Bee7 takes the sting out of re-engaging daily mobile game users

Mobile marketing automation (MMA) solutions do produce significant results for those that can afford them and can deal with their complexities, but that is a tiny few.

In a VB Insight study, we registered a 1.5 percent market penetration for MMA solutions among app developers. While things have improved since then, the number of practitioners is still tiny.

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Today, Bee7000 is launching a new re-engagement solution — Bee7 — targeted at mobile games, with a mission to provide MMA-style message delivery without the complexity, cost, or expertise typically needed. And the company has an impressive, patent-pending trick up its sleeve. Or in its hive, if you prefer.

Bee7’s technology aims to boost retention on iOS and Android, but it doesn’t stop at re-engagement. It also includes cross-promotion and monetization tools in a single solution. The trick? It understands and measures what the user is doing when they aren’t playing, and it times the re-engagement notification correctly.

Bee7 exists to solve the MMA-complexity conundrum.

“Depending on the type of [MMA] tools we look at, the entry costs may vary from simply setting up a re-targeting campaign to integrating with APIs and committing to monthly service fees,” Samo Login, CEO at Bee7, told me. “It’s either not worth it (based on results), or it’s difficult to measure, making it a risky investment.”

In short, Bee7 lets you bring players back into your game, creating an uplift in retention rates by incentivizing users to play a game each consecutive day. From the perspective of the user, Bee7 uses ad placement methods, through which users are incentivized to return a game they recently left. The incentive? That could take the form of in-game currency — you’ll get 25 coins if you click through and play today, for example.

Bee7 claims strong results.

“The product is continuously showing 7-20 percent retention increase, tested on numerous games thus far, which is having a direct effect on a game’s daily active users (DAU),” Login said. “More daily active users, in general, means more revenue, regardless of your game monetization model. And since the price structure is intertwined with your game’s DAU, your return stays positive.”

So what signals is Bee7 looking at when users aren’t playing? It measures when a device is unlocked and how many times. And it understands when other apps or games are in use. By knowing the user profile and creating a knowledge graph of behavior, the call to return to your game can be timed for the optimal moment.

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Rewarding users for return visits isn’t a new tactic, but it is an important one, and it sits alongside other gamified techniques such as rewarding users for watching videos. But that isn’t the whole story, according to Login.

“We wouldn’t say rewarding users to return is successful by itself,” Login said. “These users that have lapsed have done so for a variety of reasons, and to get them back (to spark their interest again), what they need to see is value. Whether this is in the form of a reward or a humorous message is up to how well you know your audience. But the key here is understanding what your audience deems valuable.”

Value is important, of course, but timing is everything.

“In general, rewards for returning work well because they indeed do represent some value, but we have found a lot of untapped potential by being a lot more specific and including additional factors into consideration,” Login said. “When do we want to reward the user — when she is asleep, when she is using social media, or when she plays other games? How big of a reward do we need to give each specific user? And how often do we present this reward? Arriving at the perfect time, including the right reward size and effective messaging, is the key.”

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So what is involved in implementing Bee7 for your game?

“Besides re-engagement, Bee7 offers a variety of tools for publishers and developers, including monetization formats, so implementation time and methods vary [depending] on what exactly you want to achieve,” Login said. “But speaking solely about re-engagement, you download our SDK and follow our integration documentation. With our tech support team always available and committed to making the integration as seamless as possible, the integration itself can be done within a day.”

Bee7 is available from today. Re-engagement is free for the first three months. After that initial period, a tiered pricing scheme comes into play — ranging from $0.03 per day per 1,000 DAU, depending on geography and mobile OS. Costs can be offset using the company’s monetization offerings. Bee7000 is showing Bee7 at the Gamescom conference in Cologne from August 17 to 21.