7 UA strategies for spreading the word about your game’s web shop

The old adage of “build it and they will come” doesn’t always work in the digital age. We’re in a time where 252,000 new websites are launched every day, so building a web identity for your game doesn’t guarantee visibility and traffic. Plus, web shops are a fairly new trend. Many users aren’t familiar with the idea of heading to the web to make purchases they used to make in-game - and that they could get exclusive, high-value offers available only on the web if they did head out of the app. Even if you have an IP as strong as League of Legends or Pokémon GO, you still need to let players know your web shop exists - and then encourage them to visit it again and again. 

If you followed our tips here (there’s still time to check it out!), you’ve now created a web shop with a bunch of awesome discounts. Now you need to get in front of players to tell them about your store and the offers that are available to them. 

Here are 7 paid and organic user acquisition strategies to get in front of your existing users.

But before we jump in…

A few key points to keep in mind when marketing to your web shop:

• The more active your game community, the better. Building up your web shop is a chance to double down on organic community efforts
• Always take the opportunity to collect email addresses. This valuable info can help you set up and optimize both email marketing and retargeting campaigns
• Don’t be afraid to spend. A lot of marketing can be free, but you should be willing to pay - remember you’re getting more bang for your buck on these channels by avoiding the 30% platform commission fees 
• Compliance is key. App store policies are always changing, especially in this global environment of unprecedented antitrust regulations and cases. It’s critical to stay compliant, though, so ask us if you’re worried about violating any policies ;)

You should also keep in mind that UA isn’t something you should take from 0 to 100 the same day you launch your web shop. Instead, you should gradually roll out your shop and let players know about it in phases. Here’s a suggested timeline for ramping up UA strategies:

1. In-game notifications

Serving notifications and directly messaging players is, of course, the most convenient way to reach them. But some words of caution: you need to comply with Apple and Google’s anti-steering policies (for now…antitrust regulations could change this). 

Since the workaround requires quite a few steps and creates friction, this strategy ends up being quite effective at segmenting out your most engaged and loyal players - they’re the ones that will stick with the process to enjoy the benefits of your web shop.

Some quick do’s and don’ts for using in-game notifications:

Rovio’s Angry Birds web store, Red’s Club, gives a comprehensive look at how to use in-game notifications to boost awareness about a webshop.

First, they notify players in-app about the Club with a popup that reads like an invitation. It informs people about Red’s Club, the reward that awaits them (200 Bird Coins), and how to join the club.  But the language used in this popup only mentions “rewards” and “benefits”, never mentioning prices or purchasing. 

And the CTA doesn’t lead directly to the shop - instead it returns players to the home screen, where they then see the Red’s Club icon.

When players press the Red’s Club icon from the home screen, another popup appears with a reminder of the reward and a CTA to Sign In.

But wait - pressing Sign In still doesn’t lead to the web shop. It actually takes users to an in-app browser where they’re asked to create an account using their email. This is the key step that holds the value of this entire process: capturing player’s emails. 

Even if players drop off from here after creating their accounts, Rovio still gets access to this valuable first-party data and can communicate with them directly about Red’s Club and all offers. From section 3.1.3 in Apple’s App Review Guidelines:

“Developers can send communications outside of the app to their user base about purchasing methods other than in-app purchase.”

The next screens are just the icing on the cake, if users decide to continue. After creating their accounts, players can take an optional survey, which opens in an external browser window:

When they finish the survey, players are finally directed to the web shop, where a popup appears with a welcome offer. Remember, the survey already opened up in an external browser, so now players are officially out of the game ecosystem - and out of Apple and Google’s purview.  

Pro tip: loyalty and other programs where you earn points in-app but redeem on the web are effective here. Let people know with an in-app notification that tells them they earned loyalty points and to go redeem them (e.g. “You earned 20 Loyalty Points! Go redeem them now.”). Keep in mind that to stay compliant, you can either link out directly to your web shop and pay 27% on each purchase or choose not to link out and just let players know with a notification that they earned the points.

2. Creator campaigns

Partnering with creators and influencers to promote your web shop is a win-win. For creators, they get a clear and simple path to compensation with a commission. And for developers, it’s a high efficacy strategy - since these followers are already so loyal to your game that they’re watching a creator video about it, they’re also likely to be your highest web shop spenders. 

