The Pros and Cons of Sending to Large Audiences

In the gaming CRM world, we talk a lot about messaging and the best strategies for sending to segmented, specific audiences. But what about sending notifications or emails to large audiences? What are the pros and cons involved with a generalized notification that goes to a wider group of players in your game? Is it a good idea? Or something that should be avoided?

The answer, as it usually is when it comes to messaging strategy, is that there are pros and cons to both sides of it! Today, we’ll dive into when it might be smart to send to large audiences and when you might want to avoid it.

What Constitutes a “Large” Audience?

First off, it’s important to understand what a “large” audience is. Generally, we at Teak would say it’s more than two times your average Daily Active Users. At this size, a large audience will typically include a significant number of lapsed and dormant players. This incurs risks that we’ll get into more below in our cons section.

The Cons of Sending to Large Audiences

• It can damage email reputation
  • Overall, the number one con with sending to large audiences is the risk associated with email. A big send is often flagged as suspicious by major email servers like Gmail, and could be sent directly to spam folders.
  • Large sends also will likely be going to mostly lapsed and dormant players. Teak sees that dormant players are 4x more likely to mark emails as spam, creating a negative spiral for your email reputation.
  • We have a guide to email reputation management here that we would recommend reading before getting too deep into mass email sending.
• It lowers click-through rate averages
  • Because large sends are mostly going to less engaged players, you’re going to see lower engagement. This will lower click-through rates overall, bringing the average down, and can make it challenging to understand how effective your content is.
  • This can reflect negatively on engagement numbers when you’re reporting CTR as a key performance indicator. But, if you’re able to justify the strategy as a goal tied to one of the pros in the list below, it can be worth it. 
  • And on that note, for more on increasing CTR, or how to manage expectations if it goes down, we have a guide for you here.
• It can feel spammy
  • When you send to a large audience, you don’t have the opportunity to finetune the messaging to cater to a smaller group. That means wording and copy need to be more generic, which can lead to the notifications feeling more spammy. Personalization is an important part of notification strategy and when you can’t get personal, messaging will suffer. 

The Pros of Sending to Large Audiences

• Easily reach a large amount of players
  • Perhaps the biggest reason to send to a large audience is the ability to reach a lot of your players at once. This can be extremely helpful when it comes to big announcements in your game, or big pushes for larger initiatives such as something surrounding an event or new level or features in the game.
• Perform A/B tests at scale
  • Another potential advantage is that large audiences allow for A/B testing at scale, which gives you performance insights much quicker. 
  • With A/B tests, you typically have to establish an ideal audience size and then determine how long you would need to run it to reach statistical significance. Let’s say your audience size needs to be 100,000 for good stats. With a small audience, you would need multiple sends over the course of a month to hit that number. But with one large audience, you could hit that statistical significance in just one send.
  • This slightly contrasts with the drawback that large audiences can reduce click-through rates (CTR) and obscure the effectiveness of content. Both perspectives hold true: A/B testing at scale helps gauge broad appeal, such as testing if reward mentions are better in the first or second sentence of a message. However, for more nuanced insights, a smaller, more targeted audience is necessary.
  • A large audience lets you learn what works faster in general to improve all your sends. This becomes valuable knowledge when you’re designing for smaller, harder to test audiences, such as VIPs. 
• It can save you time
  • Targeting smaller audiences can be time-consuming. It takes a lot of time to set up notifications and schedules for every single group of players. But when you send to a large audience, you save time by not having to set up multiple messages. This can be especially helpful when you’re just starting and need to see return on messaging quickly before you can justify additional investment into deeper segmentation.
  • In these cases, when you don’t have the resources to fully personalize all your messaging by segment, you can still use player properties in Teak to keep the messaging at least slightly personalized, e.g. “Ready for another spin in {{last_slot}}?”. 
  • Another great way to maintain personalization when sending to a large audience is through rewarding. We have a whole guide on how to think about rewarding right here.

So…do you send to a large audience or not?

As seen above, the answer to this question is dependent on a lot of things! To summarize (and give you a quick cheat sheet to refer back to!):

You should send to large audiences when:

• ✅   You have a time-sensitive announcement with broad appeal.
• ✅   You’re testing creative at scale to inform future segmentation.
• ✅   You’re working with limited CRM resources or early-stage segmentation.

You should not send to large audiences when:

• 🚫   Your goal is high CTR or strong re-engagement of loyal players.
• 🚫   You’re targeting monetization KPIs with high personalization needs.
• 🚫   You are sending email (except in rare cases.)

Have an upcoming campaign and not sure what’s appropriate? We’re happy to help talk through the strategy, just reach out or schedule a conversation with us.

Erica + Teak Team