What to Write So People Buy: Selling Your Game Without Feeling Sleazy

[Music] what two rights of people by selling your game without feeling sleazy I know I get it it's probably what you think of marketing it's a used car salesman you're probably like a one-person shop or something and you just really want to make a game you don't really like the marketing thing but you do it because you know you have to or maybe you're a part of a five-person studio right or you got the short straw and you have to do marketing because you're the nice one or something right I get it I get it and that's kind of why I wanted to do this talk is I wanted to prove to you and show you the ways so that it doesn't feel sleazy like this it something kind of enjoyable and I'm not going to teach like weird Twitter tricks or what the latest thing is or how to use tick-tock what I really want to teach you is fundamentals of marketing it's like 101 basic levels of marketing so that you're not always jumping from whatever is hot this year versus next year versus in two years

because last year was discord this year it's tick-tock who knows what it's gonna be in a year I want to teach you the real fundamentals not tricks nothing sleazy I just want to teach you really good basics here this is me my name is Chris sue Kowski I'm an indie game designer I've released a couple games on Steam I'm also a marketing consultant and I help companies market their games too this is my game that I released on Steam one screen platformer and according to some of the reviews according to this guy specifically I'm the dev that's the most enthusiastic in the history of Steam so you're welcome congratulations you're talking to the most enthusiastic death I've also had a lot of success on imgur I've reached the front page at least four times and I'm also the author of quest of courage if you haven't heard of it it was my fifth grade creative writing assignment which actually was just a just a long journal of of all the videogames I was playing at the time on the left are my illustrations during

this book now I it was totally bonkers I was just narrating my high jinks in video games but the school awarded me the historical fiction award for this book I guess the store but they didn't even know what to do with me but all that is to say I've basically been a Content video game marketer for the last since I was 10 years old so that's kind of the history I bring to you in that and where I come from here but I also AM a marketing consultant so I strategize with brands and companies on how they can best use their own community to market their games so these are some of my clients now I'm gonna break this down into five major parts I'm gonna just show you the basics the 101 level stuff how does marketing work I'm gonna show you how to build a marketing strategy so that you're not just grasping at things not just tweeting for the sake of tweeting and I'm also gonna show you how to act on that strategy and I'll show you short tutorials on email marketing because that's my favorite I love email marketing and then I'm gonna show you some real-life examples of how this all

kind of comes together how does marketing work basically marketing is just a bunch of big squares that you gotta fill out here steam Twitter's just a giant blank square that you have to fill out here it is this is your email service provider like MailChimp or blank boxes even if you're not writing even if it's something visual like YouTube you still have to fill words in you have to create titles create descriptions so basically all of this and all of this marketing all these different platforms that you might have to enter stuff into is copy copy is what goes in these blank spaces it's just the words that sell what I want to do today is show you how to love this stuff how to actually enjoy filling in these giant blank spaces with your words okay I'm also gonna teach you one very important role of marketing and I think it's something that everybody needs to work on and it's this Oh have a call to action and I'll explain that a little

bit but it is one of the most fundamental things to have okay so pep talk like I said it is not sleazy to love marketing marketing is one of the best things that we can do to promote our games and a lot of people hate marketing because they think of its code as coercion but coercion and marketing never works you can't convince somebody who wouldn't already like your game to like it the the goal of marketing is actually to find somebody who's predisposed to like your and show them and prove to them that this is exactly the type of game that they want if somebody doesn't like FPS is and you're making an FPS no amount of marketing no amount of dollars or ad spend is going to convert that person that's not what we're trying to do here we're really trying to find the right audience and say the right words to them to make sure that your game is shown to the right people that's all it is there's this famous quote from a famous marketer named Zig Ziglar and he said selling is essentially a transfer of feelings and I think about that a lot when I read a lot of indie game marketing I subscribe to a lot of

newsletters and real are tweets and I I read some copy that's from game developers Mel well-meaning developers but they say things like I hope you don't mind getting this email or if you're not interested you can unsubscribe at the bottom but before Warren Darkrai if marketing is a transfer of feelings what kind of feelings are we transferring here that's not good and I'm serious here please let's stop that kind of language it's just knock it off it's not helping your marketing it's not making you feel any better so really I'm gonna show you the right way to have the right message for people okay so let's talk about marketing strategy everything I talked about comes down to the funnel I can mention it and every talk I give just about every blog post mentions the funnel it is a fundamental to marketing and you have to understand it so I'm gonna go real quick through the marketing funnel the marketing funnel starts with four basic layers awareness interest desire and action it's basically a top-to-bottom guide of how somebody will interface with your game and hopefully buy it in the end it's as

