With the overwhelming number of mobile games out there, studios are tasked with the challenge of creating new experiences that engage their players.  But, how do you balance this ever-present need with limited resources and without constantly redeploying your game?

By holding events with different objectives that play off your core game loop, you can build new game experiences that activate your players and keep your mobile game interesting.

By setting up event templates that you can duplicate and customize with different text and imagery based on your event objective or theme, you can present players with different experiences, all based on similar event logic.  

This makes it easier to scale and hold special seasonal events or events at a regular cadence (whether daily, weekly, or monthly) without needing many resources.  With the right processes and templates in place, a single team member can manage these with speed and efficiency.

Here are some ways you can leverage in-app messaging to scale and run live events with less time and effort.

Event announcements

It’s vital to let players know when events are happening, and in-app messages are an effective way to let your players know of running events.  You can set up an in-app message to announce your event and use it as a template.  Simply clone your template and customize it around your event theme or season by updating the background image and content for your future events.

Segmentation can help you control when players see this message.  Taking this even further, you can set up different in-app messages with new images based on the number of times they’ve viewed the in-app message.  This allows players to track their progress through the event, personalizing the experience in real-time and hooking them with new meta-game hooks that keep them coming back for more. 

MobilityWare used a similar process in Leanplum for their Tropical Getaway Event.  As players participated and collected more coins and stickers, they’d see a different in-app message reflecting how many stickers and coins they collected throughout the event.

Incentives and rewards

Using variables like Leanplum Variables within in-app messages, you can customize in-app messages to present different player incentives and rewards and enhance the gaming experience by adding an element of randomization to player rewards or making players eligible for unique experiences and rewards based on previous behavior. Iterate on this process, and in no time, your VIPs and whales will be seeing entirely different incentives to keep playing compared to your non-paying players, all optimized for retention and revenue. 

Using Jinjascript, Leanplum’s templating language, you can assign tracking UIDs to images displaying the different rewards and even change the odds of getting each one by giving multiple tracking UIDs to the same reward image, enabling LiveOps and Game teams to dynamically adjust player fairness and game difficulty in real-time.

You can enhance the player experience further by using visual elements to display the rewards in different ways.  For example, players can click on a spinner icon or choose among multiple images containing a mystery reward.

For their Saint Paddy’s Day Event, MobilityWare used a spinner to let players collect a golden puzzle piece using the same template and logic for their Tropical Getaway Event.  While the event parameters were similar on the back end, the front end delivered vastly different presentations.

Testing variants

By creating in-app messaging templates, you can also duplicate and edit them to create different variants for your events, rewards, and promotions to test and see which ones result in better player engagement.  

For example, you can clone an in-app message and set each one for different prize amounts, changing elements of the in-app message, like images and text, to present the various prizes.  You can conduct A/B tests to see which one generates more conversions.

GameDuell used this feature within Leanplum to test three offer variants using different combinations of game currency, boosters, and collectibles.  Their findings identified one variant that outperformed the others by 87 percent.  

In-app messaging to streamline LiveOps events

The proper tools can make it easier to customize and launch live events more regularly. 

With Leanplum, you can customize, launch, and test live events with minimal coding.  In-app messages let you customize the look, feel, and timing of your events to ensure they feel native to the game experience, without losing the ability to personalize game UI through segmentation and Jinja scripting.

Not only will you be better able to offer your players new gaming experiences, but testing enables you to maximize your results with insights on how your players are engaging with event elements and ways to make improvements.

This way, you can dynamically adapt the game to drive higher player retention and improved monetization without the need for extensive developer resources or constant client-side updates.

Interested in exploring more?  Check out these additional resources: