GameVillage

With the credit crunch keeping the traditional Bingo Hall audience at home, the world of online Bingo has literally exploded in the last 18 months. A great development for soft gaming company GameVillage - but with so much competition for the market, a well-honed marketing strategy including successful email advertising activities is always at the forefront of Partnership Manager Luke Creigh’s mind.

GameVillage is the fastest growing social gaming network in the UK. It offers the chance for members of the community to have their own 'home' on one of the 'Village streets' and take part in promotions where they can win cash and prizes.

'Our strong community experience and generous rewards systems are our major USPs for players', says Luke, 'but we also run a media operation, called Game Revenue, which allows other UK Bingo operators to present offers through email advertising to our database.'

As part of Game Revenue, GameVillage sends its 'Friends of GameVillage' a weekly email advertising the latest, greatest offers from other Bingo operators to certain members of the community. It's a clever way of offering something valuable to the GameVillage audience while making the use of a precious data asset.

Facing unnecessary issues

While this strategy was sound in principle, the overly prohibitive data policies of GameVillage's email advertising company were causing an unnecessary obstruction to the campaign: 'They kept closing our lists' says Luke, 'they were difficult to communicate with and it was pretty arbitrary.'

Feeling rather pessimistic about the future of the campaign, Luke set about looking for a more flexible and efficient solution to their email advertising needs.

'When we switched to Pure they assured us there was no problem with our strategy and opened our eyes to some of the stuff we could be doing to improve our results,' he explains. 'We immediately found the email advertising system easier to use and it gave us the opportunity to do more. We started taking our email activities a lot more seriously.'

Optimising the campaign

Pure helped GameVillage develop their designs and content to optimum effect. This involved placing links in areas most likely to be noticed, reducing the graphics-to-text ratio (too many graphics can be detrimental to deliverability) and using intelligent time sending to deliver the email advertising mailers at key times of the day.

GameVillage used Pure's subject line selector to test which lines were most effective. 'We found shorter, punchier lines with some personalisation were the most effective,' explains Luke. 'Pure also advised us to remove spammy keywords like 'cash' and 'free' from our email advertising.'

In addition they carried out 'trust building' exercises, to prevent emails being spammed or junked, including a header making it very clear to customers where the email advertising was coming from. This was particularly important for an e-shot that was promoting exterior Bingo networks to GameVillage customers.

Making a difference

With an optimised campaign and the ability to track and analyse a range of results, GameVillage quickly saw the rewards they'd been looking for.

'I would say there's been a 22% increase in our click-through rates as a result of the advice we've been given and the modules we've used,' says Luke. 'And there's plenty of scope for us to do more with our email advertising. In future we'll be looking at making full use of the dynamic aspects of Pure's software so we can send out personalised birthday offers to our community.

'The advice we were given has been a real eye opener. It's taught us a lot about the importance of email advertising within our overall marketing strategy.'

GameVillage use the following packaged from PureResponse

• Advanced eMarketing toolset
• List building interface
• Viral reporting