LiveOps is a great place to start. Using an intuitive remote configuration system that doesn’t require a lengthy app relaunch process can save time and money. It can also keep an app engaging and relevant, providing the best user experience in the shortest time possible.

So how can you make the most of your LiveOps, and extract the best value for your app spend? On the latest PocketGamer.biz Podcast, managing editor Brian Baglow and his new co-host, Peggy Anne Salz spoke to Larry Hsieh, best known for leading both the LiveOps and events initiatives using Leanplum for his studio’s various casual puzzle free-to-play games.

As Principal Product Manager at MobilityWare, a company with a storied background in mobile gaming, Hsieh has plenty of insight into the flexibility, efficiency, and performance of a LiveOps platform.

LiveOps: Where the Fun Begins

The traditional model of releasing a game is evolving. Rather than the launch of a game in its final form being the endpoint, LiveOps allows for a more iterative process, as developers can edit and tweak in real-time without the constraints of relaunch or approval. Hsieh sees the launch as simply where the fun begins; what follows is the chance to keep the game relevant.

Hsieh talks about the importance of seasonal events and how LiveOps can bring a game to life for players: “If you run LiveOps, you can actually tailor the whole experience.”

Hsieh has described the benefits of using Leanplum’s suite of tools to generate the building blocks of a LiveOps event via remote configuration. Having these tools is more than just intuitive and effective, using remote configuration for LiveOps gives smaller developers the chance to compete with the gaming giants in terms of their marketing and agility, despite working with a much smaller budget.

Hsieh sees the benefits of the cost efficiencies offered by remote configuration: “I don’t have an entire team of people to run LiveOps. I only have one or two people. I have only one artist doing all the art, which is amazing. But then we’re still able to scale.”

Remote configurations also help to avoid one of the key pitfalls in updating a mobile game; updates and relaunches can take time, even in the best-case scenario a day or two, which ups the pressure to have the update perfect. Having controls and variables built helps keep things more fluid.

Hsieh continues: “If you protect yourselves by having master controls, being able to dial up or dial down certain things, then if something goes wrong, then you can actually just go into master controls and patch things out.” This allows a lot of flexibility in A/B testing, getting to the heart of what gamers want and what’s proving popular.

Keeping Gamers Engaged

One of the most interesting cases for LiveOps is the ability to keep the games engaging, to the point where it’s helped MobilityWare revive and rejuvenate a game.

Having flexibility across LiveOps key components is the holy grail for the industry, and an all-in-one solution provides a simple and effective way to ensure consistency and efficiency while not only developing, but also promoting a game update.

Another critical aspect of LiveOps is lifecycle marketing, including the push notifications, in-app messaging, and emails. With an all-in-one solution like Leanplum, Hsieh can oversee this aspect of the process and the technical development. With the possibility of events running weekly, or even daily, communication with the gamer is key to making sure they stay engaged and involved, ensuring they’re aware of the new offers, incentives and rewards available.

The numbers Hsieh has around the efficacy of live events are impressive: “If we didn’t run these events, and we see this in the data, engagements will go down, and you’ll see drop-offs of 20% to 30%.”

For a company that thrives on ease-of-use and wants to “keep events as automated and as easy a setup as possible,” remote configuration allows even smaller developers to scale and segment as required, creating different variables. Hsieh discusses the importance of this functionality: “I want to target this specific user, which is the audience side, and then through the channel, which is the messaging system, I could reach them, but then what do I give them? Then the A/B helps us test all those things out to make sure what works.”

So what’s the key to injecting life into an old game on a budget? Hsieh sees LiveOps as key to making the most of your resources: “It goes back to opportunity costs. Do I have the engineers to build this? … You want to use them most effectively to build very scalable tools.”

Want to learn more about how Leanplum (a CleverTap company) can help your team? Check out the full podcast featuring Larry Hsieh of MobilityWare on the latest PocketGamer.biz Podcast.