oldest marketing is here's actually the movie Glengarry Glen Ross this is Alec Baldwin pointing at the funnel nose Aiba and basically what happens is your goal as a marketer is to find a person that's going to like your game and they go from awareness not knowing about your game to being aware to being interested in it to being desire to desire it to buying it and so all you have to do is move somebody from the start to the bottom and then you get there get them to buy your game that's it that's how it works the hard part is that there's a lot of steps in between there so let me show you an example of how this would actually work so let's say you post something on Reddit and it goes viral makes it to the front page read it the person who just doesn't know that she just discovers your game through this reddit post and in the middle of that reddit post you say hey why don't you join my Twitter feed so they may subscribe to your Twitter and they say oh that's actually pretty good it's kind of interesting than what you're posting here so they follow you on twitter and as you post you link off

to your steam page and they look at it and they see screenshots on a trailer and then they really like your game they figure out that this is the perfect game for them so now they desire it and then eventually your game goes it finally launches hopefully not at 75% off but you offer a pretty honest discount and then they're in it they are totally excited about your game you guided them all levels of the funnel and they buy it they're totally excited and they take that action that is the funnel now the reason they call it a funnel and it has that kind of wedge like shape is you just got to be honest not everybody who's gonna make it to the bottom of the funnel some people are gonna start with awareness like five hundred thousand people are gonna do your read post but only a thousand are actually gonna go over and follow you on Twitter and then a fewer number of those people are gonna follow you on on Steam and then an even fewer number of those people are gonna buy you on a buy your game on that on Steam at the end so it's a very precipitous drop that you just have to deal with and it's one of the things you got to get used to with the marketing funnel so here's the hard part about

working a funnel and copywriting is that you'll notice that from reddit to Twitter to Steam those are all different platforms from different companies and all of that is totally different so you've got to actually get people from one login to the next to the next it's really hard and you're gonna lose people at every single one of those jumps and guess what comes in between those it's good copywriting that's going to get people from one to the next so let me show you why they follow you so here's a post that I made this is the front page of imgur and that's mine the number one post on the front page in gur called most viral and what happens is when they see your game on something viral like this those people are like totally excited about you they're just gonna do that old throne take my money and then they're like waving it at you then unfortunately this feeling is not very long they only like you for just a few seconds because then there's going to be some other thing they're going to excited to about right under you so you've got to capture this feeling while

you can and what you do is you try and channel that energy of them wanted to throw their money at you and you've got to channel it since you don't have a game out yet to something productive and usually what you do is you get them to follow you on a different platform in this case like a follow on the Twitter and the way you do that is through a call to action always have a call to action a call to action is just a very clear bit of text that tells somebody exactly what to do next that's it like it's that simple but so many people forget to do it let me show you like these well I can subscribe ring that Bob Val follow me on Twitter all those are calls to action and you need to do them to move them off of Reddit and onto your next platform so you've got to be prepared with what your call to action is with whatever you post because you don't know what's going to go viral and if you miss the opportunity that energy that people have that are excited about you is gonna fade really fast and then you missed out on the opportunity to convert people from that excitement to

actually following you I know people say oh it's just visibility this is good visibility doesn't count it's a real waste if you don't capture that energy okay so like I was saying those call to actions are what take people from reddit to Twitter Twitter to steam steam to buying you need call to actions in its current of the mortar between all these bricks okay I cannot emphasize this enough I know I'm gonna say this a lot but always have a call to action okay so let me show you how to build the funnel this is actually where you're gonna get your strategy now there's so many social media platforms there's a new one every week if you were to use all of them and to get people to follow you in all of them and you had all the things you would go absolutely nuts it's impossible you can't do it even if you could be on all the platforms your audience wouldn't know what to do there these call to actions all over the place follow me on this then now follow me on this it's impossible but understanding the funnel

helps you rationalize this stuff let me show you how it actually makes more sense once you see it in the funnel now there are terms that are very good at the top of the funnel which is awareness it's going from people who don't know you exist to actually at least having a concept of your game and those platforms are like Reddit Twitter Inger twitch if like a big twitch streamer follows you or Facebook all these are great for when somebody doesn't know you to kind of know just to be aware of you that's when you can go viral note all of these are going viral platforms on the problem with these are they're ironically not very good at mid to low funnel where you're converting somebody who's like aware of you and they like you and they want to like take that action to go buy all of these platforms are actually pretty terrible at getting people to act so let me show you what's good next in the middle of the funnel which is interest in desire those kind of mid funnel activities the good platforms are like discord email marketing my favorite and sometimes Twitter those are platforms where you really get to build

a community people follow you you follow them back you could converse with them daily come back and forth and there's a real back-and-forth those platforms don't go viral very often but they're really good at making people fall in love with you though it's the mid funnel right there the reason I say Twitter is not very good I'll show you in a little bit but people don't actually act very often when they use Twitter and then the bottom of the funnel which is action is just the storefront it's wherever your game is it might be steam it could be epic game store whatever it is that's where people take action so in this case this is what my funnel is for my games not everybody's funnel is gonna look the same I like immigrant or Matt so I put that at the top that's my top of the funnel my mid funnel is email marketing cuz I love email marketing and my games are on Steam so that's my action level of the funnel this is my marketing strategy everybody else is gonna be different based on what they like and what's their favorite platform you should construct your own don't just copy this because it's dependent on what your game is and what you like to use so that's your marketing plan just build

