How to Propel Your Toy & Game Business from Playtime to Profit: Expert Advice from Jason Hsieh

03-MAR-25_Webinar

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Toy Business Unboxed, your gateway to the secrets of the toy industry. Here, Jason Hsieh, a toy entrepreneur and expert in the field. “Every product we develop is really inspired by some of the real life experience that we have with our son.” “60 percent of all toys last year were sold on Amazon.”

“Be passionate about it. Because it’s a road. It’s a journey.” “Like when you have an idea that you think is gonna somewhat change the world, make things better, I’d say go for it.“

Jason Hsieh: Thank you for joining this month’s March, 2025. Webinar’s topic this month is going to be about from playtime to profit, five pillars of digital marketing in toys and game business. And we’re gonna also share some example of different type of marketing you can do for your toys and [00:01:00] game brands. For those of you that would like to watch and see some real example, you can also try to find a video in our YouTube channel as well.

First of all, today’s goal for the webinar is to talk about how do we effectively integrate the five pillar of digital marketing from content, social media, digital ads, emails, and SMS to really boost the overall brand visibility and drive customer engagement and maximize sales.

And today’s agenda, we are going to be explaining what exactly are the five pillars. And how are some of the practical tips that you can use for your own toys and game brand to maximize each of the pillar and also how to integrate those five pillar for your own brand’s marketing effort. And then how do you measure success and also optimizing some of the campaigns?

So first of all, a little bit more about me. My name is Jason Hsieh. I’m also the founder of LakiKid, we also run a toy business, which we design toys for kids with special needs. And I also run a marketing company, which we specialize [00:02:00] in doing digital marketing for toys and game brand. And the reason why I got involved was the different businesses is because of my son. So how it all started for me is back in 2013, my son was diagnosed with autism and A DHD while we used to live in Tokyo, Japan. However, Japan, just like a lot of other asian country, there is a huge stigma and taboo around disability in general. So that lead to lack of opportunity and resources and therapy for our family back in 2013 in Tokyo, even so we live in one of the largest metropolitan area, but we struggle to find the help with therapy. So we decided to move to United States in 2015, but only to find out, the medical insurance system in us is a mess, and it doesn’t cover most of the therapy that we’re looking for our son. That was one of the reasons why I decided to start my own toy company on top of my corporate career back then in toward the end of 2016. And the company was officially born in 2000 17. [00:03:00] And I was doing it on top of my corporate career for many years. And in early 2022, I decided to leave my full-time career and become a toy entrepreneur full-time. And that’s what I have been doing for the last three years. And at the same time, three years ago when I left my full-time career, that’s also when I decided to start a second company, which is Toy Launch, which we specialize in doing digital marketing for other toys and game companies as well.

So a little bit more about toy Launch. We are not just a digital marketing company, but we specialize within the toys and game industry and a couple of things that make us unique is because 99% of all the digital marketing company that you ever talk to, they don’t specialize within the toys and game industry at the level that we are trying to do here at Toy Launch. Second is we also run our own toy brand with many years of experience running our own toy brand. We have some inside knowledge on how the industry work and we are also very committed in the industry. And we also run a podcast called Toy Business Unboxed, which we interview different [00:04:00] entrepreneur, different professionals, different people within the toys and game industry. And since our inception of the podcast, we so far have recorded over a hundred episode already and interviewing various of different companies within the toys and game space. So we are really committed to share knowledges and also share a lot of the free resources within the industry with follow entrepreneur and follow professional people for us as well.

And we focusing on three different principles when we are partnering with the brand. The first one is conversion optimization. The second one is profit optimization. The third is ongoing optimization. And when you come to digital marketing, all three of those major principle is super critical for your ongoing success for your toy and game brand.

So today’s topic, we’re gonna be focusing about the five pillar of the digital marketing. What are the five pillar? The first pillar is content marketing. Content is the building block for any kind of activities and any kind of strategy that you’re [00:05:00] gonna be doing online for your brand. Second, from the content. You can use those content for social media marketing as well. Like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. There’s YouTube, there’s a lot of different social media platform you can post it on. Third is digital ads. You can run ads through Facebook, through Instagram, Google, YouTube, Amazon, et cetera. There’s a lot of different platform you can also run ads. Fourth is email marketing. It is important to have a social media present, but however, just like majority of the social media platform nowadays, the amount of people you can actually reach among of your follower is really limited because how the social media platform has been really st struggling the reach for organic posts. So you want to really also get their email. So that’s another channel, another method of communication that you can talk to your potential customer and really build that ongoing relationship with them through email, social medias and you can also do like advertising by doing retargeting as well. [00:06:00] And last but not least is SMS or text-based marketing. Usually the email marketing open rate is roughly about like 20%, whereas SMS or text marketing is over 90%. So it’s a lot easier to get hold of your customer using like text-based email marketing strategy. But when all five pillar work together, this is where you can really unlock your overall digital marketing presence because now you have a omnichannel strategy that you can communicate and build relationship with the potential customer over time.

And in today’s webinar now we’re gonna talk about each of the pillar more in depth and kind of showcase out of the example of different type of thing you can do for each of the pillars.

First of all, on the content marketing side, just for people that’s joining us live, please also put it in the comment or putting in the chat button here in the live session. What kind of content do you currently are using to engage with your audience? Are you using blog posts? Are you using social media like posts, like images, [00:07:00] videos? Put it in the chat for me and for our listener that’s watching and listening to the recording. You can also interact with us by leaving us a comment either on our YouTube channel afterwards, or you can also send us the emails or comment on any of the social media posts that we have. For some of our live participants today feel free to also put it in the chat session. Let us know what are some of the type of the content that you have tried so far with your own brand, either through social media or have you tried newsletter and have you tried any other type of content. I see social media posts and email newsletters. Thank you for that feedback. So all this is the different type of content that you can create on an ongoing basis for your brand.

Why is content marketing so important? Content marketing is critical because it helped to build trust and authority with your audience. And you also offer valuable information that adjusts the need and the interest of your customers, making your brand the go-to resources for the information. I know some of you that’s either joining us live or watching the replay. You are [00:08:00] might already been doing the blog posts. Blog posts is an excellent way to create content for your brand. And once you create a blog post on your website, you can reuse it on social media. You can also reuse it and send it out as a email newsletter and you can also use it for advertising if you want to as well. You can also run ads for people to go to your blog and learn more information about the thing that you’re sharing. For example, some of the example I’m showing on the screen right now is some of the blog posts that we have written for our own toy brand. Our toy brand we designed sensory toys for kids with special needs. So a lot of the article we’re trying to write is really talking about how can the sensory tool to be helpful for the family or for the educators. So you can also come up with different article that you think will be beneficial for your potential audience using the blog post format.

And it’s also an excellent way to gain a better SEO for your website as well. One thing that’s important for the blog post is you want to make sure, you [00:09:00] want to make the blog post as educational as possible, and try not to sell your product directly, but really using the blog post to show your interest in the industry you’re trying to serve and your consumer. And also using the blog post as a way to educate your audience and your customer as well.

The second type of content that you can also consider is educational video. It can be a short form video, it could be a vertical video, or it could be a longer form video. But nowadays the easiest way to do it is you can just create a short form video of you talking about one of your products, like a demonstration on how this product is gonna help your customers in a very simple. You can just use your cell phone for it and record quick videos, talking about the product itself. That’s usually a format. For example, this is some of the example I’m showing on the screen of either you can do it yourself or you can even incentivize your customer to do it on your behalf by giving them a small incentive to say, oh, please submit a video about your [00:10:00] kids using the product. We would love to give you a discount. We’ll give you another free product in return. That’s different way to incentivize your current customer base to get video and ask them to submit additional video. So you can also use it for your own social media marketing as well. And that usually work extremely well when it’s also referred to as user generated content.

So this kind of content usually work really well for social media especially because you can also use it as a customer testimonial about like how other people that have used your toys or games and what are some of their feedback and what are some of their experience they have so far with your product.

