We’ve all been pretty excited here at TrialPay and now we get to tell you why: today we announced a $40 million round of funding from Greylock Partners, Visa Inc., DAG Ventures, DFJ Growth, QuestMark and T. Rowe Price in addition to other well-known investors. This latest round comes in connection with TrialPay’s explosive growth in 2011 and allows us to continue to develop our platform and innovate in the digital payments space.
As the digital goods market flourishes, payment providers are quickly learning that interchange fees make it impossible to process microtransactions for digital goods. New revenue models are emerging to tackle this failure and this latest investment is a big step towards solving that problem. As Facebook’s monetization partner, TrialPay uses advertising to fund microtransactions free of interchange for billion dollar companies, including Zynga, Facebook and EA. While less than 5% of Zynga’s 232 million monthly active users actually pay, this problem is not unique to social gaming. Our CEO, Alex Rampell, recently spoke on this topic at Web 2.0 Summit, which you can watch here.
The team at TrialPay is looking forward to another great year, and we hope you will follow the evolution of our company as we continue to innovate and solve new problems in digital payments.
Our full press release can be found here. Also be sure to check out AllThingsD for exclusive coverage of the funding announcement and what this means for digital payments.
Integrating a Valentine’s Day promotion through DealSpot is not the only way you can reach your players during this valuable holiday.
We’ve come up with a few more ways you can ensure all of your players take advantage of a Valentine’s Day flower promotion, even when they aren’t actively playing your game.
1. In-Game Welcome Message
In-game welcome messages appear when a player logs into the game and is a great way to notify players about new features and deals. Capture the attention of players as soon as they open your app with a Valentine’s Day-themed welcome message. Encourage players to complete the seasonal offer so that they can progress more quickly in your game. In the example below, the welcome message grabs the player’s attention with a simple message and clear call to action to buy flowers and earn Happy Valley Horseshoes.
2. Wall Post
Once a player “Likes” your game on Facebook, you have the ability to post to his or her wall. Create a special Valentine’s Day wall message that highlights your seasonal offer and the value it drives to players. Wall messages are a more personal way to reach players and remind them to resume gameplay, so that they can take advantage of this special Valentine’s Day offer. The wall post from “Happy Valley” highlights the offer and provides more details on the promotion as subtext. You can add whatever messaging you want, including a deadline (i.e. “Ends February 14”) to create a sense of urgency and encourage players to act sooner.
3. Seasonal Email
Drive more players to your game even when they aren’t browsing Facebook by sending out a special Valentine’s Day email highlighting the flower offer and the value of completing the promotion. Emails are a great way to remind players to return to the game and showcase new features and deals. The look of the “Happy Valley” email mirrors the overall look of the game while reminding players to resume gameplay to complete the flower offer. You can incorporate a “Continue” button like the one in the email below to make it easy for players to access your app and buy flowers!
We hope you integrate some of these strategies in your Valentine’s Day campaign today!
We’ve already discussed the value of seasonal flower promotions during Valentine’s Day, but now we’d like to introduce a new touchpoint that we’re rolling out just in time for Valentine’s Day!
So what is it?
It’s called the Bottoms Up Bar, and it’s a touchpoint that looks just like this:
The Bottoms Up Bar is a banner that automatically appears at the bottom of the page at a time of your choosing to prominently display an offer to users. It grabs the attention of consumers without distracting from your site content, and the customer can freely scroll up and down on your page with the widget in place (or even easily close the widget if they choose).
Because it can be displayed on a number of different pages, including landing, product and cart pages, it’s a very versatile touchpoint. The Bottoms Up Bar is also highly customizable. We can feature your product image, a range of background/text colors, as well as your personalized headline, subtext and call to action. You choose when you want to display the banner and how frequently you want it to appear.
Integrating your Bottoms Up Bar is simple and only requires a single line of JavaScript, so tap into Valentine’s Day spending and make more sales this season by featuring a Valentine’s Day flower promotion through a Bottoms Up Bar.
If you contact us here by January 30 and launch a Bottoms Up Bar campaign in February, we’ll give you a $100 Amazon.com gift card!
For most game developers using offers, Valentine’s Day can generate more offer revenue than Christmas! How’s that possible? Let’s look at the numbers…
According to the National Retail Federation, Valentine’s Day is the 3rd biggest holiday in terms of consumer spending. The average person spent $116.21 last year buying chocolates, flowers and other gifts for loved ones, friends and even pets!
Plus, the NRF says 1 in 3 people are expected to buy flowers for Valentine’s Day this year, which means developers can profit from ultra-targeted campaigns that are sure to appeal to millions of users with just a single proposition: “Send Flowers, Earn Coins.”
In fact, our research shows that seasonal flower promotions can drive a 5X increase in offer revenue and yield $20 per transaction. Plus, many developers see first-time purchases from about 40% of users who take advantage of flower offers—that is, when they use the right offer placement.
Offer placement is one of the most important factors in campaign performance because if your users don’t see, they won’t take advantage of it. Upper-funnel placements (such as on your game home page or in your game navigation) ensure that 100% of players see your offer compared to the 5% of players who will voluntarily visit your payment page.
Adding a Valentine’s Day DealSpot to your game is an effective upper-funnel placement that increases sales by capturing players who want to buy flowers for Valentine’s Day but wouldn’t otherwise have made a virtual currency purchase.
Integrate a DealSpot flower promotion for Valentine’s Day to keep the holiday monetization momentum going. (There’s even a $200 early bird bonus!)
