A friend recently shared this quick anecdote with me: They received a newsletter from a game publisher (not Stonemaier Games) about a special sale for a product they wanted. Excitedly, they clicked the link and added the product to their cart…only to discover that they sale didn’t apply to them because they’re not in the US. Their excitement turned to mild anger and disappointment.
Of course, this issue could be avoided by having fulfillment centers in multiple regions (at Stonemaier Games, we ship from within the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe). However, there’s a much simpler solution than the logistical puzzle of worldwide fulfillment: segmented mailing lists.
In the instance of this friend, if the publisher knew the region or country of their subscribers, they could have segmented the mailing list so the newsletter was only sent to US customers.
Of course, this is a lesson I learned too late. I had our Mailchimp e-newsletter signup active for years before I added a question about a new subscriber’s country. But it’s there now. (It also helps that we never mention a deal in our monthly e-newsletter that doesn’t apply to all customers in locations to which we ship.)
Fortunately, there are many new and ongoing opportunities when we can best serve customers if we know their location:
- Back in stock: For every product on each of our 4 webstores, if the product is out of stock, you can enter your email to receive a notification when the restock arrives at the respective fulfillment center. Segmentation is crucially important here, as inventory levels and restock/reprint arrivals are completely different for each fulfillment center.
- Sales: While it’s rare that we’d offer a region-specific sale, different products sell faster/slower in different regions. So occasionally we may want to motivate sales for X product in the Canada but Y product in Europe, and segmentation enables us to cater to each region without running into the situation described at the beginning of this article.
- Preorder launch notifications: Whenever we’re gearing up for a preorder, curious customers can sign up for a launch notification message. On the signup form is a drop-down menu for region. Generally we send exactly 1 launch notification email to all customers, but there are rare situations where the new product may have arrived in some regions but not others, so it’s helpful to have the segmentation option. Also, because we freight ship the games from our manufacturer to the fulfillment centers well before the preorder begins, it’s helpful to have the region-specific data to see if we sent too few units to any specific region.
- Reviewers: I send an email every month or so to reviewers to share which products are available for review and a special promo code they may use to “order (for free) one of those products. This is one instance where I don’t segment, as I’m usually only offering products that are available in each region. However, it’s still really helpful to know where each reviewer is located, as sometimes customers receive damaged games from our webstore that we pay the customer to send to a somewhat-local reviewer of our choice after their replacement game arrives.
Segmentation is also useful for advertising (e.g., Facebook ads). As for crowdfunding, the best uses of segmentation I’ve seen are by reward level, as you can message all backers at a specific reward level to laud the benefits of upgrading to a premium reward.
Do you have any stories of situations where segmentation may have provided a better customer experience (or where it provided a great experience)?
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Also read:
- Kickstarter Lesson #146: Start an E-Newsletter
- Kickstarter Lesson #250: What Motivates People to Subscribe to an E-Newsletter?
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11 Comments on “Segmentation and the Pitfalls of Not Knowing Your Customers’ Region”
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Hi Jamey!
Talking about regions… I’m going to Mendoza, Argentina very soon. Planning to visit game stores and get familiar with the gaming community as much as I can. I can be your eyes and ears, is there anything in particular that you’re curious about?
Thank you! That’s kind of you to offer. I’d love to hear about anything they want to share about importing games from US publishers/distributors.
Just came back from Mendoza, Argentina.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the board game community grow so much.
I specifically talked to people from two stores that import games. One store in particular in downtown Mendoza, caters to medium to heavy gamers of the area and shared with me that one of the problems is that the government restricts how many dollars a company can spend (I think $10,000 per year) so, they have to be strategic. The person I talked to was in charge of the purchases (and as it turned out, not only knew who you are but is also a big fan of your games, especially Scythe). He explained that the other issue is that with the cost of dollars compared to Argentine pesos ($1=200 pesos approx..) the average American game is way more expensive for Argentinians in comparison to other essential goods. Having said that, with Scythe for example, the few copies they bought for the store were sold right away. They know their clientele, and have a good idea who is going to show up for the next hot game (I’d be happy to share their contact privately if you are interested, they said they would love to give talk to you).