your funnel based on what you like and what kind of platform fits best with your type of game so what do you do next you just yell buy my game at them that's easy don't no don't do that don't please don't do that what you got to do is really have a strategy for how you're going to communicate now let me show you what you're going to say to the the levels of the funnel okay there's three parts to talking to your funnel okay first you got to understand who your audience is this is a big one then you got to build that relationship with them that's that mid funnel activity I was talking about and then you got to tell them what to do so let's talk about number one understanding your audience um not enough people do this this is the first step if I get hired by a consult as a consultant for sub-game company the very first thing I do is actually just observe the audience that is predisposed to like that game I try and figure out who their buyers are and really what kind of things that customer might like so you just got to put on your like a anthropologist hat and go off and observe the user and let me show you what I'm talking about here the reason

you do that is because if you can state the problem better than they can they're gonna trust you this is an old marketing saw that people always talk about is you really if you can tell them what their problem is they're gonna love you for example watch this this is a you know those old cheesy infomercials the first parts are always those black and white where people are tripping and clumsily doing things I'm not saying we literally need to do that but the purpose of those is to state a problem they know you have like I don't know what this guy with the Ono is but hopefully they just I think they like drop their so for hopefully that's what it is so they're stating common problems that people have they just ramp it up to 11 because everybody who's watching and they're stoned or drunk that's why they have to do it that way but you don't have to but you do have to understand the problems that your audience is having and you might be saying what I'm in the video game industry what problems video games are worthless you obviously haven't been reading steam reviews people have problems all the time with video games just go in and read the reviews let me show you what I mean if you read enough negative reviews

you're gonna see some recurring themes like can't continue change the controls or I can't change the resolution people have real problems with video games that are legitimate problems so this is what I suggest to do identify who your audience is and don't just say gamers that doesn't count it's got to be very specific I've studied Steam buyers very carefully I actually gave a talk on this this GDC check the stream I don't know if it's like down below on the YouTube it's called empathizing with steam how buyers see your game but I did a whole study on how people buy games on Steam and it turns out people buy very specific genres they don't they're not very they don't buy a whole bunch of genres they stick to maybe three four at the tops so what you can use this you can use this to your advantage basically what you do is you identify your game genre be very specific about what genre your game is in and look at the number one game that is similar to your genre the big title like if I'm making a roguelike I know it's probably gonna be dead cells or it's gonna be rogue legacy so go study

that game and identify a medium seller maybe one that's not very famous kind of a mid-level game that didn't sell as well and then go read reviews for those two games and just see the common themes that show up over and over again and look at the negative reviews and see what they say over and over again and basically find some reviewers who seem nice don't go for the psychopaths don't go finding reviewers who have that weird racist frog don't do that just find a nice reviewer and then message them and then talk to them about video games they're actually gonna be very nice about it it's gonna be awkward but again we have a fun job it's it's one of the pains we have to go through right okay so here's how to talk to your audience just say what you're trying to do and don't I ask them what if they like your idea that's not gonna work you have to be very cautious about what you say so you don't taint their opinion don't ask what they want instead ask what they've done in the past people are very honest about what they did in the past and they're less honest about what they want

to do because they're gonna lie to you to make you happy that's just because people are nice and also so these are some some common questions that I like to ask like if I'm making a co-op game say hey what was the last co-op game you played and then that going to be a springboard where they can explain more and more and write down everything they say because you're gonna be compiling all these notes what I do is I make a spreadsheet and I basically split it into sections like what do they hate about a game and what do they love about that game genre and all these things are just going to be used later on I'll show you how so this is where you're going to use it it's when you build that relationship the important thing here is your copy is not about your product it's about a feeling so let me show you Nike they sell sports equipment right but when you look at this what sports equipment are they selling here I don't no they don't even talk about features or anything what they're trying to sell is that feeling and that's what your copy is trying to do you're not listening features and whether it's a green or yellow or how good your features are what you're really doing is

you're talking about the benefits and this is a very common thing in copywriting what you've got to do is break things down and you don't want to list features like don't say my game has 50 side quests try and turn that around and think of how it's a benefit for example a benefit is every character has a back story you choose which one to explore that's turning a feature into a benefit and that's what people are gonna respond to similarly maybe your feature is dual-wielding turn that into a benefit and say oh you get to improvise unique weapon combos to defeat enemies your way really people are going to respond better to that feeling that you give them rather than that some dumb bullet point feature that you've got so that's how you really connect with people and you might be wondering well what kind of features do they like well that's where your research did so one of the things is people I see this all the time they kind of write these stories that are focused on them as marketers so for example I know you went to PAX East and it was a great trip and you had a lot of fun you learned a lot of stuff but your audience doesn't care about

