LuckyFish Hooks "Hi-Def" Customer Segments with Optimove

Mobile gaming company LuckyFish is social to its core. For the brand behind the popular OMG! Fortune series for Facebook, connecting with customers in a relevant and targeted way has always been crucial, but as the company grew, one-to-one communication became "extremely difficult," says Lee Cohen, LuckyFish's vice president of marketing.

To reach users, LuckyFish employed Facebook's basic segmentation features and ran Facebook Custom Audiences campaigns, but the process was manual, tedious, and non-scalable. The company also needed better testing and analytics tools to optimize campaigns for maximum ROI. To that end, it enlisted Optimove, whose platform met all those needs and delivered a highly automated, scalable, and "high-definition" solution.

"If you think about segmentation the way you think about television, the smaller the pixels are, the better the definition and image are," says Pini Yakuel, CEO of Optimove. "The same logic applies to audience segments. When you've got small, micro-segments of audiences, then you have a much better, more specific picture of those customers."

For LuckyFish, the granularity was appealing. "Optimove looks at factors like recent activities and life cycle stage and lets us target over 100 player personas with unique messaging," Cohen says. The vendor uses machine-learning analysis to build Facebook Custom Audience micro-segments and track audience migrations between them.

Monitoring the transitions is critical, Yakuel says, because they represent key points in the value of a customer. If a user makes $10 worth of in-game purchases every week and suddenly makes a $30 purchase, that's a positive migration; if the user stops purchasing altogether, that's a potential problem. "We can pinpoint these intervention points so that companies can market to their customers at crucial moments and ensure maximum retention," Yakuel explains. Optimove has solutions for the messaging phase as well—the vendor enables brands to choose an engagement channel, plan a campaign, A/B test it, evaluate results, and eventually launch the completed message.

Soon after deploying Optimove's platform, LuckyFish customers began making more in-game purchases and spending more per purchase. Over a period of three months, the company saw 2.7 times higher deposit rates and 2.2 times higher deposit amounts, according to Cohen. And because campaigns were easier to build and deploy, LuckyFish launched three times as many Facebook campaigns as before. "The Optimove platform makes it possible to update every Custom Audience list on a daily basis without any manual effort—all data is uploaded seamlessly and painlessly. Plus, Optimove has analytics and measurement tools to let us track and improve our campaigns' KPIs," Cohen says.

Thanks to the Optimove platform, LuckyFish understands its players and their interests "like never before," according to Cohen. The company now reaches 70 percent of its players through Facebook Custom Audiences, which has made a big difference, Cohen says. "[It] has dramatically increased our conversions of free players to paying customers, while reducing churn and increasing player lifetime value."

The Payoff

Since implementing Optimove's segmentation solution, LuckyFish has seen: 

• 2.7 times higher deposit rates;
• 2.2 times higher deposit amounts;
• a threefold increase in the number of campaigns executed via Facebook; and
• 70 percent of the entire player database targeted via Facebook campaigns.