Today at Teak, we’re talking about the value of having a Daily Mystery Bonus notification in your free-to-play game. Whether you’ve been running one since you started at your game or have never set one up, we have some tips and suggestions for the best way to go about it and how it can directly contribute to increasing your game’s DAU (daily active players).
Let’s get into it!
First Off: Why You Should Send a Daily Mystery Bonus
Why send a daily mystery bonus? A daily mystery bonus is an excellent and easy way for free-to-play game CRMs to create automated, repeating content that boosts engagement, all without requiring a ton of additional effort. Additionally, one of the best parts is the amount of reward offered can be extremely high, creating an incentive for the player to tap in and play, without having to actually give away a huge amount of free in-game currency. For this reason, it’s often more engaging than other types of messaging - the possibility of winning a large sum is exciting for players.
Daily mystery bonuses also encourage daily play, as it’s a consistent daily treat that players will look for. Why is that important? Because daily play is crucial to retention and increasing monetization. Players who play every day spend 75% more than players who play 6 days a week, and 98% of players who play 4 or more days per week will continue playing the following week. So creating a daily occurrence that players expect and look forward to increases the chances a player will play daily, directly contributing to an increase in DAU and revenue.
As a CRM, your day is filled with a lot of different tasks - from managing recurring campaigns to writing copy and reporting, you have a lot on your plate. A daily mystery bonus is an easy-to-execute piece of content that players love. Once it’s set up, you can let it run and do its thing without too much checking in.
How to Start Running a Daily Mystery Bonus to Grow Engagement
Setting up a daily mystery bonus is easy in Teak, and we’re here to show you step by step how to get started. The basic setup is simple: a daily, recurring notification with a randomized reward amount. (In Teak, this is done with a Randomized Reward Bundle.)
Ensuring that you are randomizing the reward is important for two reasons: It keeps the reward fresh even though it repeats daily, and you can appropriately distribute reward amounts and not give away the full amount possible to every player. For example, the highest amount of coins someone could get could be a million coins - so the daily mystery bonus could read “Up to a million coins”. Everyday they get another chance to win that million.
We suggest starting with four different reward possibilities, at 33%, 33%, 33%, and 1%. This allows you to offer that very big jackpot, while also keeping the other tiers common enough. Within a couple of days, players will pick up on the reward truly being random, adding to the excitement of participating.
You’ll want to monitor the average prize to gauge how this daily mystery bonus will impact your game economy. Lucky for you, Teak calculates this automatically for you and makes it easy to report on and monitor.
Teak’s Randomized Reward option gives you granular control over the odds of each prize amount.
How to Build on a Daily Mystery Bonus for Better Results
Once you have the daily mystery bonus set up, you can start layering further reward tiers on to appropriately incentivize your highest-value players. We recently put together a guide on reward tiers and the importance of tiers, and the daily mystery bonus is no different. You can segment out risk, core, and VIP players and then randomize the amounts within each segment so the reward is still random within each player group.
An additional way to build on the daily mystery bonus is to brand it and tailor it to your game, adding a level of personalization that can be fun and engaging for players. Since this is a daily repeating notification, it’s a good place to invest your time to really make it your own. A basic daily mystery bonus might be called just that - for example, “Tap for your daily mystery bonus!”. But it could also be “Open the present”. This way, you create a unique, fun, and consistent habit that gives players an opportunity to come into the game.
This is also a good place to use varied content, so that both the reward and the messaging are random. This further increases engagement while only requiring incremental effort.
Here are a few creative suggestions we have for how to brand and tailor your mystery bonus:
- Leverage a recurring item in your game, such as a treasure chest or loot bag, to house the mystery bonus. Now your notification can read “Tap on the treasure chest for your daily mystery bonus”, instead of the more generic “Here’s your daily mystery bonus”, adding a level of branding to your game.
- Have a character from your game present the daily mystery bonus to players. Instead of a generic push notification, tailor the notification to come from a character in the game, so they’re presenting the reward to players.
- We always say to use personalization sparingly, but a daily mystery bonus could be a great place to leverage a players name. Because it’s sent directly to them and they’re expecting and looking forward to it, the personalization is often better received. Saying “Hi John, we have your daily mystery bonus ready!” could create more incentive to tap in. As always, A/B test and learn when using player names!
Lastly, once you have your daily mystery bonus all set up in pushes, don’t forget you can also use it in emails and even social links. In Teak, you can set up rewards once and then repurpose it across all channels seamlessly.
Teak Makes it Easy to Set up Daily Mystery Bonuses
Teak was created to help fight churn, and a daily mystery bonus is a great way to go about that. We created this guide to varied recurring messaging for you to get started. And if you have a Teak integration that can give out a reward, you can set up a daily mystery bonus as quickly as today! No further integration is required.
We’d love to help and answer any other questions you have about this - reach out and schedule time with us!
Alex, Erica, and Teak Team