• by Dianna Dilworth , December 3, 2019

Gaming company Travian Games knows the importance of personalization, segmentation and automation. But the company, which sells games in a freemium model, wanted to improve its CRM program by upgrading the designs of its emails.

So they got to work analyzing the behavior of its game players -both long term and short term- to give insights into how to improve the customer journey using email design.

“While the games were getting updated, the emails were a few years old,” said Radu Neag, senior CRM manager at Travian Games, at our Insider Summit Europeearlier this year. “The objective was to design for engagement by following brand guidelines to increase open and click rates for improved conversion.”

They started by updating email templates for the game Rail Nation. Discovering that most of the emails were opened in Gmail or on Apple devices, the company started coding and testing and changed designs to test the impact in these inboxes.

“If you have a general rule in email marketing, a constitution, the first article would be to keep optimizing, keep testing and keep changing because things are always changing,” said Neag.

The company changed the complete template using two call-to-actions – one to jump into the game another to redeem an incentive. These emails are sent in 19 different languages and the company used dynamic content to populate the copy based on the customer’s language preference. The refresh helped the brand see an 8% uplift in reactivations, a 37% click rate and a 50% uplift in revenues.

The company continued to improve emails, redesigning the birthday emails to show fireworks both in the email and in the inbox line. By bringing interactivity not just to the to the email message but also to the inbox itself, they turned them both into conversion channels.

Additional redesigns include adding an image carousel directly into an email to promote new train designs for Rail Nation. They harnessed the power of storytelling in email to launch a new mobile game last year.

“We choose to use the storytelling approach in the email template to give the player a hands on perspective of the game using gifs,” said Neag. 

The email started revealed game art and then host introduces the reader to the game through a variety of gifs, then the call to action is to download the mobile app.

Learn more stories like these at our upcoming Brand Insider Summit Europe.