DDO Store Notifications

[HumanJHawkins]

Years ago I would get notice of DDO point sales 2-3 times per year. This advertising often worked, and I would periodically buy a pretty good sized point pack, etc. I haven't seen a notice like that in years. My friends and I started playing again a few months back. Now that we've caught up and found new expansions we would like to play, I looked into purchasing them.

I have to say I am pretty annoyed to find that we all just missed a double bonus-points sale. You would almost certainly have had $300 in revenue from our group if we had known about this. My friends are extremely unlikely to buy all of this content at full price knowing that they just missed a sale, which means that there is no point in me buying it even if I am willing to pay full price.

I looked around the DDO store for a preference about opting in to email or text notifications and could not find such a thing. (I see that I am subscribed to Standing Stone Games announcements via the account page). This seems like such a huge missed marketing opportunity that almost every other sales platform implemented years ago.

SUGGESTION: Implement opt-in email notifications in the DDO store. It's pretty trivial web development that needs only to create and maintain a list of names and addresses. Sales/marketing people should then make it standard practice to email out promotional notices to this list prior to every sale or new content release. It would be impossible for this to not be highly cost effective.

[rabidfox]

From some of the recent Cord live streams, they did some work on the email notification system recently and starting with Saltmarsh sale announcement they'll be using it a bunch again. Not sure what all was going on with it before or why wasn't used much, I just remember bits and pieces of what was said from the streams.

[Gniewomir]

Such things are always posted on facebook. Always posted on twitter. Both are things usually ppl check every day and even if they don't: it's not a problem to every thursday spend 1 minute to check them. Always posted on forums. There's always information in launcher. There's almost always big image in launcher/loading screen when double points are available. Makes me wonder if you would indeed notice one small mail among dozens of others, including spam etc. :P

[Cordovan]

We are working to get our email newsletter system up and running again, hopefully pretty soon.

[HumanJHawkins]

Such things are always posted on facebook. Always posted on twitter. Both are things usually ppl check every day and even if they don't: it's not a problem to every thursday spend 1 minute to check them. Always posted on forums. There's always information in launcher. There's almost always big image in launcher/loading screen when double points are available. Makes me wonder if you would indeed notice one small mail among dozens of others, including spam etc. :P

Good points. I nominate you for marketer of the year... Kind of makes me wonder why McDonalds spends so much on TV commercials and various direct contacts, when all they really have to do is post sales and product info somewhere for their customers to check every Thursday.

Cheers!

[HumanJHawkins]

We are working to get our email newsletter system up and running again, hopefully pretty soon.

Thanks Cordovan!

[Gniewomir]

Good points. I nominate you for marketer of the year... Kind of makes me wonder why McDonalds spends so much on TV commercials and various direct contacts, when all they really have to do is post sales and product info somewhere for their customers to check every Thursday.

Cheers!

Cause for average person mcdonald is not a place you visit every day, so they have to aggressively remind customers that they exist, especially since for some people reaching nearest mcdonald might be a matter of hour long travel and during that hour there's 50 other places you could eat at? I nominate you for logician of the year if you don't see a difference between that and a online game you can access in a matter of seconds every time you would like to and since you're already playing it - hey, it's not like they have to convince you to spend time here unlike mcdonald, unless ofc you're not sleeping behind one. Also we're not talking about commercials to convince some people to come here, but about dedicated players who are already here and they're actively interested in news from game. Also neither your nor mine post were about marketing/commercials, but about basic perceptivity, so such comparison makes very little sense.

[HumanJHawkins]

Cause for average person mcdonald is not a place you visit every day, so they have to aggressively remind customers that they exist, especially since for some people reaching nearest mcdonald might be a matter of hour long travel and during that hour there's 50 other places you could eat at? I nominate you for logician of the year if you don't see a difference between that and a online game you can access in a matter of seconds every time you would like to and since you're already playing it - hey, it's not like they have to convince you to spend time here unlike mcdonald, unless ofc you're not sleeping behind one. Also we're not talking about commercials to convince some people to come here, but about dedicated players who are already here and they're actively interested in news from game. Also neither your nor mine post were about marketing/commercials, but about basic perceptivity, so such comparison makes very little sense.

FYI, I meant that in the spirit of a friendly jab... Not trying to actually imply anything too negative. (I should have used a smiley face or something.)

Your analysis makes quite a few assumptions that are not necessarily true... One being that the target audience for sales is made up only of "dedicated players" and/or people that interact with the game frequently. I (and my friends, and a boatload of former D&D players who like DDO but have real lives too) do neither. Standing Stone Games (hereafter SSG) can increase revenue from this source by being more present in our lives... And if there is a cheap way for SSG to do that, it can be highly cost effective.

Perspective: The only logical way to look at this is from the perspective of Standing Stone Games profitability. Businesses literally do nothing without profitability as the primary concern. (When a business does something nice, it's because being nice increases their rep which increases future sales, etc.)

Contact Points:

• Facebook: Not used by a lot of young people... Can get ads in front of users, but it costs quite a bit per exposure and can be random. I do see DDO ads periodically on Facebook. I have never seen a double bonus points ad there.
• Twitter: I know nothing about twitter... Could never stand it. Likely some expense involved in getting ads to show. Same as Facebook?
• WhatsApp, Instagram, WeChat, Tiktok: How many of these can a company advertise on cost-effectively? (Personally, I don't use any of them so it wouldn't have reached me.)
• Email: Dirt cheap, easy and highly effective for the "I can remember early D&D" crowd. Note: This crowd has a lot of money and is likely not on that frequently. But we'll pop on and buy XP pots to catch up, etc.
• Splash Screen on login: Pretty effective if a person is already logging in... Completely ineffective if they aren't. This misses anyone who goes on vacation through a sale, or simply has more important business for weeks at a time. Yes... There are a lot of these people.

Anyway, DDO has broad/wide reach. "Dedicated players" might be the bread and butter (and should be the priority if that is so). But that doesn't mean there isn't a ton of money to grab from more casual players, or from sporadic players who play a lot for weeks then take weeks off. Meaning for example, there are probably thousands of players who dropped DDO to play Borderlands 3 for a while. But then they got bored with BL3 and will come back. It's lost revenue to not reach out to these players and let them know a sale is happening and maybe bring them back sooner. Many (like me and my friends who were planning to shift to DDO) would log on simply to buy at the sale rate, in expectation of using the points a few months later when Summer activities die down.

I'm guessing Cordovan has actual data on where the money comes from, and probably uses that data to prioritize ads, etc. Funny thing is, I just found a thread here on the forums with reliable sale announcements, and figured out how to subscribe to it. So this is solved for me. But I still think SSG is on the right track getting their email system working again... Very few will put in effort like that to try to help a company take their money.