Learn More About LiveOps Events

To learn more about LiveOps, check out these additional resources:

• Watch the full webinar with MobilityWare, LiveOps on a Shoestring Budget, where we discuss the inner workings of how they use Leanplum for live events.
• Explore our Gaming Apps Data Science Report to see how specific engagement strategies impact retention and revenue.
• Read our article on How to Increase Player Engagement and Revenue for more insights on boosting overall engagement and monetization in mobile gaming.
• Check out the Product Tour to see Leanplum in action.
• Set up a complimentary personalized demo of Leanplum.

The post Larry Hsieh on LiveOps: Keep the Game Relevant With Minimal Resources appeared first on Leanplum a CleverTap Company.

Use In-App Messages to Incentivize Players

Remember that liveops events are made of three building blocks that can be mixed and matched across your entire campaign: the Event Announcement, the Event Confirmation, and the Reward Message.

You’re building an event on top of those three in-app messages — which means engagement is critical. You better build incentives into those messages, with in-game rewards for a player that decides to log into the event.

In simplest terms: “You have a pop-up and then you throw incentives on top,” suggests Larry Hsieh, the Principal Product Manager at MobilityWare in a recent webinar (LiveOps On A Shoestring Budget). “You can easily get double digits on that.”

But where and when do you introduce those in-app messages? The answer lies in testing. By using Leanplum (a CleverTap company) and a rigorous A/B testing regime, Hsieh and his team were able to pinpoint where those messages should appear and when.

Set It Up to Scale

At first, resources were a big challenge for the MobilityWare team, in terms of being able to run their in-game events. It required a lot of time and manpower to set up — not just to prepare the campaigns but also to man the actual event in real time.

For games on a shoestring budget, with little access to IT resources and not enough manpower, your biggest advantage lies in the proper tools that scale successful events and make them easily repeatable. Your tools should allow you to automate the sending of your messages and the monitoring of your KPIs.

Track These KPIs

And speaking of KPIs, the only way to tell if your in-game events are successful is to monitor your engagement metrics. Hsieh of MobilityWare suggests the following KPIs to track for overall engagement:

• DAU and MAU
• Retention rate
• In-app purchase monetization (including subscriptions)
• Ad monetization
• Event-specific KPIs (e.g. tokens collected, puzzles started, levels completed, etc.)

Case Study: Destination Solitaire Promoted Happy Hours

How does a live ops event actually run? Hsieh outlined one of their events — a happy hour every day from 4:00 to 6:00 PM for their virtual card game Destination Solitaire — and why it achieved the results that it did.

Hsieh talks about what led up to building these events: “When we were developing the game, we reached a point where we took the levels as far as we could — ten different worlds in there, 1,000 different levels — but then how do we actually take this to the next level and keep the game going?”

This is where Hsieh’s team brought in live ops. Instead of developing entirely new levels, they instituted seasonal events — a trick-or-treat event for Halloween or an Easter egg hunt — getting players to find different things within different cities.

“So, hey, you’re done with Greece, but if you go back to Greece and start looking for special gift boxes, you can win rewards,” Hsieh says. “So we really tried to modify the paradigm of what was going on with the game to breathe new life or give it a second life, if you will.”

Some of the tactics that they used:

• Push notification to alert players to happy hour
• During happy hour, if players achieve X number of levels, they get free Jokers (a game booster)
• Use live ops to switch objectives around in each game level and keep players engaged

Case Study: Jigsaw Puzzle Built Tropical Getaway With Custom Templates

Another event that MobilityWare ran was the Tropical Getaway for their game, Jigsaw Puzzle. The mechanics are simple: Complete a puzzle, collect a tropical sticker. Collect ten of them and you win a grand prize.

As part of their process, Hsieh and his team built a customizable template of push notifications, in-app messages, and variables to control the gameplay that they would constantly A/B test for effectiveness.

Hsieh says: “Let’s say we did this test and decided we wanted to change the end reward — instead of a thousand coins, let’s say I want to make it 2,000 coins. So then the A/B test was ‘if I could change the end reward, how much does it change the incentive or engagement rate?’” Then, within Leanplum, his team would clone a variant of the existing in-app message where the reward would be 2,000 coins.

To show the player’s progress toward collecting the ten stickers, the team created a custom meter showing each goal and connected these to segments. So, someone who saw one sticker would get a custom image on his in-app message showing one sticker on the meter and be placed in a segment with accompanying text celebrating the achievement.

