Pixowl

The Sandbox app

Since launching their top 2D world-builder pixel game “The Sandbox” on iOS and Android, the Pixowl team has been continuously leveraging the power of community management as their main growth strategy and have now built a community of over 650,000 fans on Facebook, promoted dozens of creativity contests in their game which generated over 1.5 million user-created worlds, and over 500,000 player videos shared.

Pixowl relied on Leanplum to share messages when the time was right – by queueing up push notifications by timezone. And this worked great. But for Pixowl, sending at a specific time of day still, wasn’t enough because everyone has different personal habits – do they like using The Sandbox before school, during their lunch break, or on the commute home?

To engage customers, Sebastian Borget, co-founder and COO at Pixowl put in place several tools to communicate with the players of The Sandbox, and Targeted Push Notifications is one of the primary ones – used for announcing new updates, in-game promotions, new contests, and special events.

Pixowl was an early-adopter of Leanplum to support the game backend of The Sandbox and run their Push Notifications delivery service with precise analytics. They ran tests to optimize the performance of one of their weekly push messages, the “Mana Day” promotion.

Pixowl’s team designed an A/B Test to compare the new “Optimal Time” push delivery mechanism against a control group of customers who would receive the Push Notification at the regular time messages had been sent. Behind the scenes, Optimal Time uses an algorithm that looks at each user’s individual history of using the app and predicts the best time to send a notification to boost engagement.

In fact, the company saw that Optimal Time push delivered substantially better results:

1. +16% average increases in opens
2. +2% average revenue per purchase
3. +17% revenue for users in the Optimal Time group

Pixowl is now deploying this more customized way of reaching out to its users for their promotions and contests. With Leanplum, Pixowl game players can worry less about annoying notifications popping up at inopportune moments, and engage with games and promotions at the best time.

Headquartered in San Francisco, with development studios in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Pixowl, Inc. is a leading mobile game company with games like The Sandbox, Garfield: Survival of the Fattest, and Grub. Pixowl’s secret sauce is the skillful blend of exciting gameplay, comic book art, and character-driven storylines that appeal to anyone who appreciates cartoons with entertaining play.

Sébastien Borget, COO and co-founder at Pixowl, believes the challenge for indie game developers is not only to get a lot of players at the launch of their game but mainly to retain them and keep them engaged.