The next type of content you can also consider is creating a very simple ebook. The ebook could be very fairly short. It could be just 10, 20 pages of a PDF file. And in the PDF file, you can talk about like different concept. For example, a couple different ebook we have written in the past one for our own brand is this particular eBooks talk about comprehensive guide [00:11:00] to your first flexible seating classroom, which is really relevant for some of the product we are trying to also provide to the school. And we also have written different ebook for some of our client. Talk about like different way to bring back wildlife to your yard. And this particular client, they have different outdoor toys, they develop and they sell to their customer to create like birdhouses in the backyards and different DIY items. So by using the ebook, you can also use ebook. It’s called a lead magnet. So you can ask people to say, okay, if you are interested to download the free ebook, please provide us with your email. So this is an excellent way to get additional email for your email marketing later on. And once people opt in, if they are willing to give you their email in return of the free ebook, that also show you they’re interested in the topic and the type of product you’re providing.

So this is also a wonderful way to really building your audience up and also creating email lists so you can do email marketing [00:12:00] and really creating that relationship with them over time.

Next you can also do podcasts. This is gonna be a little bit more in depth. I know a lot of the toys and game brands may not want to ground a podcast like the one we have, but this is also example of a content you can create. If you want to also create a content like a podcast for your own toy brand, that’s something is definitely a lot of work involved. So definitely something to consider. But the nice thing about having a podcast is you can have a video podcast. With the video podcast, you can chop down the long form interview into short form content. You can also turn the video interview into a audio format and upload to the podcast platform. For example, for our own podcast, we do a video interview format. Then we’ll download the audios and we’ll edit it and upload to 14 different podcast platform. Then we’ll also edit the long form videos, which is usually about 30 to 45 minutes, and we’ll edit it down to a minute, a short form vertical video, the vertical snippet. So we can use the content [00:13:00] or the podcast interview multiple times in multiple different format. We can also turn the podcast into a blog post. We also turn the podcast into different images that carousel images as well, that our social media team can reuse and repost as well.

So this is also another content generation strategy you can consider for your brand.

So far I talk about content marketing and all the different things you can consider. The next thing I wanna talk about is social media marketing and. First of all, for those of you that’s joining us live today, which social media platform has been most effective for your toys and game brand? Please leave a comment or chat. So I can also know what kind of social media platform has been most effective either is it Instagram for you? Is it Facebook? Is it TikTok, is it YouTube? Is it any other platform? Please let us know. And also trying to make the webinars interactive as we can as well.

So I see Jamie, you say it’s Instagram and TikTok for you. So yeah, I think TikTok is getting a lot of traction as well. And it’s [00:14:00] obviously each of the platform is different and you need to create content geared toward the platform that you’re trying to create content for. Thank you for sharing that. And I see you say is Instagram for post and Facebook for ads. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences.

Social media marketing is important and it’s also essential because it allow the brand to engage directly with our audience in real time platform like Instagram, Facebook, and like TikTok, the one we mentioned in the chat is provide opportunity for toys and game brand to build communities and also showcase our product to visual content. And you also have a potential to go viral, which you can get a lot more eyeball on your product. So here are some of the example of different kind of content you can consider to create for social media marketing. First, obviously you can do like promotional type of posts. Some of the example I’m showing on my screen right now, it’s like a holiday wishlist giveaway we have done in the past when we partner with other brands and do a giveaway campaign [00:15:00] that is also an excellent social media strategy by partnering with other brand to do a bigger giveaway. So instead of when they win they not only just win your product, but they also win other product as well. Also you can use the social media to showcase some of the new product and if depends on the season, you can also run like different seasonal promotional posts for your brand this is an excellent way to encourage people to share and also create more product awareness for your brand.

And the second type of social media strategy you can do is product and testimonial posts. This is excellent for building credibility and leverage social proof, showcase some of the real use cases of your customers using the product, and also encouraging people to leave a review either on the social media platform or on it could be on Amazon. You can also sometimes use some of the review you get on Amazon and reshare that on social media as well because the Amazon review is actually, you are free to use it. It’s public. That’s [00:16:00] not gonna be a problem of reusing some review you’re getting from the Amazon platform and you can use some of those content across the platform. You can take the video from TikTok and repost it on Instagram, for example. And you can also do the reverse, take the Instagram reel and repost it on TikTok. But the whole idea is to really showcase a real like customer and real human that’s using the product and sharing like some authentic story of like really enhance the brand authenticity when you’re sharing like real customers experience and real customers reviews and feedback. That’s one more excellent way to do social media marketing.