And they accomplished this without development help — basically using art files (for the meter) and segmentation.

Case Study: TerraGenesis Introduced Limited-Time Content

On an episode of the Mobile Presence podcast, Hunter Bulkeley, Senior Product Manager at Tilting Point, shared how he uses FOMO and time-limited gameplay to boost player engagement.

Bulkeley shares: “The biggest uplift I’ve ever personally achieved was when we introduced limited-time events into TerraGenesis. These were new levels that would come around for 48 hours. The player would have to play through them within that timeframe. It introduced new content; it changed the game mechanics.”

The results? An amazing 20% increase in Day 30 retention. Bulkeley says: “We were able to extend our LTV another 30 days as a result of that as well. Giving users more content in a time-limited way worked very well for us.”

Listen to an excerpt from that podcast below:

A Better Way to Run Your LiveOps Events

With a liveops events approach to game management, you can build a connected gaming community using various tactics that improve the game as it currently stands — even if you only have a shoestring budget and a few resources. Use these strategies above to level up your liveops. And if you need a platform that supports your efforts, get in touch with us.

To learn more about liveops, check out these additional resources:

• Watch the full webinar with MobilityWare, LiveOps on a Shoestring Budget, where we discuss the inner workings of how they use Leanplum for live events.
• Explore our Gaming Apps Data Science Report to see how specific engagement strategies impact retention and revenue.
• Read our article on How to Increase Player Engagement and Revenue for more insights on boosting overall engagement and monetization in mobile gaming.
• Check out the Product Tour to see Leanplum in action.
• Set up a complimentary personalized demo of Leanplum.

The post Best Practices: Running LiveOps Events on a Shoestring Budget appeared first on Leanplum a CleverTap Company.

In our previous post, we covered the three building blocks of an effective liveops event. Below, we present the principles you need to keep in mind when planning it out so that you end up with an event that is both fun and rewarding for players, and which creates an experience they’ll want to keep returning to.

The Four Principles to Staging an Effective LiveOps Event

Before you go gung-ho on your event, there are four things you should keep in mind in order to ensure its success:

• Plan ahead: Draft a clear plan for the liveops event, including what it will involve, how long it will run, and what rewards players can earn.
• Make it exciting: Look, if you’re not excited about the event, you can’t expect your players to look forward to it. Consider offering rare in-game items or bonuses, or even real-world prizes that are relevant to your player demographic.
• Keep it fresh: Yes, a successful recipe should be repeated. But do try to mix things up and offer a variety of liveops events. Players will likely get bored with the same old thing week in and week out.
• Engage with your players: Encourage players to participate in your liveops events by promoting the events on social media and in-game and by responding to player feedback and suggestions. When you make your players stars, they’ll love you for it.

Overall, the key to successful liveops events is to make them fun and engaging for your players. Do the things that matter to your players: give them immersive and engaging social experiences, gripping storytelling, and rewards that matter.

Take Control of Key Areas

Before you plan out the actual agenda of your event, ensure that you have control over four key areas:

• Your store: sales, events, promotions
• Game design: level design, progression difficulty
• Control integrations: privacy prompts, IDFA conversion value generations, remote SDK configuration
• Ad monetization: rewarded video ads, ad frequency

In a recent webinar with us (LiveOps On A Shoestring Budget), Larry Hsieh, the Principal Product Manager at MobilityWare shared why this is crucial: “Anything you want to be able to control on a per user level is what we want to have.” The advantage is you can “dial up or dial down certain things. Then when things actually go out into release or production, if something goes wrong you can actually just go in and then do master controls and actually back things out.”

Plan Out Your Events Cycle

A major part of planning your event is to answer the question: How many in-game events do you intend to stage — and how often?

Of course your answer will depend on your game and the type of players you have in the community. But having a goal will provide you with a direction.

Hsieh says: “Once you have stuff really, really humming, you can do events almost daily, if not weekly. So it really just depends on the type of events. For flash events and things like that, then those can be daily. For events where we want to have (game) progression, those are at least a week, if not a month apart.”

Set Up Your Automation

When resources such as manpower and tech stack are limited, you’re going to need the assistance of automation to do the heavy lifting of your event — particularly when your game scales to millions of users.

