How to Make Content That Keeps Core Players Happy

Keeping core players in your game happy is an important part of your role as a CRM. When your core players are happy, there is potential to move them into a higher tier in your game where they play or spend more often. And if they’re not, they can churn and become inactive players.

Today, we’re going to go over some of the best tactics we here at Teak have seen to ensure your core players keep playing and stay core. Or even better…move into a VIP category!

First off, how do you want to go about defining a core player? We covered the specific phases of the Player Lifecycle in our series breaking it all down, and it’s safe to say most games can consider core players to be the ones coming back to play your game on a regular basis, either once a day or multiple times a day. They might, however, be a low spender - or even a non-spender! It’s more about the amount of times they play, how regularly they play, and how much they tap your notifications. All of this amounts to what it means to be a core player.

In general, content that really keeps Core Players happy always hits on two things: consistency and relevance.

#1: CONSISTENCY

A huge amount of players in games wait for notifications or aren’t thinking about your game until the notification comes in. Being consistent is a great way to build habits and feed Core Players daily play.

For core players, we always recommend daily emails and at least two daily pushes. This cadence has proven to work and is great for player retention. We break it down more in our article on Core Players. One of those pushes should be an automated Daily Bonus that is sent at the same time each day. Call it out to them with a clear message like, “Your Daily Bonus Is Ready.” Like we said above, building that habit and getting them to expect consistency is key.

The other notification should be some kind of daily hand crafted messaging that maybe references an update or a promotion. Or, perhaps whatever you want to say that day. Keep this content fresh, but the cadence consistent. We woulds suggest setting up your Bonus automations first, before investing the time to craft daily content.

Once you have those basic notification schedules set up, you can start seeing what engages the group the most and then lock in from there. Obviously it’s always important to test and learn in the world of notifications, but focusing on steady, consistent experiences that the Core Player can count on goes very far.

#2: RELEVANCE

Second to consistency is relevance. For Core Players, this is especially important - they are in your game often and know it well, so sending generic notifications won’t always be the best way to engage them. They are looking for more personalized content and for more from you and the game. Of course, keep sending notifications about new features in your game and sales, but for Core Players, layer on extra pushes by segmenting your Core Players into even more targeted subgroups.

Let’s say for example, you notice that for Core Players who skip a day, 70% come back, and for Core Players who skip two days, only half come back. You’re starting to notice and learn where the drop off is - use that in the relevance of the pushes. You might want to decide to send a triggered notification on the first day they don’t play reminding them to come play, along with some extra coins to entice them. You could even utilize language that speaks directly to the group you’re targeting - more on that in our article on writing reengagement content.

The other part of this to consider is what we hit on a bit in the beginning of this article - not all Core Players are high spenders. Perhaps they are missing a day here and there because they’re out of coins and not eligible to play. A triggered notification that gives them coins when they haven’t played for a day or two counteracts that issue automatically. Or, if you want go even more fine tuned, Teak allows you to track player currency balances with Player Properties, so you can give players who you know are out of coins an extra nudge.

The big takeaway is: using situations a core player might find themselves in, apply strategy and learning, and always prioritize consistency and relevance. This is your core group - you can cater to them a bit more than others.

Speaking of that - a common question we receive a lot at Teak is how much time should I be spending crafting content for one group of players versus another? Is there such a thing as spending too much time on Core Players? They are, after all, core.

We here at Teak believe that spending the most amount of your time on Core Player strategy is a smart move. This doesn’t mean other groups can fall to the wayside entirely - but the bulk of your time is likely already spent on creating messaging and testing ideas for the core players, and especially on figuring out if the messaging is working or not. Often, your strategy for Core affects and informs all other groups of players as well. And keeping them happy keeps your CTR, DAU and Return Value happy (more on KPIs in games here).

Features that make this job easier. 👇

Lastly, we thought we would hit on just a couple Teak features that we think are particularly helpful when it comes to making content for Core Players:

• Creating a Single Schedule with Varied Content
  • In Teak you have the capability to set up an A/B test so it randomizes every 24 hours. More on that and how to leverage it here. You can send essentially the same messaging but with different rewards, or different phrasing or different rich media.
  • With this setup, your Core Group can receive a daily notification that feels fresh because Teak is alternating messages for you.
  • Then, you can easily evaluate which pushes performed the best after running the randomization for a week or so.
  • Consistently we see these randomized pushes receive very strong click-through rates.
• Leveraging Players Local Time
  • Another thing we would suggest is to set up some of your notifications using the ‘players local time’ option in Teak. Sometimes you’ll need to use a universal time for things like events or new feature launches. But for more generic ones, using players’ local time in Core Player content consistently has great returns for Core Players. This is especially true when your game has players all over the world.
  • More on how to set those up here.
• Setting up Custom Player Properties
  • Teak’s Player Properties are a key feature for personalizing messages and enhancing targeting to reach players based on their in-game attributes such as: level, experience points, how much currency they have - just about anything else you can think of.

Overall, keeping core players happy is all about consistency, paying attention to player trends, and personalizing pushes. With a little finessing and testing and learning, we’re confident core players will keep coming back and maybe even become VIPs.

Anything we didn’t cover you’re curious about? Questions about core players? We’re here to help!

Until next time,
Erica + Teak Team