disagree cite the biggest challenge as providing relevant content. For gaming companies, both issues are critical.

The first hurdle gaming companies face is making it into the inbox. Deliverability is deceptively complex for many companies and for gaming companies, due to the nature of the business, legitimate promotions may contain words or phrases that can be incorrectly flagged by ISPs. 

To improve deliverability of your email messages, consider the following:

Avoid gimmicks

Spam filters seek out patterns and common irregularities often found in spam, so resist the temptation to spice up messages with all-caps, large fonts, unusual punctuation, repeated phrases or common advertising come-ons such as ‘Free!’ or ‘Limited time offer!’. This is especially true for legitimate messages that include words that might be filtered, which can be the case for gaming promotional campaigns.  

Marketers shouldn’t attempt to conceal these words with extra characters or an odd spelling, as this will just make the messages appear more ‘spam-like’. 

Update lists 

Spammers’ lists are typically littered with invalid and out-of-date information, so ISPs watch for mailings with a high percentage of incorrect addresses. If an ISP bounces an address back to you as permanently undeliverable, remove it from your list immediately. Strive for a hard bounce rate of no more than four to five per cent, as anything above about seven per cent is likely to impact your deliverability. 

When it comes to soft bounces, which may occur when an inbox is full or a server is temporarily down, I recommend the ‘three strikes, you’re out’ rule: after three soft bounces within a 21-day period, addresses should be pulled. It is also important to reduce the effects of address churn by distributing a mailing at least once every 90 days. And if you haven’t sent an email to a recipient in six months, consider segregating them from your lists and re-soliciting their permission. 

Don’t ignore ISPs

Online marketers often don’t realise they need to set up an abuse@yourdomain.com mailbox in order for ISPs to be able to communicate information, such as bounce codes, back to a mailing’s origin. If you don’t have an appropriate mechanism for accepting an ISP’s messages, you have no way of knowing the problems ISPs want addressed to ensure your mailings continue to get through.

Protect corporate IP address

Never send marketing email through the IP address you use for your corporate email. That way, if you run into deliverability problems, you don’t expose your corporate email to risk.  If the worst happens and an ISP blocks your email marketing IP address, you can still carry on with your necessary day-to-day, business-related email communications.

Brand! 

Use your brand in the ‘from’ line and use the same email address consistently. Make sure your brand and logo are viewable in the preview pane. Once a message is received, recipients expect something of high interest. Email recipients have indicated that lack of relevance is the Number One reason they hit the unsubscribe link and frequency is Number Two. Marketers must find a balance between keeping  their recipients informed and engaged and becoming intrusive. 

There’s a fine line between too much and not enough when it comes to sending email. In today’s highly overflowing inbox, it’s no longer sufficient to simply obtain permission. Customers must now not only sign up to receive emails, they must anticipate them. 

Ensuring that emails are relevant requires that you ask players what they want . . . and then listen. 

In order to maintain this desired level of relevancy, gaming companies must understand their players’ behaviour and anticipate their needs. These answers can be identified through web analytics or sought out directly through preference centres or surveys. 

By analysing past behaviour and transactional data and then using that information to provide tailored promotions to customers to keep them engaged, marketers can initiate highly relevant conversations that are anticipated and welcomed.

For example, a customer who has registered on an online gaming site but is not an active player may receive a promotional email that contains an incentive to join a game.  

A frequent customer, on the other hand, may be incentivised to play a designated number of games within a specified timeframe in order to be eligible for a certain incentive. 

While the main focus of both of these programmes is developing deeper relationships with customers, the specific message is drastically different depending on whether the short-term goal is conversion, retention, activation or reactivation.

Savvy marketers continue  to make great strides in separating the good email from the bad – both in terms of deliverability and relevancy.  To truly engage their customers, more gaming sites are recognising the need to take their email marketing campaigns to a higher level. 

Tailoring messages to meet the needs of players at different levels of engagement requires segmenting mailing lists, testing various offers, formats and timing and, perhaps most importantly, ensuring the  emails actually arrive in the appropriate inboxes.  

   Will Schnabel is vice-president of international markets, Silverpop.