Setting up a liveops process and using automation was key to the success of MobilityWare’s various events. Larry Hsieh shares: “I have been in other places where they have very customized tools that are very sophisticated, and if it’s not designed very simplistically, it makes it really challenging to be able to scale. “So for us, we want to be able to keep events as automated and as easy to set up as possible.”

The benefit was easily being able to scale successful events and make them easily repeatable.

“To give you an idea,” Hsieh says, “we actually had someone from university intern and work with me. But we got to the point where we had things so streamlined that we could actually let him run a live event after some basic training. And he was able to rerun the events every week.”

Learn More

Want to learn more about how Leanplum can help your game? Check out these additional resources:

• Watch the full webinar with MobilityWare, LiveOps on a Shoestring Budget, where we discuss the inner workings of how they use Leanplum for live events.
• Explore our Gaming Apps Data Science Report to see how specific engagement strategies impact retention and revenue.
• Read our article on How to Increase Player Engagement and Revenue for more insights on boosting overall engagement and monetization in mobile gaming.
• Check out the Product Tour to see Leanplum in action.
• Set up a complimentary personalized demo of Leanplum.
  

  The post Preparing for Your LiveOps Event appeared first on Leanplum a CleverTap Company.

  ]]> https://www.leanplum.com/blog/building-blocks-of-liveops-events/ Thu, 15 Dec 2022 08:07:40 +0000 https://www.leanplum.com/?p=23370 LiveOps — short for live operations — has been described as “games-as-a-service.” This is because of the way it creates a loyal community around a mobile game via promotions and in-game events. One thing’s for sure though: live ops events boost player engagement and retention, according to MobilityWare’s Principal Product Manager, Larry Hsieh. In a […]

  The post The Three Building Blocks of LiveOps Events appeared first on Leanplum a CleverTap Company.

  ]]> LiveOps — short for live operations — has been described as “games-as-a-service.” This is because of the way it creates a loyal community around a mobile game via promotions and in-game events.

  One thing’s for sure though: live ops events boost player engagement and retention, according to MobilityWare’s Principal Product Manager, Larry Hsieh. In a recent webinar with us (LiveOps On A Shoestring Budget), he broke down the basic building blocks of live ops events within gaming and how to optimize each element in order to keep players returning.

  What is LiveOps in Gaming?

  LiveOps is the management and operation of a game as a live service. In a nutshell, it’s the process of providing updates and improvements to a current game without needing to release a sequel or a different version of the game.

  Live ops leans heavily on remote configuration — a software development technique for mobile apps that allows developers to update the app’s behavior or features remotely. No need to publish an app update.

  Live ops gives developers the ability to launch new game features as well as create promotions and in-game events, all to keep players engaged and build up a community around a title. This can happen on a fixed schedule — weekly, monthly, yearly — or it could happen just once. The point is to improve the game and by doing so, entice players to come back and experience the latest and greatest in your game.

  In the past, games were delivered as standalone products rather than services. New content or features were included in sequels rather than in the currently released product.

  Hsieh shares: “You had a very traditional model where you ship it and then there would be no updates. And then you’re just doing sales. But now with everything online, especially with mobile, then once you actually launch the product, that’s when the fun really begins. Like, okay, how do I actually make things seasonal? How do I make it relevant? How do I keep the players engaged?”

  The Pros and Cons of LiveOps Gaming Management

  The liveops approach has the advantage of opening up new ways to retain players and provide the company with a steady source of income, although it does require more operational experience and technical know-how to pull off.

  For example, to implement a successful liveops strategy, a developer may need to integrate cloud services or run their own backend technical infrastructure. Then they’ll need an efficient way to identify and respond to issues that arise both inside and outside the game. Oftentimes this entails more manpower.

  Still, manpower is a smaller price to pay compared to the cost of launching a whole new game. Introducing new level designs or game progression to the current game as updates is much more cost-effective — and something that a live ops process can accomplish with much less resources.

  The Three Building Blocks of LiveOps Events

  Which brings us to the building blocks of liveops. What are the main ingredients of any successful in-game event?

