Email: Still Got Game?

If you open your email box and find an email reminding you that you really should spend more time playing your favorite game, it could be the handiwork of Zeta Interactive.

The full-service digital marketing company, noting the rise in popularity of gaming, particularly among women, has started offering game makers its marketing services to help build up their following. To grasp the frenzied interest in games—by developers and now, apparently marketing companies—look no further than Zynga, the social gaming company behind FarmVille and other titles, which is reportedly weighing an initial public offering with a valuation of some $10 billion.

“With Zynga waiting to file for an IPO, there are 500 or 600 companies out there trying to build the next big social game,” said Al DiGuido, chief executive officer of Zeta Interactive, based in New York City. “As more and more games get out in the marketplace, the question is how do you build a business around that game?”

The lynch pin for Zeta’s marketing strategy to raise the fun quotient on certain games: email.

That may sound off-kilter, given that those young Millennials who grew up with Game Boys all but attached to their palms seem more fixated on texting. But a key target market for the games they expect to promote are women, ages 25 to 49, who have not only become surprisingly rapt consumers of games, but are of an age where they are most certainly used to checking email (the better to find those daily deals that they are also scooping up.) After abandoning soap operas, en masse, these ladies are spending much time on social games and mobile games, says DiGuido. (A recent Adweek article posits that it is Zynga that killed the soaps All My Children and One Life to Live).

So the marketing company is simply following gaming companies and consumers into the graphics world of tokens, rewards, victories and defeats, and making sure that no one gets in without an email address.

“The solution we’ve created is creating email platforms into the back end of gaming platforms,” DiGuido said. “Based on back-end analytics, we know when you’re playing the game, and how much you’re playing and when you’re playing. If you’re a frequent user of the game, we know how far you are from different levels of the game, such as virtual goods.”

Zeta, which brought in more than $30 million in revenues in 2010 and counts Sony, Intuit and Century 21 among its clients, has already lined up a few gaming companies (it could not disclose which ones yet) that will use its services, and it will offer the services for games in various mediums: online games, social games and mobile games. So what will the email messages say?

They will feature graphics from the game, as well as information on what users can do with their game credits, and which of their friends are also playing the same game, with the opportunity to send those friends a gift.

“If you’re someone who has not played the game in awhile, the emails will encourage you to get back in the game,” DiGuido said.

DiGuido knows the power of email. He is considered one of the founding fathers of email marketing back in the 1990s, and served as CEO of Bigfoot Interactive before investors sold it for $120 million to marketing services giant Epsilon back in 2005.

Zeta is devoting more of its business to helping businesses use social media tools like Facebook and Twitter effectively. Social media has grown 100 percent since 2010, and now comprises 10 to 15 percent of our business. But the company is far from abandoning email as a key marketing tool.

“No doubt, it has been impacted like postal mail but it’s going to continue to be a foundation as a communications channel,”DiGuido says.

After all, you can’t even sign up for Facebook without an email account.

“What companies are doing is, they want to be able to get consistent messaging across all of those platforms,” DiGuido says.

---

Teresa Novellino writes for Portfolio.com