While VIPs make up a small portion of a player base, these segments of players can constitute upwards of 70% of a title’s revenue. It’s essential to build relationships with this segment, personalize their experience, listen to their feedback, and know what makes them tick. Gemma Doyle, co-founder of SurgeROI, former VP of Player Success at Zynga, and architect of Zynga’s VIP program, emphasized during a 2023 GDC session that “relationship building evolves over time – and you depend on your relationships with your players to keep them engaged, retained, and happily investing in the game.”
Keywords’ VIP Engagement & Growth service provides clients with strategy consulting to build their VIP program and staffs them with experienced account managers that proactively reach out to and engage with VIPs to build and deepen relationships as well as deliver a definitive upside through VIP management.
The holistic service incorporates a listening strategy that brings the players’ voices closer to product teams, ensuring feature roadmaps match the needs and wants of loyal players. Keywords work alongside clients to deploy VIP retention strategies, including communications, notifications, incentives, and rewards. The population is split into a treated versus control group so that a definitive revenue uplift can be measured, and clients can see the impact on their bottom line.
VIP Engagement & Growth clients can choose to supercharge their programs by implementing SurgeROI and tapping into the power of data science. Keywords’ VIP account managers are trained by Gemma Doyle on the SurgeROI platform and can take swift action upon machine learning-powered insights like churn risk, propensity to pay, and lapsed payments. The platform offers a 360-degree VIP account view, productivity, and performance insights, a robust analytics dashboard, and an executive view of treated versus controlled population health. As part of the new service, Keywords provides biannual revenue reports that allow games companies to see the lift – treated versus control – and justify further expansion of account management for their VIPs.
Tony Grigg, Managing Director of Keywords’ Engage Business Division said the following;
“Our goal has always been to support our clients in achieving greater efficiency and providing the best possible experience to their players. The VIP Engagement & Growth service and our new partnership with SurgeROI amplify how we continue serving our clients, deepening their connections with their players and producing a definitive upside for their investment.”
NEXT: How can game industry tackle the user acquisition problem?