  A liveops event can be broken down into three basic elements — and each of them is an in-app message or push notification. If you master the construction of these elements, you build a more engaging campaign that builds up a loyal player community.

  1. The Event Announcement: Join Us!

  You will always need an event announcement. This is the player’s introduction to your event and has one purpose: to get them to join.

  This in-app message and push notification explains:

  • What the event is about
  • When it happens and for how long
  • What the overall objective is
  • What rewards the player stands to win
  

  This Diner Dash event announcement is brief and to the point!

  Once the player is in the game, what are their next steps? Tell them what they need to do to win the prize at the end. Be brief but thorough with details and event mechanics, but also, hype up the excitement! This should be fun and interesting for all involved.

  Segment to Show Personalized Progress
  Segmentation is key. Set up different in-app messages with varying images based on the number of times they’ve viewed the in-app message. This way, players can track their progress through the event, and the experience is personalized in real time, hooking them with new meta-game hooks that keep them coming back.

  Create Variants
  Create multiple in-app messages to different segments. Easily set up then duplicate in-app messages so you have variants that display different holdbacks, prize amounts, and even in-app copy.

  2. The Event Confirmation: Time to Play!

  The second in-app message comes up when the player triggers the event and starts playing. This interaction tells them they’re on the right track, and allows them to complete the objective. For a player, nothing is more frustrating than clicking to join a liveops event and to not have any confirmation that you’ve joined. Make sure you tell the player they’re now part of the event once they click through!

  

  This simple in-app message in Two Dots tells the player they’re in the event and already winning.

  3. The Reward Message: Win This!

  The third in-app message is to showcase the incentive that your players are gunning for. This reward or prize is the entire reason the player is going to care about joining your event. So make it worth their while. Use graphics and copy that highlights how rare or valuable the reward is. And to add urgency, give them a limited time to join. Nothing creates FOMO more than a deadline.

  Randomize Rewards, Optimize for VIPs
  Customize this in-app message to show different incentives for different players. By adding randomization to the rewards, you’re enhancing the gaming experience and adding a little FOMO that can keep players coming back to hopefully access a different reward they haven’t received yet.

  You can use Jinjascript, Leanplum’s templating language, to choose prizes at random from a given pool and even assign specific probabilities for getting each reward. This serves to customize the experience for your VIPs and whales because as you keep iterating on the process, your VIPs see rewards that are entirely different from non-paying players. The entire experience becomes optimized for retention and revenue.

  Add Excitement With a Mystery Prize
  Take the excitement a notch higher by using visual elements to display the rewards in different ways. A favorite example is using a spinner icon that a player spins to win a mystery reward. The visual cues bring in fresh new sights and variation.

  

  This in-app message from Zynga Texas Hold’em Poker shows the rewards within a limited time frame.

  Want More LiveOps Content?

  Give your gaming audience a dynamic and personalized experience. Building in-app message templates that you can clone and customize allows you to create a unique experience every time. This way, you can scale and consistently hold live events that resonate and connect with your players.

  Want to learn more about how Leanplum (a CleverTap company) can help your team? Check out these additional resources:

  • Watch: our webinar featuring Larry Hsieh of MobilityWare, LiveOps on a Shoestring Budget with MobilityWare
  • Read: How to Scale LiveOps Events
  • Read: Increase Operational Efficiency with In-App Messages for LiveOps Events
  • Read: How to Increase Player Engagement and Revenue

  The post The Three Building Blocks of LiveOps Events appeared first on Leanplum a CleverTap Company.

  ]]> https://www.leanplum.com/blog/how-to-increase-mobile-gaming-engagement-and-revenue/ Mon, 12 Dec 2022 12:08:14 +0000 https://www.leanplum.com/?p=21553 There’s no denying that the mobile gaming market has been booming at an astonishing rate. Not only is there a very low barrier to entry to play mobile games, but the isolation brought on by COVID-19 has also made people much more dependent on gaming as a form of entertainment. Naturally, this growth brings with […]

  The post Mobile Gaming 2021: How to Increase Player Engagement and Revenue appeared first on Leanplum a CleverTap Company.

