Email and SMS as acquisition, not just CRM
By UA Ledger staff — Archive date: 3 min read
Email and SMS work as genuine acquisition and reactivation channels for mobile games, provided consent, deliverability and attribution stay clean.
Email and SMS get treated almost universally as retention tools, the channels a studio uses to talk to players who are already inside the game. Run properly, they also work as acquisition channels in their own right, built from pre-registration lists and waitlists, or from lapsed player databases, rather than from a paid click.
Building the list before launch
A pre-registration campaign creates an owned audience a studio can convert at zero incremental media cost the moment the game goes live, whether it runs through an app store's own pre-registration mechanism or through a studio-owned landing page collecting email addresses ahead of launch. The value of that list depends entirely on how the studio built it. People who found the page by searching for it, because a friend shared it, or because they already followed the studio convert far better at launch than low-intent entries padded in through an incentivised sign-up flow that asked for very little commitment.
Re-acquiring lapsed players
The same owned channels work for reactivating players who installed the game, played for a while and then stopped. A studio holding consented email or phone contact for a lapsed cohort can send a genuinely targeted re-engagement message tied to a specific reason to come back (a content update, say, or a live event) rather than the generic remarketing a paid network can manage. This only works within the consent a player actually gave. Without consent there's no campaign. Deliverability discipline matters more than most studios initially assume; email sent to a large lapsed list with poor hygiene, meaning high bounce rates and unsubscribes that aren't honoured promptly, will damage the sender's reputation, and that in turn suppresses deliverability for the studio's other, legitimate messaging.
Keeping it out of paid attribution
The one measurement discipline worth enforcing is a clean separation between owned-channel activity and anything reported as paid UA. A player who returns after an email nudge should never show up inside a paid channel's attributed install or reactivation count, and a studio running both simultaneously needs its MMP configuration, or a simple exclusion rule, set up so owned-channel activity can't inflate a paid campaign's apparent performance. Treated honestly, the two channels are a genuine acquisition and reactivation route with a cost structure most paid channels can't match. Treated carelessly, they become a way to quietly launder credit that belongs somewhere else.
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