The other solution is to print the game in Argentina, which they do for some games, but to do so they would have to produce a large amount of copies, and for a big box niche game like Scythe that wouldn’t be the best idea, at least that was my take away. Exceptions would be mega popular games like Catan or Ticket to Ride.
Unfortunately, there are other stores that create rip-offs of mainstream games like Blockus and Risk giving them a different name and slightly different look.
In addition, I found a growing number of originally designed Argentine games, that can be sold at a lower cost and cost less to produce.
In terms of the overall gaming community, I stumbled upon a group that hosts a free gaming night, where everybody is able to grab a game from a table or bring their own game. The hosts are also available to teach the rules to anyone, which was awesome!
These game nights happen the first Saturday of every night. I did not expect that many heavy gamers from little Mendoza, to be honest. I imagine there are many more groups like that in Buenos Aires.
In short, I found a lot of passion for gaming in Argentina, the main obstacle is dollars over pesos.
I hope that was helpful, I’d be happy to do more digging, I had fun doing it!
-Martin
Martin: I’m so glad you circled back about this! Thanks so much for having those conversations and sharing your insights about the state of gaming and game sales in Argentina. The restriction on how much a company can spend is fascinating.
Mailchimp makes it super easy to add custom tags too, so I know who downloaded the print-and-play prelaunch, who backed the last campaign, who discovered Micro Dojo at a convention like Essen, who entered a recent giveaway and who won or lost that giveaway. I don’t always know what I’ll do with those tags and sometimes they are just for curiosity (oh look, a print-and-play backer upgraded to a printed version for this campaign) but it helps guide my targeting.
A downside is that most of my signup pages have asked for email only to minimise the barrier to signup (rather than collecting additional information like you suggest) so I don’t have country unless they gave it to me as a backer. Its surprising but even one extra box affects the signup rates. I think you mentioned this in an older KS lessons article already :-)
Thanks for sharing, Ben! That’s neat to know about tags. And you’re right, the more info you ask for, the higher the barrier to sign up; in this case I think it’s worth it. :)
I feel like this publisher was me! I had 400-500 deluxe units of MIND MGMT left over after Kickstarter. On KS I mentioned that I would only sell these at conventions. There haven’t been many conventions to attend and I was paying storage space for these games, so I asked my backers if I could sell them off from my website. They all said go for it. I didn’t have e commerce set up on my site as this is my only product – and so managed to get my web developer to connect to the back end of my fulfillment company so orders that come in would go directly to them to fulfill. Challenge was – I only could set it up for US orders (was able to eventually set it up for Canada too) – due to something something tech tech that my web developer said without adding significant cost. I only had a few hundred left – so thought to make it for NA only. Every time I posted about it I mentioned that it was US only but – I might have forgotten to do that on one of the FB ads I ran. Dang. Apologies to everyone affected for sure.
And – great advice on segmenting your mailing list! Never knew or never thought you could do this! Love it!!
This particular case wasn’t you, Jay, but I appreciate you sharing these details–your transparency is commendable.
As a New Zealander I can relate to this strongly. Often competitions come with the statement of who is eligible to participate, it would only take a few keystrokes to state that for a selling related email/post.
From the point of view of competitions I have hardly ever seen the option that if international participant wins they contribute towards shipping.
When advertising sales / competitions online to a multi-region audience it comes across as rude excluding part of the customer base. And more so the longer it takes for the person to discover they are excluded.
I’m sorry to hear that, Louise, and I agree with that solution (though I think it’s even better when competitions and auctions cover worldwide shipping).
Of course that would be the ideal. I do understand how tight money can be for small publishers so I don’t mind too much being excluded by them.