that it's like watching somebody else's vacation so don't write about how you visited PAX East talk about stuff that your community cares about they actually care about your game more than they care about what you did to market your game so be cognizant from their standpoint so here's some specific tips on how to format your writing okay headlines titles these are very difficult to write they take a lot of time so let me give you some tips look at your list that you built you know the pros and the cons that people have with your game and turn those into headlines so for instance I'm making a Metroidvania game a lot of people love to look at those maps the maps are a very important key aspect of Metroidvania so I turn that into a headline five ways we made the metroidvania mats suck less when I read a lot of reviews people are always complaining about the maps so I'm going to write something that's relevant to what they care about which are the maps the next part is really building a swipe file now a swipe file is just a list of cool headlines that you've seen in the past and every good marketer has their

own swipe file because it sometimes you get writer's block and you need to run figure out you need some inspiration for a headline so I build a swipe file that I have now you probably have been doing this long so you don't have one what I recommend is go to youtube look at your history on YouTube and all those videos that you viewed probably have a pretty good headline because they caused you to click on it same thing with email go to your promotions tab and then look at all your Gmail inbox to see if there's any emails that you read and I bet that that title has a real catchy headline so look that for that for inspiration and also don't be afraid to just Google for it just search great email subject headlines all great copywriters do it it's not a crime it's not like school where you can't copy I mean make it your own but really understand it's it's okay to be inspired by other other marketers now we can't talk about headlines without talking about clickbait it's a very hot topic on the Internet it causes a lot of angst among people and I feel like the Internet and as as we as indie marketers

were a little too afraid of clickbait we're so afraid of being called called out for clickbait then we write these super bland headlines like studio newsletter number six like that is super boring nobody's gonna open that email I didn't read studio newsletter number five so I'm has hell not gonna read number five or number six so don't write a boring headline like that also new dev blog update that's also a boring headline don't do those sort of things instead do something that's a little bit of dramatic it's not okay it's not it's okay to be dramatic as long as you're being honest clickbait is bad when people feel tricked here's an example here's an example if you wrote a headline that says I'm quitting dairy people are gonna call it off or clickbait and they should that's lying to people an honest clickbait headlines actually though which is not clickbait is i'm quitting and then i wrote a whole blog post about how I ended up quitting my corporate jobs so that I could go market video games professionally which is what

I did and I wrote a hole in gur post it made it to the front page of imgur and nobody called me out for clickbait it was an honest title and I told a dramatic story so don't be afraid of dramatic headlines if they're honest you've got to be honest with you audience but you also have to be interesting so make them pay off all right so how about the body text they've gotten under the headline that clicked it it's really scary for that middle big open block so let me show you how you should and shouldn't write so a giant open blank space like that is very intimidating nobody's gonna read all that that much text instead you gotta break it up let me show you how people actually read they skim along the headline so they're gonna be the first headline and the second one and the third line they like big chunks to their texts like chunking it up into sub heads and then what they do is they go to the bottom because they look for the call-to-action because they want to see what it's in what's in it for them they're like what are you here for a buddy what are you gonna charge me they look at that then once they get to the bottom they bounce back up and they jump ahead to the section that they actually

like so if they're interested in heading to they're gonna skip the heading two and then they'll also kind of skim through bullet points so that combination of sub heads and bullet points you got to use that to your advantage let me show you when people are reading those headlines because they skip them you got to kind of construct them like they're one sentence let me show you how this is for a fictional game like breath of the wild explore an open world find secret ingredients and craft destructible potions notice how that almost reads like a sentence but those are headlines and then what I do is I write expanded text under each one of those headlines that describe that open world or what those ingredients are because I know people are skipping down the headlines and this is where you kind of get your text is by remember that's white list that we did where we have the red and the green of what they like what they don't grab those and turn those into headlines because what you want to do is you want to turn that into what the readers are saying they're gonna read that they're saying how do you know

that I love the metroidvania map so much it's like it's like you've watched them before because you have you interviewed their comrades people who are very similar to them you really know them and then they're gonna trust you okay so you got the body text now you got to tell them what to do also known as action we always have to have a call to action now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you how to write a good call to action now remember a call to action jumps people between the funnel it gets some also read it get on to Twitter it's really hard to move people from one platform to another and I'm gonna show you how okay we're gonna do a live example almost like English class here so this is a typical indie marketing headline that I see or a call to action that I see something like this sorry to bother you I know you're busy but my little tiny stupid game came out a few days ago could you just take a look and review help please link this is terrible CTA don't do anything like this let me let's make this better I'm gonna