  ]]> There’s no denying that the mobile gaming market has been booming at an astonishing rate. Not only is there a very low barrier to entry to play mobile games, but the isolation brought on by COVID-19 has also made people much more dependent on gaming as a form of entertainment. Naturally, this growth brings with it a huge opportunity for mobile gaming apps to capitalize on in-game revenues.

  At Leanplum, we have built a strong product for the mobile gaming market, and currently serve numerous global gaming customers, including some of the top 10 gaming studios in the world. Listening to our customers, we realized there were some universal questions that many of them wanted to get answered. We also noticed that while player engagement and player retention metrics are important to gaming studios, their ultimate goal is to drive revenue growth. With that in mind, we created our Inaugural Data Science Report for the Games App Category to analyze key campaign performance metrics and their impact on revenue. 

  The report was recently released, and we also discussed its findings with our customers and guest speakers in two global webinars, (EMEA, in collaboration with GameDuell and 2nd Potion, where our guests shared examples from their work on customer retention and monetization – watch on-demand and (North America, in collaboration with Tilting Point, where we discuss live ops best practices – watch on-demand.

  Key Strategies to Increase Player Engagement and Revenue For Mobile Games

  What Does the Data Reveal? 

  Our data science report is based on an analysis of over 1800 campaigns and more than 670M+ messages sent by our mobile gaming customers, the majority of which drive revenue through in-app purchases. The gaming categories we explored were: casino, card, puzzle, role playing, strategy, racing, and simulation. 

  The results of our analysis were eye-opening and should be used by product managers, marketers, and live ops teams to optimize player engagement and revenue. Below, we discuss some of our key findings. 

  Holdbacks Are Essential

  One of our key findings is the value of holdbacks. While our report found that most of our customers don’t use holdbacks, holdbacks are key to your ultimate success. Campaign-level holdbacks are essential for measuring the impact of individual campaigns and comparing different campaign results. Universal holdbacks, on the other hand, require that you suppress a bucket of your users from receiving any messages from you. While more expensive to implement, universal holdbacks are super helpful in calculating the long-term value of all your campaigns. In the event that neither universal nor campaign-level holdbacks are possible, LTA (Last Touch Attribution) may be used to measure revenue impact.

  

  Figure 1 – Holdbacks and when to use them

  Use a Personalization Ladder

  In analyzing our data, we noticed a direct link between incremental revenue and personalization. Also, we’ve created a personalization ladder (Figure 2) which reflects the pattern of progressive personalization methods we found.

  At the very base of the ladder is basic personalization or demographic segmentation of your audience, which is based on static user attributes (we track over 2000 user attributes). The next level up is adding behavioral segmentation, which looks at historical in-game events. This is also where Leanplum has done a lot of work with our new Recency and Frequency feature, which allows you to look at events and event parameters and even aggregate functions, such as total sum, average, and mid and max values of total spend.

  From there, we move up to behavior-triggered plus IAM (in-app messaging), where you’re using real-time player behavior and player journeys to trigger appropriate messaging. And, finally, at the very top of the ladder, we get to message personalization, where we offer support for: 

  • Jinja, a flexible web template engine for the Python programming language, which, among other things, enables useful conditional loops 
  • Linked Data for flexibility to customize messages at send-time with data or content which resides outside of Leanplum (e.g. an internal recommendation engine). 

  Our data science report showed that less than 10% of messages sent used the two personalization methods at the top of the ladder (behavior triggered+IAM, and message content personalization), while over 50% used basic segmentation.

  

  Figure 2 – Personalization ladder

  The good news here is that there is a lot of room to grow and add deeper personalization.

  How Does This All Come Together?

  To show the impact of our personalization ladder on revenue, we used a metric called RPM (revenue per thousand messages). Figure 3 shows that as we climb up the ladder and offer deeper personalization, we see a direct impact on revenue. Ultimately, as we climb the ladder and get to the very top, there is a 3X impact on revenue over personalization with just basic segmentation.

  

  Figure 3 – Relationship between personalization and revenue

  We also found support for greater revenue impact by comparing RPM by messaging channels. Here, triggered delivery (push and email)  outperformed scheduled delivery by 5X.

  

  Recommendations and Next Steps

  While we can’t cover all the findings from our Data Science Report and webinar discussions in a blog post, we’d like to leave product managers, marketers, and live ops teams at gaming studios with key next steps that they should consider and implement immediately.