Then you can also consider create infographic or engagement posts. Usually for infographic people sometimes create meme, or they can create like a educational, like infographic to teach different concept. For example, for our brand, sometimes we’ll be talking about. How can you support friends with kids with special needs? And instead of being critical, you can try to be more supportive, or it depends on the brand that you have and what [00:17:00] kind of audience that you’re talking to. You can create different content that’s both educational and also informative for your audience. This is also a excellent way to encourage interactions. And sometimes you can also ask people questions like in the post, you can do a question post like what do you usually like to do with your kids? Or what kind of game do you like to play with your kids? You can also ask questions in your social media posting to encourage more common, encourage people to share more.

So that’s all social media strategy that you can implement and incorporate into your current social media marketing. And one more thing I also encourage is always try to create a social media calendar. So you should have your content in advance. There’s a lot of tool that you can use to do social media scheduling and posting. We also have a software we run ourself called Toy Marketing Hub. That is a software we use that can enable to do the scheduling. So you can create a [00:18:00] content in in advance and have them schedule out for like couple weeks in advance. So that way is, you have all the images, the video, everything is ready to go. You already reschedule ahead of times. So usually you’ll have a content calendar that exactly what are some of the content you’ll be sharing with your audience for the upcoming weeks or even upcoming months. So this is also a good way to do social media marketing by getting your content ready in advance and ready to post.

Next is also holiday posts, especially for the toys and game brands, Christmas is usually one of the biggest holiday of the years. But there’s also other holidays that you can also consider. Either, it could be Halloween, it depends on the toys you have. It could be back to school if you are more selling educational toys. If you’re selling like a summer toys, it could be a summer type of theme. You wanna make sure when you’re creating any kind of seasonal post, you want to promote like a special offer for the seasons. And you can [00:19:00] also encourage people to really participate.

 Next I want to talk about is gonna be digital ads. There’s different way of running digital ads to reach your ideal audience. But first, for our live audience today, please put it in the chat. What kind of advertising have you tried in the past? Have you tried Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, TikTok ads, or Amazon ads? Please put it in the chat and let us know what kind of ads have you tried. And for our listener that’s watching or listening to the replay, please also let us know in the comment section on our YouTube channel as well. I see people, some people are saying Instagram and Facebook. Some people say Facebook ad, and starting to get into Amazon ads as well. Each of the platform has its own like nuances. And I’m gonna talk a little bit and explain about the high level nuances. And of course, because of the sake of the time that we have today, I’m not gonna have the time to spend explaining each of the platform in depth, because each platform is gonna be very different. The Amazon ads itself is gonna take like at least one or two hours just to explain their platform [00:20:00] because they, it is a lot of different functionality in the Amazon ad platform.

First of all, let me talk about why digital ads is very important. Digital ads, like for a platform like Google, Facebook, or YouTube is essential to quickly reach a large targeted audience. It also offer a measurable data driven result that allow you to run like very highly customized campaign to increase sales or generate leads or build brand awareness either through search ad or display a banner. There’s a lot of different like type of ads you can run on the platform. But generally there’s two different major category. There is push advertising and there’s poll advertising. And let me explain the difference between the two.

