The Bucket (I just cut and pasted this from a tool kit that I sell to clients then added CF related commentary. I hope it makes sense.)

Whenever I consult with clients for the first time I always do a quick survey of things that are easy fixes, then we start working on our bucket. What is the bucket? Well, if you think about marketing as the process of turning on a faucet that flows with new customers, then the bucket is the mechanism that these customers will flow into. Some clients will have a very good bucket, and we’ll start with turning on the water right away. Others will have buckets with holes, and others will have no bucket at all.

Step 1: The Path

Every business should have a well defined path that takes a customer from mildly curious to making a buying decision. A very good path will take them past their first buying decision, and include ways to get them to continue to buy.

In my primary business, a martial arts school, the path looks like this.

Info call - the prospect calls in with a question about the school. Then,

Appointment - the prospect comes into the school for a sit down with me where we get to know each other and explain the benefits of the program. Then, they sign up for a free, two lesson introductory program. So next is,

Intro 1 - 15 minutes showing them some martial arts stuff, then discuss the cost and time commitments of membership.

Intro 2 - Another 15 minutes of martial arts, then a sit down where we ask them to join our one year program. Then, 90 days later

Yellow Belt Conference - just a follow up to see how things are going, and an opportunity to plant the seed of pursuing a black belt. Then 90 days later,

Black Belt Update - we introduce the Black Belt portion of our program, and they sign on for another 3 years after their original one year has expired.

You see, there is clearly defined path that takes a prospect through my school, for a four year period. Actually, there is another four year extension after the first four years, but that is not as well defined... yet.

See, when you go after a prospect, you have to know exactly what you want them to do. That's why one of the first things I'm suggesting we do, and Mr. Daevryn seems to be behind, is tweak around the page that people see for the first time. In my opinion that needs to be done ahead of anything that would steer people toward us. (The only exception to this would be creating and running ads that point a person not to the website, but directly to telnet.)

We need to define how we want a person with no prior MUD experience to approach CF for the first time. (This is a good topic for discussion on this forum.)

Step 2: Statistics

At any given time I can tell you the number and percentage of people who are going from one step in my path to the next. This is hugely important. Keeping good statistics is like flying a plane by the instruments. When it’s foggy out, or when flying above water your intuition about how well you’re flying is very likely to be wrong. The same is true in marketing - you have to fly by cold hard statistics, and not by the seat of your pants.

So for us this means figuring out where we need people to go, so we can figure out how many people go there from where. You need to be able to track every ad, so that you know what is being productive and what isn't. Then it's simple, just do more of the productive stuff and less of the unproductive stuff. Of course, you do have to watch that, because when your doing things right all your advertising has a synergy that's greater than the sum of it's parts. For example, I pulled Val Pak ads once, because they weren't performing, but it turned out they weren't generating calls, they were sending people to my website. When I dropped the Val Pak ads, the number of calls from my website went down - because I keep good statistics I could identify what the fall in info call was from, and fix it.

Also, it doesn't do us much good to attract players to start playing if they don't continue to play. So we need, in my opinion, an in game mechanism that is telling us how many of our newbies are making it to level 10,20,30,40,50 and so on. It's not a bad idea to praise them on the forums, like maybe with an automated system. So you could have it do like a thing that says, "Congratulations Druktard on bringing your first character to 30!" And then the same thing at 51, and we give them their first PBF for free. Something like that would probably be cool... but at the least we need to be able to track how new players are progressing.

This also lets us track things like which ads aimed at which type of people (D&D players, Magic players, WoW players, hotdog vendors) are producing not only interested people, but also people who are climbing the ranks. Maybe when we advertise to WoW people we get 50 people who come to the website and click play now, and 5 when we advertise to Magic players - but then when we analyze statistics we see that of the 50 people who came from WoW, only 3 of them ever made it to level 10. Whereas all 5 of the Magic people made it to level 10, and two to 51. Now who is it better to advertise to? At first glance it looks like WoW people... after all, 50 responded. But closer analyzation reveals that we're better off advertising to Magic players.

Step 3: Followup

You also have to have a good system in place for followup. For us, we capture phone number, address and email at the first step in the path, the info call. That means that if the person falls off of my path for any reason, I can continue to contact them to try to get them back on my path.

I would strongly suggest that we capture email from people when they role their first character. We email them their character name and password, and a welcome letter with some tips to help ease the learning curve. Point them to the newbie channel and newbie QandA forum. Then a few days later they get an automated email that asks them how it's going, and if there is anything we can do to help. If they aren't playing we at least have an opportunity to find out what went wrong and fix it for the next guy.

Step 4: Adequate Customer Service

Finally, we want to make sure that we don’t overload our path so that people don’t get the attention that they need to make a buying decision. For us in the martial arts school, we know we can only process about 20 new members a month without bogging down our system. We aim at 20, and no more. How many people can you handle on your path at one time, logistically?

From here we move on to defining our target market. Basically what I'm hearing is that we have some vague ideas, but that someone (probably me) is going to have to do the leg work on that. I'll let this kick around on the forums for a few days, then we'll do some online focus groups.

First things first.

1) How can we track new statistics, if at all?
2) how mant new players can you take in one month?
3) what is the plan for a main page?

There is no current system in place that I know of that tracks new players. I can watch what is happening from the ad and see how many are using the ad to get to the site and listen to the newbie channel. I am only reporting on what I have seen.

The system we use now hasn't been taxed at all by volume, so that is an unknown. We can definitely handle a lot more than what we currently have in the way of players.

I haven't seen any of the actual developers of the web site since this thread has been started so I don't know if anything for that has been started by any of the staff.

