Indie MEGABOOTH — Email Newsletter Case Study

For Indie MEGABOOTH (IMB), the email newsletter was one of their primary forms of communication. Sent out approximately once a month, it featured news of upcoming events and calls for submissions.

Because it was an essential form of communication, there was a desire to grow the subscriber base, so we worked on promoting it at our events. For starters, here was the signage:

Please excuse the pun. The IMB community was a gaming community, so we had a playful voice.

If you’re wondering where the CTA is, it’s above the sign. We also had a tablet as part of the setup where visitors could instantly sign up for our newsletter:

Looks like the sign got jostled a bit, but you get the idea!

So once we had people signed up, what did the emails look like? That was something else I did. Not just the writing but the layouts and implementation in MailChimp too. I’ll be showing three emails here, and we’ll start out with a fairly standard one:

Now, before we move to the next, there are a couple elements I want to highlight:

• Upcoming events: We used this section to promote what was coming up, which in this case was GDC and then PAX East (keep that in mind for the next email). Those were two of the bigger American conferences, and we had a presence at both of them.
• IDYMI: One of the continual benefits of being showcased by IMB was that we would promote a game and company even after the fact. That’s why all of these games are getting mention — from crowdfunding to release dates.

Okay, so you know how we mentioned a PAX East announcement coming up?

Here we have all of the important info about our showcase at PAX East. We start with the lineup and announcements about panels, and then by the end we have the full floor map for anyone attending.

In between all of the PAX news, you’ll notice we continue to highlight new games coming out and take a moment to revisit what was featured at GDC. These were big announcements, so you can imagine the value to an indie creator of having news about their games featured at the same time.

I’m going to wrap this up with an example of a different email, not part of our monthly cadence. We sent this out right before PAX as a way to promote the panel and give a brief reminder of what would be featured. We also wanted to get the video some attention because, perhaps unsurprisingly, video games are generally a little more enticing in motion.

Now you’re “indie know” about the work I did on IMB emails!