show you okay get rid of weak sauce apologies don't do that I hit this is what I don't want you guys to do I want you to be very honest with your game and be confident about your games awesome so let's just cut that stuff out my game came out a few days ago be sure to take a look and reviews help okay let's improve this this is good but not great um you should only have one call to action people aren't gonna do everything they're gonna do one thing so let's strip this down to one let's just say my game came out a few days ago and reviews help and then you provide a link better but let's show let me show you the next part don't use passive voice be very verb focused and tell them exactly what to do so let's improve that my game came out a few days ago please review it and then you provide that link better better but see this link you've got to be very specific with what you want them to do I always click the link whenever I have a call to action let me show you why so this is valves official Twitter and they had a post about city 17 and they took

their call-to-action was follow the upcoming release of steam of Alex and of half-life Alex sorry and so what they did was they just provided a link now be honest this is a pretty good call to action so I click this link this one right here because I'm on Steam so I want to follow them because I'm really excited for that game so I click that link and it takes it to this page now look closely there's not a single button on here that says follow they dumped me to a page that doesn't have the call to action that they told me to do to actually follow this page here's what I got to do I got to go over here to the store page button click that button then I'm on the store page then I got a scroll down and then right there there's the follow button that's three to four extra steps that I would have had to take in if I had followed their link nobody is going to do that I did that only because I'm studying them and trying to understand how copywriting

works so don't do that nobody's going to do that you're gonna drop off on your audience what you got to do is be very specific and dump them on the correct link so that they can do just one symbol simple action to do it so always test your links to see where it goes and write your copy based on this so for example if I wanted to ask them to do a review say something like this my game came out a few days ago please review it click the following link scroll down to reviews and write one thing that you liked about my game and one thing you didn't and then provide the link you've got to be dead specific I know it sounds obvious but that's not you have to do this you have to be very specific with what you want people to do because they've got busy lives they're probably at the checkout aisle at the grocery store reading this so be specific the other thing you got to do is add a little pathos to it I like to tell them why you have played my game and I appreciate you and I need your help with one thing please review it click the following link scroll down to the review section write one thing you like about my game and one thing you didn't and provide the link pretty good right so finally add a cool button and here's

why remember I told you people skim at the front if your link is hidden in your text they're not gonna see it so put a gigantic button with a nice verb on there review my game I always put a review first a verb first it just gives it that extra punch so that people know what to do so even if they skim all that text which I I know is a lot of text they're gonna see that review my game and they're gonna click it and know exactly what to do that's it that's what we had to do to get a good call-to-action always have a call to action always all right part four short tutorial on email marketing this is my favorite thing I love email marketing it's kind of where my jam that's kind of what I help other companies do so if you have an email marketing problems I'm here to help the reason I like it so much is it's the most effective mid funnel channel known to humans aka this nothing gets more clicks than email in the known universe and I'm serious about this let me show you why okay this was a talk

William Pugh did just a few days ago actually about his marketing strategies and stuff and he said email had a higher conversion rate than Twitter Facebook and Instagram put together he's the creator of Stan Stanley parable and he knows his stuff it really works and to prove it I always go out and research other devs who are doing good marketing one of them is forager it's a run by a really great company they have really good marketing and they were really kind to share their data with me so if you haven't pick up a copy of forager it's worth it they're worth it okay come on in that they they've got about 23,000 Twitter followers and 31,000 email subscribers and this is impressions so they tweet and emailed at at the same time I tracked three campaigns that they did one on October 1 in December and will in January now the blue bar is how many impressions their Twitter got and the green are the orange bars are the number of email impressions that they got as you can see Twitter is awesome because

it can go viral note their January post really did go viral look at that they only have 23 subscribers but 96 thousand impressions were resulting from it that is awesome however when you look at the number of clicks that actually happened it's not that many email killed them for the clicks and as you know exposure doesn't matter anything you need them to convert you need them to click the links so even though it feels impressive that you got that many exposure bucks by actually seeing getting featured or getting fired going viral it didn't convert and as you can see email actually had a 1.5 times more potent than Twitter if you combine all those clicks that happened add them all together 1.5 times more for email and they can even get more severe of a difference than that okay so but if you look at these two graphs like if you compare them you kind of start to see the funnel emerge look at this twitter is great for awareness it's great for

exposing your game to somebody who doesn't know you exist just like that viral tweet that happened in January that brought your that game to a bunch of people who had no idea existed but it didn't convert that's why I say email is a much better mid funnel and Twitter is much better topo file I do not recommend concentrating on Twitter as your mid funnel because people just don't QuikTrip click on Twitter links they just keep scrolling so that's why you need something good mid funnel like either Twitter or I'm sorry either email or disco they're great mid funnel platforms to use okay the other reason I like email address is cuz everybody's got one you know how I know that because to sign up for those other social media platforms like Twitter or discord or twitch what do you need you need an email address here's their signup forms guess what top thing it's always email alright so there's three things that I see people do wrong with email that I think is really easy to fix and these are things how you can improve it how to get people to join it how to use an autoresponder and how to be more personable so this is the typical email

signup that I see on indie devs websites just base says join my mailing list for news and updates that's boring nobody's going to join your mailing list or you can improve it greatly by just changing just a few things and the way you do it is with something called a lead magnet and a lead magnet is just a little cookie that you give people - it's the little sweetener to have people join it it's just like that person at the office who has a little candy jar because they like to make conversation and it's just a little bit of a little sweetener to get people to talk to you and what a what these little sweeteners are little cool gifts that you can give like a soundtrack you can bait access to your game a free version of your game like a demo you can do an artbook desktop background steam avatars anything that's free and can be easily sent via like a zip or digitally you don't want to send off like physical patches or pins to join your mailing list because those are cost prohibitive it's got to be something free that they can do and all that does is it gets people off of

