Conversion Rate of newsletter subscribers and previous customers

[ggambett]

We're doing a very low profile launch of our new game (I'll post an official announcement here later). In this first stage, I sent an email to our newsletter subscribers and our previous customers.

I'm amazed at the conversion rate this is getting. The number of downloads is still small (~200) to be statistically meaningful but it's remaining pretty stable since the beginning.

So what are usual figures for conversion rates in this case - not among a general audience, but among mailing list subscribers and old customers?

[soniCron]

I know this is totally off topic, but how did Pirate Poppers end up doing, Gabriel?

[ggambett]

I know this is totally off topic, but how did Pirate Poppers end up doing, Gabriel?
I don't know many details and I couldn't post them anyway because PP is PlayFirst's property, but apparently it's doing very good.

[Jack Norton]

Depends on the niche. I think if you release a game that is really well targeted to your newsletter target you can easily achieve very high CR, over 20-30%.

[Nexic]

When my newsletter was small I was getting like 10%, now it's 25 times bigger only about 1% and most don't even download. No idea why.

[JoKa]

In my latest newsletter the CR was in the range of 10-15%. Unfortunately I don't have too many subscribers :rolleyes:

[Tom Cain]

I've found that conversion rates are good depending on what you're looking for and how you calculate the rate. Sales versus emails sent can be low because a large percentage of the emails do not reach the inbox. That's a measure of how your mailing list performs, not a measure of what subscribers think of your game. If your mailing service can (loosely) track opened mail, use that for the conversion rate and you get a better measure of subscriber satisfaction/loyalty.

[ggambett]

I'm calculating the CR as max-downloads/sales. Max-downloads is the downloaded KB according to my website stats divided by the size of the demo. Since there may be aborted downloads, redownloads and the like, this is an upper bound of the number of downloads, which makes my CR estimate a lower bound of the true CR.

[Tom Cain]

I see now, you're saying that the only traffic your site would be getting right now is from the mailing list. I didn't pick up on that before.

How similar is your new game to your previous games? I've gotten under 50% when the game is different from previous ones and over 50% when the game is very similar to previous ones.