Here’s an example of word of mouth marketing in motion – in early August, a friend of mine messaged and asked, “Have you seen Deep Rock Galactic?”

Me: “No, what’s that?”

Him:

“4 player co-op L4D style game. 4 dwarves go into a cave and try to gather resources fending off alien bugs.”

Looked interesting, then I promptly forgot about it. Until he messaged again that they were having an open alpha test.

The test would be while Alex and I were gone for Veteran’s Day weekend but let’s look at how Ghost Ship Games ran their test.

The email confirmation

In order to get into the alpha test, you had to sign up via email – standard situation, except they actually customized their opt-in confirmation. I was impressed. Not only did they include information about what you would receive from signing up for the list but also specific information about the test:

Everything about this is very clear as to what you’re opting in to and contains a ton of detailed information specific to the upcoming alpha test.

The alpha invite

Now this is a little more standard – there was basic information on the alpha test in the email invite. But two things worth noting are a) the call-out to their Discord community and b) their follow-up for other social channels.

Here’s the overview:

The end of the alpha test

They followed up! This might sound like a really obvious thing to do but I’ve seen a ton of groups run alpha or beta tests and totally forget about this component.

People invested in testing the game and they get the in-game data, then just don’t even bother asking for opinions afterwards.

Then they actually gave back to their content creators with a list of some of the top streamers for the game:

General thoughts

You have no idea how thrilled I was to see a small group like this actually using email marketing, following up with their fans, building their community, all the things.

Their emails went out on time.

Emails were customized and genuinely useful – none of that generic, automated drivel.

They gave out accurate information to truly support their alpha test.

They supported growing their community through these emails directly to their fans – so they focused first on their direct line to fans and then used that to support other channels. And they supported their streamers, to boot.

Of course, I feel like a massive hypocrite here since I didn’t actually get to engage with the alpha test. But the fact remains that they did a ton of great, little things here that any other dev could follow with their usage of email in the alpha test.