Twitter and onto your mailing list because as we know people don't quit click links in Twitter so it's really hard and so you need that little bit of a sweetener just to get encourage those clicks onto your mailing list that's why you need that lead magnet and what do you do to get your lead magnet to work you need to have a call to action always have a call action to join your mailing list and to mention that sweetener and here's an example of one today I'm proud to announce a free demo for my game gun miner click the following link enter your email address and I'll send you a copy and then you've got that link to actually go join your mailing list this is a fake game that I've got going here this is not a real tweet that I actually sent but you get the idea it tells them what to do and where to do it so when they click that link a lot of people will just dump that link to their general website and they got a scroll around their website don't do that create a special page on your website just for the sign up for your email list here's an example of a great one this is

from the game Nimbus this was a demo that they gave away for joining the mailing list this page right here generated 50,000 email list subscribers and the great thing about it is you can notice there's nothing else going on this page the only thing you can do on this page is enter your email address and click that nice call-to-action button that says get the demo you want it very clear because you don't want them to have to hunt around on your page to find where to put their email address you want it to be so dead obvious that they can't miss it ok next part is something called an autoresponder there are very few in these who actually use an autoresponder and it's a shame it's one of the most important things you can do with email marketing now an autoresponder is a very simple thing that's built into like every single email program if you've got MailChimp you're gonna have the autoresponder built in you can use it as long as you're paying for it if you've paid for MailChimp you've got the autoresponder so you should use it let me show you what it is when somebody joins a list maybe let's say on a Sunday you can set up your mailing list subscribe to automatically send an email

like on the next day and so what you do is you pre write email one you say send this to them a day after they join my list and then you write a second email and you program it to go off the next day and then a third one the third day so basically what you do is you're prewriting a bunch of marketing messages and so when they join your list they're receiving those pre-programmed messages and it's just an automation that really boosts the rest of your subscribers so let me show you why this is so important you're like what's the big deal ok remember how I told you those people that maybe like discover your game and they love your game and they're like totally excited they like take my money and you don't have anything good for them to do and you don't have them to buy anything there's nothing they can do and that energy just kind of dissipates it just kind of fades away that's bat right so you follow my advice and you say you turn that energy into a call to action and you get them to like join your mailing right so they join your mailing list and then you don't send them anything for like six months and it slowly fades away even if they're on your mailing list if you don't email them they're still gonna forget about

you and lose track of who you are so what you got to do is you've got to capitalize on this and you do that with an autoresponder so when they join your mailing list there they want to throw their money at you you say join my mailing list what you do is the next day you hit them up with another email that you've pre-programmed and what they are they're in that honeymoon period they're super excited about you your game so you want to keep that that flame alive it's like if you just started dating somebody and you didn't use you went on a first date and then your second date was nine months later you don't want to do that so what you do is you send this email one and then the next day you know - and look they're still excited email three they're even more excited because you're sending them good stuff and then four they're just like just throwing money back at you really what you're trying to do is just keep the flame alive for a few days and what happens is you they remember you more than just that one flash in the pan where they signed up because the worst thing is six months later they get an email for you like who are these people I don't remember that's why you need to do an autoresponder now the other thing the other trick with autoresponders is you gotta set up what's called an open

loop open loop kind of comes from screenwriting and if you remember the show lost every episode of the show ended on a cliffhanger there was the smoke monster and then there was that that shaft that had the vault and they found what was in the bottom of the vault and when then when they got to the bottom of the vault there's this guy pushing a button and why is he pushing a button and every episode just kept chaining these just more and more impossible stories and that's what you kind of want to do with your email so maybe at the first email you say stay tuned tomorrow because I'm gonna tell you about the game that almost closed the studio what happens is people like oh my gosh that's a great story I want to hear about that and so when email 2 comes in and you tell that story they are more likely to open it and then you end to on a cliffhanger so they're more likely to open the email 3 it's just like those really addictive shows where they just end on a cliffhanger so that you open the next one and just really boost your open rates and makes people love you even more so it's a really helpful strategy that nobody really does if you like this stuff if you're interested in you know I

