Increase Customer Retention 101: Power League Gaming and KFC ME
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Eyes peeled, attentive ears – this is how almost 3 billion people chose to spend their time in the recent past.
However, as the world opens up again!, the gaming industry is also re-evaluating its customer retention strategies and developing a marketing strategy for brands to retain existing customers.
Evolution of the Gaming Industry and Rise of Loyal Customer Base
Before we dive into the initiatives brands have taken to retain customers, let us look at the reason prompting such customer retention strategies.
In the last couple of years, the gaming industry in the Middle East has witnessed major uplifts in terms of customer engagement.
Saudi Arabia alone has more than 21.1 million gamers, and the numbers are only going one way – up, ultimately creating a ripple effect in the region.
Gender Equality in the Gaming Industry Thrives
What is even more interesting is the fact that women and men are equally matched when it comes to gaming.
While men are pulling ahead slightly with a few percentage points in PC and online gaming, women seem to be just as keen when it comes to mobile gaming, with 72% and 73%, respectively.
Overall, the Middle East is emerging as a great exemplar for the gaming industry, marked by gender equality.
A look at another significant market, the United Arab Emirates, reveals a very similar picture. Mobile gamers, between men and women, are 74% and 70% of the population.
“The first game I played was Super Mario for the Nintendo 64. I grew up in a house full of gamers and people who love video games. In my opinion, there is no difference between being a male and female in gaming. It is purely about your talent”, says Meshael, one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest macro female gaming influencers and a Miss E-sports Ambassador.
What’s Popular in the Middle East: Video Games, PC, or Mobile Games?
To know the reason for the success of the gaming industry in the Middle East, we ought to ask ourselves: What drives customer engagement or interest?
As it turns out, the Middle East has had no challenge in adopting the majority of gaming platforms available to the rest of the world, and, if anything, there has been a huge surge in interest in shooter, racing, and sports games amongst old and new players
Generally speaking, there are three popular forms of play here, including:
- PC
- Consoles (Xbox, Nintendo, PlayStation)
- Mobile
With the most recent development of mobile games such as Clash of Clans, PUBG Mobile, and others, the interest in the mobile gaming sector has soared.
Overall, gaming as a hobby has soared in the Middle East, and that is an unassailable fact. As macro and micro conditions change, the next step for the region is to improve customer retention rates by engaging, uplifting, and rewarding repeat customers.
This can be done by cultivating a homegrown environment by encouraging budding gamers and empowering them to showcase skills on a global stage.
A great example of a brand emulating this customer retention strategy is Power League Gaming.
Power League Gaming Builds Gaming Community With Immersive Events
Placing themselves as Arabic first, i.e., actively seeking to engage an Arabic audience, Power League Gaming is a full-service gaming agency working with content creators, and gamers to drive engagement and create a loyal customer base.
Based out of Dubai, Power League Gaming aims to establish itself as the leading e-sports tournament producer in the region. Their mission and vision are to find disruptive content to engage with existing customers in the region as well as reach/engage new customers.
Working with various global brands like Adidas and Intel, Power League Gaming has produced different events and videos to engage the gaming community, in turn leading to an improvement or upliftment of customer retention metrics for the above-mentioned brands.
Power League Gaming and Adidas Launch Football Shoes Through Promotional Event
To launch its X Ghosted football boots to the gaming audience in the Middle East, Adidas partnered with Power League Gaming and created a 360-degree campaign across social media channels.
With the target audience aged between 16 and 35 years, the brands came together to create an e-sports tournament spread over 4 weeks, attracting 5000+ players to participate in the FIFA tournament.
Participants competed down to a pool of the ELITE 32, who then went on to play in groups with leading influencers and regional pro players.
The activation of this game marketing also coincided with the launch of FIFA 21 in the region.
As a result of this simple customer engagement technique, Adidas was able to attract over:
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🎯 6800+ participants 🎯 Generate 650K unique viewers 🎯 And, garner 80K engagement. |
Similar to the above-stated engagement with Adidas, Power League Gaming has been responsible for garnering views and creating campaigns to drive customer loyalty programs.
Some of the other events Power League Gaming has created to enhance the customer experience are:
- With Adidas, Namshi, and Epic Games
- With Riot Games and KSA’s General Entertainment Authority
- With Lenovo partners for Miss E-Sports
Immersive Game Marketing to Engage and Retain Customers
Similar to Adidas and other brands, Power League Gaming has had a strong standing relationship with KFC. At the same time, KFC has been laser-focused on building a regional gaming community through its dedicated gaming account, KFC Gaming ME.
To achieve this endeavor, KFC Middle East entered into a program to shift the brand’s perception amongst Arabic gaming communities and partnered with Power League Gaming.
The gaming agency targeted PUBG and created a KFC MENA Cup for the mobile game. It designed a fully immersive gaming activation that saw PUBG Mobile Squads unite across 11 countries to compete toward a grand prize of $15,000.
The activation of the mobile game drew the region’s top tier-pro teams into the tournament, surrounded by high-frequency content, weekly round-up shows, competitions, sales promotions, influencer engagement, and daily ‘fire sale’ KFC voucher codes, distributed to audiences throughout the daily LIVE broadcasts.
As a result, the event witnessed 4.2 million unique viewers and had 41 million impressions.
Seeing this positive customer feedback and interest, KFC Gaming ME was encouraged to develop a more engaging customer retention strategy and create campaigns around them to attract new customers and retain happy customers.
One of the many customer retention programs that KFC Gaming ME strategized in partnership with Power League Gaming was creating a series of YouTube videos and promoting it via social media channels and influencer marketing.
