Level Up

Arcade bars and retro gaming: these were the initial inspirations behind the email marketing campaign Level Up. I was tasked with creating a year-in-review email campaign that highlighted four specific investments by the company to “level up” in the year 2022. The campaign ran over five weeks with five separate emails highlighting:

  1. Introduction: Overview to the “game”

  2. Compass: The company’s proprietary software product

  3. Team Investment: The expansion of a Leadership Team

  4. Roadshow: The Long Game Roadshow traveling event

  5. Insights: The weekly emails and blog-style articles written for the craft beer industry

Level Up saw a CTO increase of 83% from start to end during the one-month campaign with a 22 percentage point increase open rate over the average non-campaign emails for FY22.

Type
Email Campaign

Year
2022

 
 

Concept

Whether readers were gamers or non-gamers, I aimed for subscribers to identify the inspiration immediately upon opening the first email. From that point forward, I crafted a simple framework for the four “levels”: we start in space, fly high in the sky, travel on ground, and dive deep into the ocean. Each level represented each investment:

  • Level 1: Compass - Space: Limitless possibility and innovation

  • Level 2: Team Investment - Sky: Inspired by the company retreat to Utah (That's a lot of sky!)

  • Level 3: Roadshow - Ground: Traveling to meet craft owners/operators in their cities

  • Level 4: Insights - Ocean: Diving deep and sharing knowledge on industry trends

Along the way, readers (or gamers) would "unlock" new items and new characters, meeting members of the company as they shared their expertise, experience, or knowledge on each specific investment.

As part of the final level, readers would come to discover a treasure chest and click to reveal The Tools to Success, a webpage that listed all of that year’s insight articles, podcast episodes, and conference presentations for them to explore and add to their “toolkit” as the craft industry entered the new year.

 

Game Start: Introduction

Level 1: Compass

Level 2: Team

Level 3: Roadshow

Level 4: Insights