gave a talk last year on email marketing probably if you just search GBC chris wachowsky you're gonna find it here it is from last year I went a whole half an hour just on email marketing it's really helpful okay so the other third problem that I have with a lot of people's email lists is something called impersonal writing and I get these emails from indie Studios and they just sound like boilerplate like they just converted their press release and they just convert it to a newsletter and send it to me like leaping lizard studios is proud to announce the forthcoming edition of our next game you can just hear that voice first off I know you're just like some dude in your your spare bedroom coding out your game don't call yourself a studio but you be honest with what you are you're just like one dude right be that one dude don't claim you're a studio that's more it's more impressive if you're just one guy second don't use a word forthcoming who use the word forthcoming instead you got to think of email it's like a personal communication with two people I I subscribe to Chrissy Keegan's newsletter

which is actually pretty good newsletter you should subscribe it's got some good stuff going but the cool thing about it is if you look at my inbox here it looks like I'm getting a one to one person email from Chrissy Teigen it's like Chrissy Teigen is emailing me right you've got to use that to your benefit you are going to appear in somebody else's email as one person so it's like you and your fan are talking one to one so write it that way like here's an improvement on that hey Chris it's John you know from leaping lizard studios you want to see my new game see it sounds like he's talking to me and that's how you should write your email don't say hey y'all hey guys what's up everybody that's not it's one to one so write it that way okay that's email I love email marketing I'm gonna show you how this works in real examples and how I kind of build funnels and and really work my marketing across multiple platforms okay so here's the first one these are copywriting examples so this is me my game zombie King and how I love him grrrrrr so remember how I always

study users and I know the audience with my games I make pixel art games there and feel so I talked to folks who like my type of game and they really do like the history of medieval times and they like retro games and so they really kind of have that spirit I mean what I did was I realized that in a trip to Germany because I went for a trip that there was this castle I had a great story and that's what inspired my game and what I did was I researched into like where this castle came from and it turns out it shows up in all these retro games ironically so like all these old Nintendo and Super Nintendo games have no Schwein style in it and I thought what a great story and so what I did this is also a Zelda look in the top right they put that a little nourish Weinstein Castle it's so cute okay and so what I did was in my game I had my artist add Norse Weinstein castle to my game cover so I kind of have this continuity and this call back to the retro games and so I wrote an imgur post all about that about my trip to Germany all the games had had it and guess what

it made it to the front page and so thousands and thousands of people on imgur were totally jazzed about this great story that I had and what do I do with that you know what actually don't you know don't do a call to action I'm in grenades call to actions you got to know your platform so don't do a call to action right away on imgur basically i let it sit there for a little while and then I added a call to action you don't want to put a call to action immediately on reddit on imgur or reddit cuz they'll downvote you right away and so what I did was I just made it more personal and more so like they were helping me so this was my call to action on the bottom of the post I'm actually looking for some beta testers for right now if you're interested in my game sign up here and then I had a link and it goes to a landing page where the only thing they can do was sign up for my game so that's an example of using a call to action with a top of the funnel thing like in grrrrrr okay so this is example two for email marketing this is a client that I consulted for this is a minion masters by beta dwarf they hired me to

help them with their email setup and so let me show you exactly what I did for them okay so that so minion masters is a free-to-play collectible card game and the weird thing about free-to-play games is their funnel is actually kind of upside down so the awareness phase is actually steam if they're interested in the game they can just install it because it's free so installing the game is very top of the funnel and then they've got a lot of middle funnel stuff where they're actually playing the game and if your game is cool in a free-to-play game and they like it then they are going to take action and actually buy something like AI AP or minion masters that has a season pass so that's what you're trying to do is you're really trying to get people within the game to go down to the action phase it's tricky like if you look at their game it's a very complex game for new players and so what I did was I did what I always do which is I talk to the users so I looked through their forums I talked to their community I talked to their moderators I talked to the community manager and I really found

some folks who are kind of representative the community and I had one-on-one interviews with them because I wanted to find out how did they get into the game what do they dislike about the game what could be improved about it and how how what they would recommend if I were telling a new player to get into the game and so I took tons of notes and I set up what was a strategy for them so we knew there was a complex game with a steep learning curve and retention is decided in the early days right so we don't want them to bail and we need to establish that relationship because beta to earth is very good with the community they're very nice people and I really wanted to emphasize how good they are for their community and the interesting thing is this is a PC and Xbox game so it's not like a mobile free-to-play where that game is always in their pocket where they could play it at the checkout aisle there's big times where they may play in the morning and in the evenings but all during the day they're separated from the game so they can't check in on it so those were the kind of challenges I was trying to solve here here's the solution I came up with for their email so of course the awareness