Plus, it’s much easier to measure the performance and attribution of web campaigns - all it takes is a link tracker to see where player traffic and spend is coming from (e.g. which creator video they watched then followed the link in the caption to your storefront and purchased). Compare this to in-game, which is pretty much a black box when it comes to this kind of tracking - you aren’t able to determine which creators sent players into your game, or attribute any actions (like in-app purchases completed) to that creator’s campaign.

We suggest working with creators in any of the following ways:

1. Creator codes
2. Creator bundles
3. Store promotion

Pro tip: your players can act as “creators”, too - pick your top three players (ie highest on leaderboard, most battles won, etc) and let them create an exclusive bundle with items that helped them get to where they are today. This helps foster a sense of community and encourages players to feel more connected to your game and brand

Creator codes

When tied to an incentive like a discount code, creators can share a unique offer code with their followers, provide an explanation of the reward, and then players can redeem the offer on your store.

Supercell, for example, partnered with Orange Juice Gaming to tap into their 3.36M+ YouTube subscriber base. The influencer shared their code - OJ - with viewers, who could then head to the store right from the video’s caption to shop, enter the code at checkout, and earn a discount. 

Creator bundles

Take partnerships a step further by letting creators put together collectable, limited-time bundles that they know their followers will love. These can contain both valuable resources as well as non-consumables, like skins or playing cards - it’s all about tapping into what their followers want and providing them with these items.

That’s what Stumble Guys did when they partnered with Stumble Guys YouTube Content Creators, Coral and Smorekyle. 

For three days, these creators had their custom bundles available in the web shop, which included a bag of gems, skin, and emote. Players could feel like they were getting to own something exclusive and valuable, all while supporting their favorite game creators. 

Pro tip: Do what Stumble Guys did and create a blog post around the launch of a creator bundle. You can then direct people to it from social posts and other channels.

Store promotion

If your shop doesn’t offer creator codes (yet), you can still get the benefits of tapping into their audience and spreading the word about your shop through promotional videos. Having an influencer talk about all the deals, offers, and value of your site is a simple yet effective way to clue players in - just remember to include a link to your shop in the caption so users can navigate to it easily.

Pokémon Go looked to The Trainer Club - a creator specializing in “the Best Pokemon Go Videos on Youtube” - for a video about their web store. Over the course of 9 minutes, The Trainer Club takes a deep dive into the offers and deals on the site, emphasizing it as the best way to get the most bang for players’ bucks.

3. Organic social

Utilize your existing social media and community channels to get the word out. Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Reddit - these are all excellent platforms for advertising your web shop and incentives for free. Plus, these channels aren’t restricted to the platform rules like in-app UA thanks to a major Apple policy change in August 2021 that allowed developers to email players about alternative purchase options. So you can link directly to your web shop and use more obvious language in posts on these channels.

Here are 9 top strategies for harnessing organic social for UA:

Leverage all social real estate 

No need to just make posts. Add a badge to your profile pic, highlight an incentive on your cover image, and add the web shop link to the about us description as well as link in bio. Words With Friends ’ Facebook profile shows how it’s done:

And Tiki Solitaire TriPeaks gives an example of how to format other parts of your profile, like the intro which includes a callout and link to the web shop:

Post across multiple channels at the same time 

Lean into whatever community you have, from Facebook to Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Reddit, YouTube Shorts, and forums. And no need to reinvent the wheel for each platform - you can recycle the same caption, or make minor tweaks. Take Pokémon Go, for example, and their post across X/Twitter and Facebook:

A/B test multiple formats 

Just like any other performance channel, see which format and design works best for directing players to the shop - image, gif, video, or carousel. Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker is a good example of this:

Promote new web shop content

Consistently update about new deals and web-exclusive offers, and post regularly about the shop. Stumble Guys and their active social media presence is a good example of this:

Encourage players to bookmark

Add a line at the end of each post reminding players to bookmark the shop, so it becomes an easy habit, like Zynga does for their game Wizard of Oz Slots on Facebook:

Promote a blog or video explainer 

Launching for the first time? Write up a blog or publish a video on your site or forum explaining how the shop works and why it’s valuable for players. Then use it as a resource to always reference on social. 

