Retention, Part 22: Newsletters

By Sanya Weathers

Newsletters are a type of database marketing. So are the coupons you get in special mailers if you belong to the Super Shoppers club at your grocery store, as well as the “Tip of the Month” junk mail you get if you own a house and used a real estate agent to buy it. You hook people into joining your database by giving them something right away – a good deal on a house, or a gallon of free milk, or a chance to try out your product for free.

Once you’ve got the customer hooked, you have a recurring opportunity to increase the odds of each reader becoming a regular customer. You’ve probably heard the old saying that it’s cheaper to spend your money on keeping a customer than it is to go find a new one.

That one didn’t get to be an old saying because it overstated the case.

However, the thing you need to keep in mind is that a newsletter only works as a retention tool if it gives the customer an incentive to read it.

Common mistakes:

–    Length. Remember that this is junk mail to the user. Junk mail they may or may not remember agreeing to get, no less. A paragraph is too long, let alone a whole essay.

–    Content that you want to tell them, as opposed to content they want to read. If you’re using the newsletter to push a program or explain a design change, you probably lost your audience two lines in.

–    Old content. I have three newsletters in my inbox right now consisting of “news” I already saw on the website/industry mailing lists. I get that newsletters have to be approved. I get that a studio beholden to a corporate overlord has multiple approval gauntlets to run. But as a customer, I do not actually care about your problems. If it’s not exclusive to the newsletter, get the newsletter out within a week of the story breaking elsewhere.

Things you can do that are awesome:

–    Reward them for reading. A code for an in-game item. A fancy badge on the forum. 10% off a month’s subscription fee. Whatever. Just give them free stuff and watch your click-through rate soar.

–    Reward them for reading regularly. Anyone signing in three months in a row to redeem the monthly prize gets a bigger prize.

–    Talk to them like insiders. Stop trying to sell the product. They’ve bought it. Now they’re part of the inner circle, so treat them accordingly. Be straightforward. Make inside jokes. Show them they’re part of something special.

–    Special opportunities. There are focus groups, and then there are focus groups. Some require a true random sample of the user base. For all those that don’t, give your newsletter subscribers first crack at the fun.

Make your next newsletter one that incentivizes readers, and directly increases your retention.