When those administrators come around can you ask them how many forum handles have posted within the last 30 days? That way we know what % of response we're getting when we do surveys? I'm just going to move on to writing that "sales letter" that explains why you should play, just want to talk to some others for ideas first... and figure out who I'm really writing to.

I know our system hasn't hit max capacity by a long shot, what I'm more curious about is how many people do we have imms to service? Like, we might be able to accommodate 1000 people online, but that would mean 900 of them are newbies, and that's probably a BAD thing and not a GOOD thing.

For a guy who didn't want to do any marketing, you're doing a lot of marketing. :)

I am not doing a lot of marketing, per se. I have placed a single, 95 character ad which now has over 2500 views. It cost me $10. All I am doing is keeping everyone up to date on how it's doing.

You can ask Daevryn for the other stuff. He is the one to go through for website details and whatnot.

How about, during character creation in-game, after a person has selected the "new player" option, you throw an additional question in there asking how they heard about the game?

Possible answers could be 1) An internet ad, 2) A friend, 3) The Official Site, 4) Other.

you need something that says "is this your FIRST time" and then that question

Send this request to Daevryn.

Did this a week ago, no response. I know he's been busy.

Also any word on how we're going to structure traffic driven to the website? (IE landing page, seperate page, what)

*waits patiently*

That's all him.

New players are fragile little beings...if they get bored or feel like they're filling out a survey, they'll quit out never to be seen again. I suspect you'd lose a fair amount of players if you add two more questions to character generation that are not fun.

As an example, half of the time if you see a new player (flagged newbie) struggling at the gnome and pop down to speak to them, they get spooked and just quit out. We've discussed adding 'how did you hear' information and other survey stuff to the character generation before, and as a staff always opted not to, for these reasons.

> As an example, half of the time if you see a new player (flagged newbie) struggling at the gnome and pop down to speak to them, they get spooked and just quit out.

True.. I did it myself on a couple of MUDs I was checking out. I wanted to poke around without being treated as a newbie, and persistent offers of help just annoyed me. perhaps a betetr approach in this case would be to show an echo that would only be visible to the new player, e.g. "Type 'summon guide' if you would like a guide to a help you in the unfamiliar world." And then appear/talk to them in the form of the guide before them if they do, and leave them alone if they don't

Yup, I agree. We're also developing stuff in this direction and I'd be for additions like 'summon guide.' It's all in the same vein as a badass academy, the gnome, the newbie channel, etc....very easy to "pull" help but not "push" help.

However, the marketing data that you want (Is this your first char? How did you hear about us? Did you get the right amount of help? Uh oh, you're a new player that's hit 'quit' in 5 min...what didn't you like?) is always going to be a "push" thing. I know I back out of a lot of sites that offer a pretty hook when they start asking too much "survey crap." I think the addition of even a small set of 'how did you hear about us' questions would feel like that to many newbies.

On that vein, I'd actually be in favor of consolidating the name questions.

There is the question when you roll, something like "are you new to CD or mudding blah blah" and you can type Y or N. You may just add one more option "We will also appreciate if you participate in our small surver (3 questions)" press H for this

Something like this, its just rough idea

We were saying to hit yes if it was your FIRST time on CF - not sure the rest of it was an issue at this present time.

Ultimatly you care about finding out where people you stay heard about you... that doesn't have to be done on generation.

All other points I think are valid.

This can be determined with a reasonable accuracy from the current "Are you new" question + the IP address.

Because somewhere along the way I asked if IP addresses could be used to track new players starting as well as total number of active players. The answer has been "no" thus far.

IP addresses won't be used by anyone who isn't an admin imm for any reason.

But this could be done automatically fairly easilly by a script, which would only output the names of the new players.

I hope that one day I can log on and retrieve a who list with over 200 people.

The main gist I get from what you're saying is that in order to judge what is working we need feedback on who and where the new players are coming from. This can be tough. But the good news is I think CF is small enough of a game/community where you could potentially get a fairly decent picture on where newer players are coming from. Something simple like: take all the current marketing paths being put forth, and put a voting poll on the main page. "Where'd you hear about us?". Cliche'd but simple enough to be worthful I think.

I would strongly suggest that we capture email from people when they role their first character. We email them their character name and password, and a welcome letter with some tips to help ease the learning curve. Point them to the newbie channel and newbie QandA forum. Then a few days later they get an automated email that asks them how it's going, and if there is anything we can do to help. If they aren't playing we at least have an opportunity to find out what went wrong and fix it for the next guy.

I think the Imms have been against this from the beginning. Personally, I'd agree. I hate putting my email in anything. I'd probably close the window immediately if I was a potential player. I like the fact that playing CF "feels" completely free and anonymous.

Step 4: Adequate Customer Service

Finally, we want to make sure that we don’t overload our path so that people don’t get the attention that they need to make a buying decision. For us in the martial arts school, we know we can only process about 20 new members a month without bogging down our system. We aim at 20, and no more. How many people can you handle on your path at one time, logistically?

Another really solid point:
1) How many players could the server (both hardware and software) physically handle? (my hunch would be a lot)
2)How many players could the current game layout handle before it gets unplayable? (Although seeing a hundred players on my who pk list would seem really fricken cool at first, would current gameplay really support this?).
Now, of course, I'm looking at this in an extremely optimistic light, but who know...? :)

would be what the current size of the world could handle, without ending up feeling way to crowded.

Damn, imagine the vokers going mental on the crowds of people on eastern road :)

Yes, I rue the day when Cerunnir waits patiently until seventeen fire giants are in his quicksand at crossroads... cone of cold is sooo OP they will say. Haha.

One day, my friend...perhaps one day...

sdf