• by Nina Lentini , Staff Writer @Nina_Lentini, February 20, 2019

A redesign of Travian Games’ email led to a big increase in response rates and revenues, and the company’s CRM and email marketing manager\ explained how on Wednesday at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit Europe in Austria.

Radu Neag said he first analyzed new and old players and set out to improve email layouts from flat and standard to those using the latest techniques, including interactivity and the hybrid approach. 

In the case of Travian’s Rail Nation game, Neag studied where his players opened emails and on which platforms. Most are via Gmail, he found.

Using Litmus, which provides a suite of email design and email marketing tools, Neag codes his own emails. “If you have a general rule in email marketing, if you have a Constitution, the first article is to keep optimizing, keep testing, keep changing. Changes are good.”

In the new email, he uses two calls to action, one at the top and one in the middle with an offer to redeem and incentive. Taking the hybrid approach to localize 19 languages, he created a template using dynamic content based on the player’s language preference.

Neag found the new email gave Travian Games a 50% increase in sales, an 8% increase in activations and a 37% increase in the click rate. Based on those results, he did the same for his other email templates. Of his results, Litmus said that, “In 2018, behind-the-scenes improvements came together to transform the entire email experience, bringing interactivity not just to the email message but also to the inbox itself—and turning both into conversion channels.”

When Travian launches new trains, Neag uses image carousels as well as cascading style sheets (CSS) to create interactivity. Overall uplift in those revamped campaigns include 23% in the click rate and 35% in the CTO rate.

Neag showed how he uses storytelling to introduce a new mobile game, giving the user a hands-on perspective directly from the email. Results of such storytelling versus the classic promo email include a 45% click rate hike and a 100% CTO rate (mostly because the last CTA asks the user to continue the race).

He says that with all the CSS possibilities, he can be creative, coding with new and more approaches.

He summarized his presentation thusly:

• Improve/increase revenues and reactivating by redesign because it works

• Align your design to the brand (images, color, fonts)

• Implement the latest design techniques (if there’s no time/budget then externalize)

• Test always (email clients, design approaches, copy, subject lines, anything)

• Be creative; it never gets boring.