  • Use Holdbacks to Measure Campaign Goals with Higher Confidence

  Universal holdbacks are best for measuring the performance of your campaigns over a period of time – monthly or quarterly – to assess overall performance. Campaign-level holdbacks are your ally when it comes to comparing performance between campaigns to understand what’s working and what’s not. While there is an opportunity cost to using Holdbacks, it is very difficult for studios to optimize what they can’t measure with confidence.

  • Further Personalize for Better Player Engagement

  Keep our personalization ladder in mind as you think about your messaging strategy. Remember as you move up from basic demographic segmentation all the way to message content personalization, you’ll realize a direct positive impact on revenue.

  • Be Mindful of Delivery Channels 

  No matter what delivery channel you use, push, in-app or email, the better targeted your messages, the higher the impact on revenue.

  To learn more about what Leanplum can do for your team, check out these resources:

  • For a quick overview, watch our 2-minute Gaming video
  • We are the only engagement platform with a focus on Gaming
  • Watch the full webinar with MobilityWare, LiveOps on a Shoestring Budget, where we discuss the inner workings of how they use Leanplum for live events
  • Explore our Games Data Science Report to see how specific engagement strategies impact retention and revenue
  • Read our article on Mobile Gaming 2021: How to Increase Player Engagement and Revenue for more insights on boosting overall engagement and monetization in mobile gaming
  • Check out the Product Tour to see Leanplum in action
  • Set up a complimentary personalized demo of Leanplum

  —

  For app-first companies, Leanplum is the only solution that helps personalize and optimize all customer touchpoints, both inside and outside the app. Leanplum combines multi-channel Lifecycle Marketing with the ability to A/B test the Product Experience for complete, end-to-end personalization of the mobile journey. Break down organizational silos and eliminate point solutions to enable rapid growth.

  The post Mobile Gaming 2021: How to Increase Player Engagement and Revenue appeared first on Leanplum a CleverTap Company.

  ]]> https://www.leanplum.com/blog/boost-player-retention-revenue-three-hacks-for-mobile-gaming/ Wed, 08 Apr 2020 22:06:09 +0000 http://leanplum-wp-staging.appspot.com/?p=19915 While mobile games continue to account for the majority of app store revenue, fierce competition, fickle users, and growing user acquisition costs make profitability increasingly challenging for game owners. Success in such a fast-paced space often requires mobile gaming marketers to focus on driving long-term growth by maximizing engagement, retention, and monetization. Let’s say you […]

  The post How to Boost Player Retention and Revenue? Three Hacks for Mobile Gaming Engagement appeared first on Leanplum a CleverTap Company.

  ]]> While mobile games continue to account for the majority of app store revenue, fierce competition, fickle users, and growing user acquisition costs make profitability increasingly challenging for game owners. Success in such a fast-paced space often requires mobile gaming marketers to focus on driving long-term growth by maximizing engagement, retention, and monetization.

  Let’s say you already have an established audience of users who have downloaded a new mobile game. Is it fair to expect that the majority of players will abandon the game by day one? According to the data, yes! “90% of users are about to fall out of your marketing funnel soon after downloading the mobile game.” Wait, but why?

  Looking into our AARRR (acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue) a.k.a “pirate metrics,”,we may notice problems like using ununified and unreliable data sources, addressing retention drop-offs based on assumptions, poorly designing our mobile monetization, and more. Reasons for losing users at each step of the funnel might be different and hard to identify, but as it often turns out solving problems like these is the key to mobile success. Retention hacking, after all, much like growth hacking, is about strategic thinking and communication!

  

  Let’s take a step back and examine some of the problems and possible solutions.

  Problem: Push Opt-ins Are Low

  Push notifications engage users during every step of the funnel, from account registration to purchase and beyond. But opting into push is typically quite low as the prompt for it often appears at the worst possible time. Imagine being bombarded with access requests to your phone’s camera, photos, contacts, location, microphone, and more. It’s no wonder that only 42% of iOS users, on average, opt-in to push notifications. Losing the opportunity to engage over half their customer base, mobile game marketers soon boil down the problem to communication and timing.

