When it comes to customer acquisition, a great way to reach out to potential customers is to have your most fervent fans do it for you. If you have a passionate customer base, empowering them to tell their friends about your product / service is a powerful way to get the word out. This is especially true if you can give your fans something of value to share.

Over Valentine's Day weekend, we ran a campaign whereby our customers could send their friends a Valentine's Day card and coupon code for a free game. Our goal was two-fold. First, we wanted to offer our fans something of value to share given the amazing loyalty they've shown us over the years. Secondly, we're always looking for new ways to reach out to those we feel are a good fit for the products we offer. Friends of current customers is a great opportunity.

Here is a look back at the process and what we learned.

The Planning

At Big Fish Games, our marketing department focuses on three key components: customer acquisition, customer conversion, and customer retention. I'm dedicated to the customer acquisition team as the owner of all things organic.

The initial plan for this campaign looked like this:

1. Create a coupon code good for a free copy of Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst (one of our most successful titles that is now several years old).
2. Work with our creative team to create compelling assets visitors could email to friends along with the coupon code.
3. Leverage creative as the basis for the landing page that featured a game for users to 'play'.
4. Integrate a Wufoo form within landing pages to capture visitor information (sender email, recipient email, name, and card to send).
5. Sync email list with Mailchimp to facilitate batch processing of emails on Valentine's Day.
6. Deploy to our promotions server cluster.

To the novice email marketer, this might seem like a straightforward sensible plan. Not exactly. Turns out there are a few important components to email marketing I failed to consider, not the least of which is:

1. Sending emails to people who haven't explicitly given us permission is a big no-no.
2. Sending emails to people who are on our 'black list' (have requested to be removed from your email list) is an even bigger no-no.

Fortunately, I took the time to chat with our email marketing team prior to rolling this campaign out and they pointed me to the CAN-SPAM compliance guide.

In order to insure compliance with CAN-SPAM, it turns out the 'mailto:' functionality in HTML is an interesting option. We wouldn't be sending the emails. We would let our fans send the emails from their own email accounts and customize them in any way they wanted. This also removed the risk of the form being gamed to inject massive email lists (something I was concerned about).

Finally, it turns out sending image based emails presents a list of other challenges not the least of which is the user having to click to load the assets after they've opened the email. Yuck. In the end, we decided to make the Valentine's Day card landing pages (card1, card2, and card3) and simply have our fans send out links to the pages.

The Execution

Immediately upon release, the first comment on our Facebook page read, "*Psst!* Guys! What if you don't have a major mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird or Mac Mail set up? I use Yahoo." While I can't say we didn't consider this, I didn't expect it to rear its head in the first five minutes. Moreover, I had seriously underestimated how quickly visitors would run to Facebook to voice their opinions.

To solve this problem, I spent the evening creating an alternate version of the landing page for users to copy the email body copy so they could manually paste it into their own email.

We announced the promotion on our forums, our Facebook page, our Twitter page, and our blog. Most announcements pointed to the blog post that featured the following image and details about the promotion and a link to the landing page.

The Results

In the end, our Valentine's Day campaign was deemed a success based on the number of user engagements, new prospects (those who downloaded the free game), and new customers (those who bought a different game) the campaign generated. I can't share specifics, but in the post-mortem, we all agreed we would be revisiting this campaign in the future and investing more resources to make it more engaging and easier for our fans to share.

The Lessons Learned

The execution and planning were done fast and primarily based on our instincts and experience and I think it was a great first attempt. That being said, here are few pieces of knowledge we'll have available for version two. I hope they are of some value to all of you.

• If you're not a designer, don't spend your time trying to be one. Leverage your creative team to craft your art assets and/or the wireframes. The last thing you want is a slick campaign with art assets that look second-rate.
• Any email related campaigns should be run through your email marketing team. They likely have critical knowledge you need to know and they have tools that may enhance the functionality of your campaign.
• Empowering users to send emails is tricky given the number of different ways we can set up our own personal email process. Make things as platform independent as possible, but don't give up if you can't get to 100%.
• Don't be afraid to roll out a campaign that isn't perfect. During the development process I came up with at least three ways I could have made it better. Remember what Volaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
• Share your campaign with your Customer Support team. They will offer a fresh set of eyes and keen insight into what aspects of your campaign likely will be problematic for visitors.
• Track everything you can. Think hard (really hard) about all the different ways people will discover this campaign and do your best to track all entry points.
• Facebook is a great place to get immediate feedback from real users. If they run into issues you overlooked, you're going to hear about it fast. Be prepared to make minor updates and changes after you launch the campaign - especially if this is something you have never tried before.
• Test everything prior to launch. Then test it all again.
• If you are going to dabble with email, be sure you know CAN-SPAM backward and forward. The fines can add up fast.
• Be sure to include the details about the offer. In our case, we never shared the expiration date of the coupon code (EOD, 2/14). Oops. Have a separate document that clearly details all aspects of the promotion and have your legal department weigh in on it.

I'm a huge believer in the power of learning by doing and sharing knowledge gained. I hope this look back has offered some snippets of value for those of you who are considering leveraging email as a customer acquisition platform.