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Onboarding your players to promote game success

Adequately onboarding game players is a great way to promote game success and engage players right away.

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Benefits:

Onboarding creates a strong first impression by:

Helping new players navigate your game

Helping players understand how to play the game and have success

Helping players interact with each other

Highlight key differentiators that sets your game apart - impeccable graphics, in-game events, exciting prizes, and more!

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Maximizing push subscription rate

Perhaps most importantly, onboarding your game players can help maximize the push subscription rate by clearly explaining the benefits of receiving push messages before asking permission. This transparency lets your game players know exactly what they’ll receive notifications about and can lead to more opt-ins

Welcoming and engaging your game players in an effective way at the start can:

  • Increase your engagement
  • Help retain new players
  • Create a unique player experience
  • Maximize your opt-in rate

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Increase sessions, duration, and dau/mau

Some of the most important gaming metrics or KPIs – such as Daily Active Users, Monthly Active Users, Session Amount and Duration – can be bolstered by the messages you send your game players.

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Effective strategies to increase sessions, duration and dau/mau

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Communicate your game updates

Gaming studios are often creating new levels, game play, and artifacts in the game, but game players don’t always know about changes because of automatic updates by operating systems.

You can increase retention and sessions by promoting game updates to players through push or in-app messaging within the game - entice players to explore new features and updates.

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Celebrate player achievements

You can keep Daily Active Users high by personalizing & engaging active players in gameplay – user achievements, like game level, rewards, or high scores, provide great content for engagement.

You can customize these messages to pull users back into your game and even trigger messages based on players achieving certain milestones.

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Understanding your players better

At OneSignal, we also recommend messaging to continuously engage specific highly active game players – what one might call “VIP” game players. An example of a VIP player could be a user that has reached level 10 AND purchased an item. Understanding your players in this way does involve implementing data tags to track player actions and events.

Creating and targeting these users can improve monetization and the relevant engagement metrics such as DAU, MAU, and sessions.

Some helpful communication tips:

  • Don’t be afraid to try - A/B test your communication strategies
  • Keep the communication constant
  • Engagement is the key to success….
  • ….powered by a smooth player experience

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Re-engage players and reduce churn

As most know, re-engaging existing customers is 5 times cheaper than attempting to acquire new ones. This same notion can be applied to game players as well. Bringing inactive players back to your mobile gaming app should be a key part of your messaging strategy.

Push messaging and In-app messaging are perfect ways to leverage re-engaging players who have previously shown interest in your game.

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Re-engagement in 2 steps:

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Establish your re-engagement cadence

To re-engage players effectively, we recommend first establishing an engagement cadence that works for your game/business. A cadence that we have seen work well is the following: Day1, Day3, Day7, Day14 - essentially messaging your players on Day 1, Day 3, Day 7 and Day 14 of their inactivity since playing the game.

Leveraging the OneSignal Journeys feature makes re-engagement campaigns simple and easy to execute as it will automatically message players along your desired re-engagement cadence with your preferred messaging for each day. We’ve seen OneSignal gaming customers double their retention by utilizing our Journeys automation feature.

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Build an enticing messaging and communication strategy

Effective messaging that can entice players to come back and play your game includes:

  • Publicizing new levels or game improvements - try giving them hints about secret shortcuts they can try!
  • Send them free game items such as coins, tokens, or trophies that can be used within the game
  • Limited time offers
  • Highlight upcoming big holiday or seasonal events
  • Promote sponsored events

Creating a tailored re-engagement strategy and cadence for when and how to communicate to players can improve retention by as much as 20%