Online
gaming company leverages Silverpop Engage for lifecycle email campaigns
The Company
Virgin Games is a wholly owned trading division of Virgin.com Limited that was launched in 2004 and quickly established itself as one of the leading online gaming site in the United Kingdom. Virgin Games is currently comprised of three distinct offerings: Virgin Casino, Virgin Poker and Virgin Bingo.
The Challenge
The online gaming industry is a highly competitive environment with dozens of companies in the United Kingdom alone offering their services. And Virgin Games is a fairly young company, founded in 2001, so the cards were stacked even higher against it. Virgin Games learned over time that it needed to become more sophisticated with its email marketing if it intended to compete in this environment. “Being an online company, 99 percent of our communication is via email,” said Warren Eloff, casino product manager for Virgin Games. “It became clear that we needed to put a targeted email strategy into place if we were going to keep a strong, competitive position.”
Another business issue commonly found in the online gaming industry is low email deliverability rates. “Due to the nature of the business, it can be difficult to get your emails delivered,” Eloff said. “Our promotions often include words such as ’win’ and ’casino,’ which can result in ISPs flagging our messages as spam. A sophisticated email solution offering industry-leading thought capital would provide us with the resources and knowledge we didn’t have to help increase our email deliverability rates.”
Virgin Games had been using an in-house solution for all of its email marketing needs, which required quite a bit of IT involvement. “Our in-house email tool was not sufficient for our needs,” said Ismael Diagne, head of CRM, Virgin Games. “We needed to constantly work with other departments, which was not only time-consuming but also a bit frustrating.”
The Solution
Virgin Games considered eight competitors before selecting Silverpop Engage. “Virgin Games selected Silverpop Engage because we believed it would be the best at optimizing our deliverability rates,” Diagne said. “Other major factors in our decision included product usability and the ability to integrate with WebTrends.”
To get the most out of its investment, Virgin Games personnel took Silverpop Engage training classes to better understand the product’s potential. After training was completed, the staff continued to learn by applying Silverpop thought capital and best practices to help build its email strategy. Today, Silverpop Engage is fundamental to Virgin Games’ lifecycle email program. Using Silverpop Engage, Virgin Games fires a cycle of emails for conversion, activation, reactivation and retention. The conversion, activation and reactivation email campaigns are completely automated and triggered based upon specific behaviors by players.
For its retention emails, Virgin Games engages with customers through highly relevant communications. Virgin Games uses Silverpop Engage to analyze past behavior and transactional data and uses that information to provide fitting promotions to its customers depending on where they are in the lifecycle. For example, if a customer has signed up for a Virgin Games account but has not started to play, Virgin Games will send the customer an email promotion to play. The promotions change depending on the amount of time that has lapsed.
The Results
Virgin Games benefitted immediately from the user friendliness of the Silverpop Engage solution. “There were no technical requirements, making it very easy to use,” Eloff said. “With Silverpop Engage, we can do everything we need without help from IT. In addition, our previous issues with deliverability have been more efficiently managed”
Silverpop has become a fundamental part of Virgin Games’ business. “With Silverpop, we are able to analyze both behavioral and transactional data that allows us to arrive at an ROI for specific segments of our customer base,” Diagne said. “Understanding the ROI of our customers helps us define our promotional strategy for retaining our most profitable customers.”
Looking for a campaign that would strongly engage higher ROI customers, Virgin Games implemented a holiday promotion in which it segmented out its high-stakes customers based on time of day and how often they play. Using a multichannel marketing approach, Virgin Games sent an email directing customers to a landing page built using Silverpop’s Landing Page product to sign up for the 14-day promotion, during which time they needed to play at least one game to be eligible to receive a prize. More than 65 percent of Virgin Games’ active base took up the offer, and new registrations increased by 7 percent due to the promotion.
Download the Virgin Game case study on leveraging Silverpop Engage for automated lifecycle messaging