  Hack: Push Pre-Permissions

  Build your audience with a push pre-permission that suppresses the default prompt and asks users to opt-in at a more engaging or incentivized time.

  Asking for an opt-in to push notifications right after a user has installed the game may not only be ineffective but also harmful for retention results. Better wait until you are pretty sure that players understand the value you have built in your mobile game and are happy with it. For example, you may ask for an opt-in straight after a user has unlocked a certain level, or beaten the boss. That’s definitely a moment to savor for the player because you have built the game this way. Just follow that up. It’s moments like this that justify the value proposition behind push notifications and drastically increases the success rate of reaching your players.

  Source: https://www.flaregames.com/encouraging-mobile-gamers-to-opt-in-for-push-notifications/

  Problem: Trying Product Changes Is Risky

  Trying to fix mobile retention problems often leads to product changes, which in itself might be a risky endeavor. There are countless examples of games, not just in mobile, that have introduced a major product change to 100% of their users without thinking about the possible ramifications. By filtering your audience, you can experiment with these changes and create personalized content that serves the users that need it most.

  Hack: Segmented Experiments

  Try new onboarding flows to different segments (ex. 20% of the users who came in via a specific acquisition campaign) and incentivize to activate with free currency at the right moment.

  Specific player segments allow mobile marketers to create automated flows that help them improve players’ engagement and LTV (lifetime value). A recent case study shows how the usage of Leanplum’s segmentation and A/B testing functionalities helped IMVU to triple their retention. Read the full IMVU case study here

  source: https://www.leanplum.com/case-studies/mobile-engagement-hooks-imvu/

  Problem: Engaging with Players Instead of Hoping They Engage with You

  Well, this is a major problem not just for mobile gaming, but for mobile apps in general.

  What usually happens is that you build a fantastic app, attract users’ attention, invest in onboarding and retention but after some time players stop seeing the initial value of downloading the app. Sitting in the background of your users’ phones and minds, your app is soon uninstalled and forgotten. As it turns out, building an awesome product is not enough when you have so many different channels at your disposal for engaging users.

  Hack: If they’re gone, incentivize them to come back

  While the number one reason for uninstalling apps is excessive and irrelevant push notifications – you can only win back dormant users.

  Nobody complains about the free stuff!

  This is a hack we learned from and verified with different customers across a number of different industries. It’s as simple as that: if your users leave, don’t just make them aware of the fact that they have left. Rather incentivize them to come back.

  And don’t be shy. You can offer discounts, free credits, free premium, etc. The only thing you lose by not doing so is the user. There is no loss in giving them a little so they stay a little longer.In fact, this is an example we saw with Via, a ride sharing company, that is quite adventurous with the discount offers that they make to pull back users in a very competitive space. Via’s campaign with special offers on dormant users led to a 27% increase in users returning to the app and actually staying for seven days are long.

  Really nobody will complain about getting free things. Yes, keeping your users by discounts may cost you a little, but in the long run, it proves to be worthy!

  

  Finally, let’s recap our top three recommendations on boosting and optimizing your player retention and revenue:

  • Identify a single source of truth by choosing reliable tools and unifying data
  • Test your product against drop-offs and eliminate any assumptions from your mobile strategy
  • Engage with players instead of hoping that they will engage with you

  Learn more about how Leanplum helps game publishers build deeper engagements and form long-lasting customer relationships by delivering personalized experiences across all touch points, by signing up for our next webinar or contacting our team at sales@leanplum.com

  Industry leaders like Zynga, Lumosity, and Pocket Gems trust us to help them become best-in-class at engaging and monetizing their players. Let’s discuss how we can help you boost your mobile retention and user happiness!

  To learn more about multi-channel campaigns and how Leanplum can help you effectively engage your audience, see our unique approach to mobile engagement and mobile retention.

  Leanplum is a mobile engagement platform that helps forward-looking brands like TED, Afterpay, and Tesco meet the real-time needs of their customers. Schedule your personalized demo here.

  The post How to Boost Player Retention and Revenue? Three Hacks for Mobile Gaming Engagement appeared first on Leanplum a CleverTap Company.

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