Power League Gaming Connects With Gaming Community Through YouTube Series – “Your Game Your Style”
To start with, Power League Gaming developed a series of eight-episode YouTube (YT) show called Your Game Your Style with an aim to connect, uplift, and reward Arabic gamers, as well as increase customer retention rates across the brand’s content platforms.
Apart from ensuring customer satisfaction and retention, the idea behind creating this YT series was to emerge with a disruptive game marketing strategy that provided the right platform to Arabic gamers.
This way, they could not only showcase their skills but also empower promising gaming talent in the region and entertain the audience.
Format of the YouTube Series
The format of the show was simple and sleek. The host, “Shamsimaru” invited gaming influencers of the region for a talk/gaming show.
With each video ranging from 20 to 30 minutes, the host and the guest (gamers) would set up an interactive session comprising of a casual quiz show along with streaming live games to showcase game plays and strategy.
This way, Power League Gaming, and KFC Gaming ME were able to bring forward the best features related to every old and new game and, at the same time, provide relevant content through hands-on experience and ultimate guide.
As a result of this interactive session, each of the YT videos was able to garner over 100K views.
Social Media Promotions for the Event
Power League Gaming undertook a 360-degree management of the project from ideation to development, project management and delivery. They assisted KFC to build and retain a highly engaged Arabic gaming audience, while promoting the YT series through various social media channels including Instagram and Twitter.
This strengthened the brand equity, drove a measurable shift in their retention rate and created a positive perception of the gaming audience for KFC.
Power League Gaming also used the absolute finest in production for the KFC gaming show project, which featured a virtual set environment to replicate the Colonel’s gaming area, and influenced the region’s love of anime and video games.
Influencer Marketing Strategy Adopted by Power League Gaming
To further create noise around the YT series and attract new customers while engaging with returning customers, Power League Gaming utilized influencer marketing.
They invited the region’s leading gamers who had substantial followers and could create a huge impact to drive customer loyalty.
These gamers promoted their specialized game by introducing new tactics and gameplay.
Some of the gamers in the show were:
| Games Masters | 1.87K Subscribers |
| ShongXBong | 5.55 M Subscribers |
| Meshael MR | 410K Subscribers |
| I6RBA5 | 1.65 M Subscribers |
What Benefits Did KFC Gaming AchieveThe ‘Your game your style’ gaming show exceeded 800k views and generated 20.9% engagement since it launched in May 2021 which is a 400% percent increase from the industry benchmark of 5% on YT. The game show has also converted 3.34% of viewers to direct sales and drove 5,000+ new app users across KSA and the UAE, making the project a gateway for building and retaining Arabic gaming audiences for the brand. |
What Does This Mean for the Gaming Brands in the Middle East
Looking at the rising popularity of the video and mobile games market in the region, it is of utmost importance now for gaming brands to increase engagement and find answers to a critical question – How to engage the audience in gaming?
Simple, generalized campaign trends are long forgotten. As a matter of fact, our recent survey in the State of Insights-led Engagement Middle East stated that 26% of brands do not find their campaign insights impactful
To avoid reaching a saturation point, brands will need to collect customer feedback, draw insights from them and drive personalized campaigns.
This will help them drive a higher retention rate for an existing customer and, at the same time, initiate a first purchase for a new customer, ultimately leading to better revenue.
How MoEngage Can Help in Improving Customer Retention For Gaming Brands
While most users may bring in short-term gains and immediate gratification for gaming companies, it is the lifetime value of loyal customers that is critical in the long run.
MoEngage has been instrumental in solving the tough challenges for gaming brands by analyzing, segmenting, engaging, and optimizing campaigns that delight customers and improve their performance.
Here Are Some Customer Retention Tips
Create a 360˚ View of Your Customer
We help you get a single view of the customer (geographical, demographical, behavioral data). By bringing together the best of automation and analytics on one platform, we help marketers design and monitor customer engagement campaigns.
Orchestrate Smart Customer Journeys With Omnichannel Campaigns
Using MoEngage Flows, brands are able to design marketing automation flows that are easy to create, visualize, and deploy across channels.
For example, from onboarding prospective customers to earning referrals from existing customers, flows take care of all customer touchpoints.
Segment and create user personas
Segmentation could also include user attributes such as model of cell phone used, place of residence, channel preference, etc.
With MoEngage’s RFM Analysis (Recency, Frequency, Monetary), you can create a chart of your users based on their likelihood to make a purchase, their overall frequency, and the monetary value of their purchases.
The RFM chart gives you a quick overview of all customers coming onto the platform, right from Dormant to Champion, and helps you create appropriate marketing campaigns for one-time buyers and repeat customers.
Additional Affinity segmentation helps you group customers based on dominant preferences beyond their past behavior and create promotional strategies that appeal to customers’ emotions.
Proactive Predictions to Drive Customer Insight
We enable you to go beyond past actions and current interest to understand your customer’s future actions.
Leveraging SHERPA, our AI engine, allows brands to develop strategies based on what each of their customer needs and deliver those experiences.
These could be predicted by predicting the conversion, churn or dormancy of new or repeat business.
As a result, brands are well placed to cross-promote their services, ultimately building trust and engaging with players outside of the game through various kinds of auto-notifications.
Final Thoughts:
Moving forward, the video and game market is bound to mature in the Middle East.
To stay ahead of the competition, brands will need to further personalize their communications by building a holistic view of the customer and engaging with them intelligently and proactively throughout the lifecycle journey.
These few critical steps will allow brands to create specific incentives according to each customer, ultimately helping them in getting positive reviews.
Learn more about how MoEngage can help your brand retain and engage the loyal gamer base.
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