Bart Bohn founded AuManil to assist the $40 billion online games market by collecting social gaming data to reduce whale churn, increase whale conversion, improve whale acquisition, and managing whales across a portfolio of games.
In the gaming world, “whales” are big money spenders and fanatical users. However, the specific social gaming data regarding these whales about churn, conversion, and acquisition – players leaving, benefiting, and joining a game, respectively – are subjective per company and game.
AuManil uses advanced analytics and predictive models to identify top customers at risk of attrition, customers who are likely to buy more in game products, and behavioral profiles for your customers.
Below, Bohn explains why this is all so critical.
Tech Cocktail: What exactly does AuManil do for companies?
Barth Bohn: We have data scientists that analyze an individual player’s social gaming data, the play and financial behavior, in order to predict lifetime value, churn risk, and life cycle patterns.
Mobile, MMO, social, browser, casual, and desktop games are increasingly using the free-to-play revenue model. This leads to extreme revenue concentration: less than one percent of players generating 50+ percent of revenue.
Marketing teams lack the data and analytics infrastructure to monitor the game population and proactively engage financially and socially valued players. This is important because they need this data in order to improve lifetime value and the average revenue per user.
AuManil provides a vertically integrated solution by abstracting the underlying big data stack and machine learning capabilities while integrating with marketing workflows and tools.
Tech Cocktail: Specifically, who uses your service?
Bohn: In-game community managers, mostly. They use AuManil to collect large portions of data so that they may send targeted, personalized incentives to at-risk players. That is, players who are on the cusp of leaving the game world.
For example, one community manager decided to send a seven-day Energy Boost to one thousand of their whales identified as critical risks for churning. Put another way, they gave special in-game privileges to a large amount of power users, the ones who pay the most, but are considering leaving.
The players that were targeted ended up with a 30 percent higher retention rate and a 70 percent higher spend rate when compared to non-targeted players over a four-week period.
Tech Cocktail: Is this all part of a larger trend?
Bohn: Yes, most definitely. This is a big step in personal, one-on-one marketing and customer engagement. Historically, customers have been driven by macro, demographic criteria, but we are now able to begin to understand individual customers.
We can proactively engage each player at precisely the right moment, through the proper channels, and with the right message.
AuManil was featured at Tech Cocktail’s Austin Mixer & Startup Showcase this past April.