phase is steam they find the game through Steam and then they join it so what we did was we embedded a signup form within the game and what they would do is get free codes by what it was like a splash page when they first signed into the game and because it's a collectible card game we can give them cards through little codes that we sent them and what that happened was once they signed up for the email we used an autoresponder just like I said those open loops and so they got daily emails every single day they got an email from minion masters and we taught them the rules of the games and I gave them gifts so that they would keep opening the emails because if you get an email and you know that there's gonna be a gift in them you better believe you're gonna open it and so then I also introduce them to the studio and taught them who the people were behind the scenes so let me show you an example of an email now this is one email it's a big long awesome email but I can't show it very easily on a SlideShare so I kind of sliced it together but this is just one email that I sent so we've got Stefan who's the CEO and founder of beta dwarf I wanted to put him right up front

you know how it was like even though they are a big studio they've got several employees big team I still wanted to make it personal just like that guy John it was in the basement working on his game I wanted it to be human he's kind of like the Walt Disney who would introduce the show every afternoon on Disney Sundays so he's there and he says hey my name is Stefan look he introduces himself right up front and then right away we gave him a gift because really we got to be honest that's what people are here for so we gave him a free copy of a couple cards those are fake codes but we really gave him real codes that they could enter in and then what I did was every email in the sequence I've trained people on a certain aspect of the game now I knew from my interviews and looking at the forums people are very concerned about how to rank up in the game so I wrote a nice clear heading about how to rank up and then I broke it into sections like what is a good ring how do you gain rank remember they look for those sub heads first and then they go back and read the text so I really wanted to make sure it was clear what that was going on and

then finally what do you do at the end always have a call to action so at the bottom of every email we did a different call to action and only one because if you put too many calls to action they're not going to do any of them so each team elwood picked a different thing to do in this case I know that people really like to check the patch notes so I did a special call to action of hey here's how you find patch notes and by doing that they kind of learned the community they learn where to go to get patch notes and every day with this autoresponder sequence we sent them to do different things it just depending on what was important for the studio to do and then finally we did our open loop now remember the open loop is aware we tell people what to do next so they're excited for the next email I'll the graphic that the graphic designer and marketing team picked for this one it was a guy looking off into the distance just like what we are doing we're saying hey tomorrow or in this case we did a couple weeks we're gonna tell you what to do how to play the guild system because guild systems are very important for them so that's why we

kind of left this open loop to boost that open rate so let me show you the results based on what happened when we implemented this autoresponder now they have a great community manager and they've got an existing really good system going on they've got discord going they actually had an email list before I started and they use Twitter a lot too so they have some existing platforms and what we did was this was a four weekend deal that we were setting up a bunch of marketing so we had my first email was going out we also mentioned it on discord here they've got one of the largest discord servers in all of discord they're really killing it with discord and they've got Twitter too now when all those marketing push went out my emails went out in this discord I was checking and I was a little worried because here they had this weekend deal and I looked at their discord and look it down there below I was like oh my god Here I am I'm trying to prove how good email is and when we look at it look at all those emojis they have down there email doesn't have those emojis look it's got 96 flame emojis people are

loving discord so much to put 96 flame emojis and there's there's 22 emojis of anime girls email doesn't do emojis of anime girls like if I had a touch and my old what's going on here email is still cool right how can I compete with discord right I was worried that was honestly worried and then the numbers came back after the weekend deal we kind of parsed the numbers here's the numbers um email still killed it still killed it like I said email is the highest performing way to click in the universe nothing beats email in the whole universe even emoji girls even if you get 22 emoji anime girls that's still not as good as email so email had twice as much as both discord and Twitter combined when you look at the click percentage it's out of the park email is just so good when it comes to getting people to click it's just unheard of now we did that autoresponder and it sounds crazy right like nine days of daily emails and I

thought it was a little crazy I was like I'm gonna take a risk on this we're gonna do nine emails every day and at the end of the nine days when people newly join the email list I I sent out a survey to them and I said I just asked him a question how did you like those emails did were they too much too little just right okay 94% of the responders to this survey said that the emails were great 40% actually wish there were more than daily emails they I don't know if they wanted twice a day what they wanted they wanted for a whole year daily emails I don't know what it is but 40% wanted more even though I love email I'm not gonna do more than a daily email so just don't be afraid because people like multiple emails 6% said that's a little too much but I'm willing to take that because 94% of people on their mailing list love these daily emails it was it was amazing so this GDC is a little

weird this year I can't answer questions live but I will answer your email or your questions on Twitter just tweet at me even if this is two years ago and it's like 2024 or something you can still tweet at me and ask questions about this presentation I'll answer I love this stuff I love to answer these things I'll be honest to answer you here one last thing thanks for coming to my talk what one last thing though you know you know it's gone okay I appreciate you coming to my talk as a special gift I'm gonna give away a free copy of my book it's all about how do you email marketing it's a free copy all you got to do is go to my link right here click that big button I don't think it actually works in on YouTube you just got to type that in so how to market a game calm /gd c20 and you just give me your email address and thank you for joining my email list and we in response to that I'll give you this copy of this free book I send out an email every week where I have different marketing tips and different things that you can try it's really helpful I don't span because I'm a very good marketer

but that's it and thank you very much for your help and I really appreciate your time