Boyfriend Dungeon is an indie game being developed by Kitfox Games about dating luxuriously beautiful weapons and then using them to fight monsters. It was originally announced back in October 2017. On August 15th of 2018 the Kitfox team launched a Kickstarter for the game.
The Kickstarter took the internet by storm and went totally viral on social media. The Boyfriend fever even reached as far as general interest magazines like Gentleman's Quarterly. The game was funded within hours and when the Kickstarter ended 30 days later it earned 4x its initial goal. The team executed on so many levels and in so many channels it was a truly magical thing to behold. For more information, check out these deconstructions that were written by the team.
I was honored to be given the opportunity to be a consultant for their Kickstarter to help them develop their email marketing strategy. I worked directly with their incredibly talented and diligent community manager, Victoria Tran. Together we developed a month-long strategy for their mailing list. Victoria then took that strategy and did the hard work of writing and publishing the emails through their Mailchimp account. The following post deconstructs the email marketing tactics that were deployed during the campaign. Even if you are not launching a Kickstarter, most of these tips can be applied to promoting your own game.
TL;DR overview of what our strategy was for the Boyfriend Dungeon Kickstarter:
Send emails to subscribers written from the point of view of The Dateable Weapons.
Try to get fans who were not already on the mailing list to join by promising that every subscriber would receive love letters directly from The Dateable Weapons.
Send a new unique email to subscribers every week of the campaign.
The emails
The following are the 5 emails that were sent out during the Kickstarter. The rest of this article deconstructs the strategy behind them.
Email #1) Boyfriend Dungeon now on KICKSTARTER -- and a cat?!
Sent 08/15/2018
Email #2) Hey Gorgeous Sunder's Boyfriend Dungeon Love Letter
Sent 08/23/2018
Email #3) New Girl in Town Valeria's Boyfriend Dungeon Love Letter
Sent 08/27/2018
Email #4) Ask me anything Isaac's Boyfriend Dungeon Love Letter
Sent 09/07/2018
Email #5) Trailer music released Seven's Boyfriend Dungeon Love Letter
Sent 09/11/2018
Email #6) ONLY 24 HOURS left to back Boyfriend Dungeon
Sent 09/14/2018
Also here is the open rate and click through rates for each of those emails.
List background
Since the founding of the studio, the Kitfox team has placed most of their marketing effort on Twitter and email was not a primary means of communicating with their fans. Despite it being a secondary strategy, they did manage to grow an email list of over 6000 subscribers through a signup on their website and by having a form available at all the conventions they attended.
Prior to the Kickstarter, Kitfox would email their list on average about once a month. The emails did a good job of introducing the team and providing free giveaways such as a song from Boyfriend Dungeon. However, for new game launches they typically only emailed 1 time to announce the game.
You can see their back catalog of emails here
Strategy
A few weeks before the Kickstarter, I met with Victoria and listened to what their goals were with the Kickstarter and some of the limitations they were working within. There wasn’t much time before the start of the Kickstarter and most of the creative team was entirely heads down on getting the game ready. We brainstormed some possible options for their email marketing strategy. They were new to advanced email marketing tactics such as lead magnets and autoresponders so I recommended that they start small: try to up the frequency of their email communications and build a relationship with those fans.
It was clear that they needed to center their email campaign around the strongest resource at their disposal: The Boyfriends. The concept I presented to Kitfox was for each week of the Kickstarter they send an update written in the voice of a different boyfriend character from the game. Each email would reveal a bit about the character and a bit about the game’s world. Each email would also have a clear call to action to back the Kickstarter.
The Dateable Weapons are undoubtedly the unique selling proposition for this game. However, all of Kitfox’s trailers and media kept their individual personalities of the BFs at arm’s length. The inherent format of email allows for two things over social media:
The appearance of 1x1 communication between the studio and the person receiving the email. Unique because a love letter just doesn’t have the same intimacy when it is sent from a Twitter account to 10,000+ followers
Unlimited space for text and images.
With email there would be the room and the time for the studio to really put the boyfriend’s personality right in front of fans’ adoring eyes. This marketing campaign was really the first time and place where someone could have some alone time with each of The Dateable Weapons and I wanted fans to revel in it.
My goal was to add a new marketing channel for Kitfox. Email provides a more intimate channel of communication because it is not public like social media. Email also allows for more words and more pictures and therefore more room to tell a story. This plan also makes email the only place where you can get this content, it wasn’t (and really couldn’t) be shared on the other channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
The plan was a bit goofy, a bit funny, and a bit sexy. It was perfectly aligned to what the game itself would be.
Preparation for upcoming campaign
People rarely just hand over their email address. There must be an extra incentive in exchange for their email to break the ice so fans will join. These incentives are called Lead Magnets and typically take the form of a freebie such as a soundtrack download, early access to a beta, or a digital ebook. The Kitfox team was already scrambling to get the Kickstarter released so we didn’t have time to put something like that together. Instead, I though they should try to pitch the promise of secret love letters from The Dateable Weapons as the lead magnet.
Victoria updated the Kickstarter page to advertise the love letter offer (screenshot below.)
She also updated the newsletter signup page again to reenforce the offer.
Results
By the end of the Kickstarter campaign, the Kitfox email list grew by 335 subscribers.
Unfortunately a typical lead magnet that uses a beta code or other type of digital downloadable yields much higher results. For example, I have seen campaigns for a beta download yield 50,000 email signups. With the insane traffic that the Kickstarter got I was expecting the number of new followers to be much higher.
I have a couple hunches for this. First: the chaos of the Kickstarter could have crowded out the call to action for the email signup. By necessity, Kickstarter pages must be pitching the game and the next reward tier. A separate callout for a downloadable good probably doesn’t make it through the noise. Maybe it is difficult to build email subscribers during a Kickstarter?
Second hunch: If the lead-magnet was something more tangible it could have yielded more sign-ups. The email signup call to action that Kitfox used was “Get love letters from the Bae Blades.” Perhaps people didn’t think the Kitfox team was being literal in that you would literally be getting sexy notes from some totally beautiful beings. Maybe they just assumed it was your standard, boring, “here is some news” type of email. Perhaps a more tangible download would have done better.
For example what if we had a PDF version of a 2019 calendar with each month represented by one of the dateable weapons. Or a zip file containing a bunch images of the Bae Blades perfectly formatted for phone or computer backgrounds. Would that sound more attractive to you?
Takeaway Tips:
Make your lead-magnet a very tangible thing. Something they can download or played with.
Make sure the signup is very prominent everywhere people will be coming in.
Make sure the email signup is the only way to get the bonus content so that you drive people to the email list.
Launch day
The launch day email is going to be the one that gets the most interaction. It should be short, to the point, and with a very clear call to action. You don’t want anything to stand in the way of you and your potential customer backing your game. Your true, die-hard fans will back your game because of this email.
Victoria crafted an excellent launch email that was sent the moment the Kickstarter went live.
Here is a screenshot of it:
What I like about this email
The link to the Kickstarter is a button with a clear call to action: “Support Boyfriend Dungeon Now”
The button is located almost at the top of the email and visible without scrolling on most devices.
There is an intriguing bit of copy just before the CTA button. “(Check out the rewards!!! Body pillow alert.)” Even if you do not intend on backing the game it does entice people to click the button to see whether a body pillow warning is
