Sell More Games

One of the biggest advantages of working with a publisher or a big portal is the ability to use their beta test groups. They usually have a lot of people interested to play games and send feedback. What’s more important, those are not random people, but casual players.

You need your own army of beta testers ready to play your games. You need to hear honest answers from people that are not your friends and never played your game. This will let you catch a lot of stuff that is so obvious that you would never think of it ;-)

Start building your list today. It’s easy and once you set up this there’s little for you to do. By the time your game is ready you will have a lot of people ready to test your game.

It doesn’t matter if you use your own custom forms to collect emails or newsletter service provider. You need to make it automatic and collect: first name, email address and operating system (Windows, OSX or Linux). I use ymlp.com and it works great for me.

Setup a page “Become a BETA tester”, put a link to it on your website, give people some incentive (like a free game for valuable feedback or big discount). That’s it. But don’t forget, once your game reaches beta stage mail those people and listen carefully. If you mail them once your game goes gold then it’s too late.

I wish I started building my bete testers list when I started developing games. By now I would have 300 or more emails instead of 42.

Marketers say that your headline and first paragraph of your offer are the most important elements of it. That means that any change in one of them may have a huge impact on your conversion.

I started an experiment last week to improve Path of Magic page. Because this site doesn’t have much traffic I decided to play only with headline (one with a headline Help Evelyne Save Avalon and one without it). Here are the two versions I’ve created:

Can you guess which one is better? My educated guess goes to the one with headline - it has some kind of call to action. But boy, how wrong was I. The one without a headline is over 84% better.

Imagine my disappointent after investing $1000 in advertising without checking the impact of change in headline? 4 words can drop return on investment by 84%.

I don’t want to say that no headline is always better. I want to say: TEST, TEST and once again TEST!

Cross-selling is a simple trick for selling more (at least in the online world). Here is the definition of cross-selling on the web:

The strategy of pushing new products to current customers based on their past purchases. Cross-selling is designed to widen the customer’s reliance on the company and decrease the likelihood of the customer switching to a competitor.

Or easier to understand:

Cross-selling is the term used to describe the sale of additional products or services to a customer.

The trick is that you need at least two products to cross-sell. If someone decides to buy your game it is much easier to convince him or her to purchase an extra item. It’s good to offer a discount when cross-selling.

If you want to maximize your revenues try to cross-sell similar products. Offer a sequel or another game from the same genre.

Once I analyze my sales data I’ll post some stats regarding my results on cross-selling.