Game of War published a video explainer on their Discord channel when they launched their web shop:

Empires & Puzzles went the blog route instead, writing a post on their community forum about the Zynga web shop launch:

Push users to buy more during live ops events

Have a Christmas event where players need more gems to progress through the leaderboard? Remind them they can purchase gems for a discount on the shop, like Tiki Solitaire Tripeaks did for their Jester Rescue Event:

Always tie a post back to the shop and include a link

Never miss a chance to mention the shop. Even if the post is a fun community game, add a line at the end reminding players the value of the shop. It’s Tiki Solitaire Tripeaks again here, always tying the shop into their on-brand captions:

Include a link to the shop in creative

Don’t just write “shop” - tell players exactly where to go and highlight it. Zynga does an excellent job of this with their Wizard of Oz Slots creative highlighting the value of the webshop and including the URL at the top of the image:

4. Email marketing

Once you capture players’ emails either in-game (similar to the Red’s Club example we ran through earlier), on the web (see Train Station 2 and their email capture at the bottom of the page), or through your socials (like WWE Champions in this Facebook post), you can reach out directly with a series of email marketing campaigns. 

Email communication gives you the opportunity to welcome players to your web shop and promote it through weekly newsletters. You can also use the space to answer common questions about your site and purchases to proactively reduce some friction players can experience when shopping on web stores.

Direct new subscribers to the web shop

Send a welcome email to new subscribers, and include a link to your webshop in the message. This is also a good opportunity to elaborate on what the web shop is, its value, and a few key offers, like the Red’s Club welcome email:

Highlight offers in a weekly newsletter

Weekly email communication gives you the opportunity to promote the incentives on your shop, including seasonal offers, discount codes, and free gifts. Make each offer clickable so players can head straight to the web store to either shop and/or redeem. Train Station 2 from Pixel Federation included a free gift code in their newsletter - email-exclusive offers like these also remind subscribers of the value of your newsletters, encouraging higher open and click-through rates:

Incorporate FAQs in each email

Include FAQs at the bottom of every email so players understand why they should visit your webshop and how to use their purchases in-game. It’s also a good way of encouraging users to create accounts, if they haven’t already (e.g. if they subscribed to your email list through the game website). Looking at Train Station again, the FAQs in their email include information about connecting player accounts and accessing webshop purchases in-game:

5. Paid campaigns

You can run paid user acquisition campaigns on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to target existing players with offers and drive them to your shop. And once you collect email addresses, you can use these to launch retargeting campaigns. Track the ROAS performance of these ads through your MMP, and put more spend behind your highest-performing ads. 

Just keep in mind that Apple recently expanded their 30% commission fee to running ads on the Facebook and Instagram apps. However, desktop versions (i.e. facebook.com and instagram.com) of these websites are exempt.

Using your liveops events - like site-wide discounts and seasonal tournaments - can be particularly effective for promoting your web shop on paid channels. In fact, this takes direct inspiration from other D2C industries, like retail. For example, Everlane ran a paid media campaign on Facebook to advertise their site-wide Summer Sale event, directing people to the sale section on their site:

Pixel Federation’s Train Station ran paid Facebook ads to promote their new Event Pass for their seasonal Summer Games. The ad directed users to the web shop, and called out the store’s added value (bonus gems):

You can also use this strategy to announce the launch of your shop, like Call of Duty did on Facebook for their mobile web store:

6. Media partnerships

Promoting your web shop and offers across different gaming websites and publications can help you reach a broad audience and drive traffic to your store. Some ways you can establish media partnerships:

• Reach out to journalists
• Sponsor an article
• Buy banner ad space

Sites like Pocket Gamer and IGN are great examples of publications you can partner with to publish content about your webshop. 

But there are many more, too. Pokémon Go, for example, was featured on ScreenRant for a recent article about promo codes players could redeem on their storefront. And GameRant published a piece about Star Trek Fleet Command’s own codes. Both examples show another best practice for this UA strategy: using promo and discount codes as the incentive to drive people to your web shop.

7. Referrals through community channels

Use your community channels to spread the word about your webshop. Whether it’s a dedicated subreddit, fan site, clan chat, or guild, these spaces are filled with loyal and engaged players that will jump at the chance to earn an exclusive reward or get a good deal. 

Referral campaigns on these channels are a great way to incentivize players to share among themselves. One idea is to publish a post on these community channels with a code or link that users can share with their networks. If a player gets 5 friends to make a purchase using this code at checkout, then give that player a free bundle or exclusive item. Another approach is allowing entire clans or guilds to create a unique referral link. When other players in the game use their code, the clan/guild receives a bonus or reward points that accumulate towards a final prize. 

Build a webshop that drives traffic and captures more spend

Getting players to your web shop and having them make a purchase is just one part of the puzzle. The second is to encourage them to keep returning - and spending. Our team at Stash are experts at not only boosting profitability and engagement, but also retention. Talk to us about launching a webshop that shifts your highest spenders to a direct channel, and keeps them coming back into the long-term.