Push advertising are the platform like Facebook and Instagram. What I mean by push advertising is you are pushing information or you’re putting ads in front of the people even so they might not be asking for it. That’s why it’s called push marketing, whereas poll marketing is usually a keyword intense platform like Google, like Amazon, where [00:21:00] people are typing in keywords and looking for your product specifically. Those are considered poll marketing. So push marketing and poll marketing itself is, that is the big categories. And then there’s different platform, like within the push marketing obviously facebook and Instagram is the biggest one because they have so many user on their platform. But one of the major thing you want to consider when we’re doing push marketing, for example, for Facebook ads, is you want to make sure the ads you are creating doesn’t look like a ads, doesn’t feel like a ad, and doesn’t smell like an ad because it’s so important to make and make your ads look like it’s like a posts made by the neighbor or made by your friend. You want to make sure you’re not overly selling the product. That’s why customer testimonial video or customer testimonial posts, it usually work really well on Facebook because it doesn’t look like an ad. It look like someone is just sharing their experience or someone just sharing their testimonials. So when you’re creating, especially for Facebook and Instagram, you [00:22:00] want to keep that in mind. You want to create the content in a way that it look like it’s organically native to the platform. And usually the more native it look and feel, the better the ads will perform based on our experience.

And second, the Facebook ads is in 2025 especially, it’s getting more and more mature with their ai. You don’t really need to do a lot of targeting anymore. The Facebook AI can just look at the ads and they will find and identify different pocket of people that they think will be relevant for your product. Historically, when I first started, like digital marketing back in 2016, Facebook ad is all about targeting, finding the right audience, finding like test different lookalike audience test, save audience, trying to come up like the age group of oh, what my potential audience should be. But right now, in 2025, all most of that is out of windows. You don’t really need to do those super detailed targeting anymore because the AI is getting so much [00:23:00] better. You want to let the ad itself to speak to the audience. And because the Facebook system is so good at detecting who is the one that is either interacting for example, clicking on the ads, or stopping when they’re scrolling on their Facebook feed, if they’re stopping and actually watching the video, Facebook is detecting all the information. All the data. It actually sounds scary because they track everything we do on the platform, but also those data point they are tracking to determine what are some of the other potential customer. They can also show you ads in front of, so that’s why the content is even more and more important, especially when you’re running ads on the Facebook or the meta platform because Facebook and Instagram is the same company.

This is some of the example of different ads we set up. But as you can see, like the setup itself even so it look complicated, but we usually try to focusing on creating a lot of different creative for AB testing in the [00:24:00] platform. So the more creative that you have, the better that the ads usually will perform. And there’s different philosophy on how many different creative you can do. You can do two headline followed by two ad description, followed by maybe three different creative assets, like two two, three images or three videos in one asset. So that’s different like structure you can do in the Facebook ad, but on the side, but on the asset, you don’t really need to overthink as far as too much targeting. You can just, you can target it pretty wide and just let the Facebook AI try to identify the potential audience for you. And here’s some of the example of what the Facebook ad will look like. If you run any kind of Facebook ad. Usually they will change their placement for the feed for the Facebook feed, Instagram feed, Instagram story, Facebook story. And there’s also a mobile placement and also a desk desktop placement. Each of the placement you ask is gonna look a little bit differently. It depends on are you running image ads or are you running video ads? And also depends on the [00:25:00] video ratio and the video dimension. There’s a certain platform your ads will be show on, and there’s certain placement that maybe your ads is not eligible because of the dimension.

And I already talk about Instagram ad. Instagram ads and Facebook ad is similar, but the platform is a little bit different usually for Instagram because there’s no direct button that you can click on. Usually you need to ask them to swipe up to go to your website. Again, the main things for those push-based marketing is you want to create a video that’s as engaging as possible and really trying to make the ads look native to the platform. And for the Google ads and YouTube ads is more focusing on keywords. So of course today we’re gonna spend too much time in depth in the Google advertising. But most of the Google advertising is keyword based. So you need to do a in depth keyword research on what type of keywords that your potential audience will be searching for when they’re finding similar product like yours. And in that sense, Google Ads and Amazon ads is [00:26:00] similar because they are both a keyword based platform and they are both considered whole marketing means people are typing in keywords on their platform, on the search engine to find either services or find a product. So coming up with a list of the keywords in for Google advertising is super important and same as Amazon advertising as well. You want to really kind put together a list of keyword, but before you start running the ads, because all the ads will be a keyword focus when your creating the ad structures on the platform. Whereas Facebook and Instagram is more like the content itself is really the focus, but the Google ads is the keywords is actually even more important than the content. Of course, you still need to have content on your website, obviously because that’s where people will see when they click on your ads.

But as far as the focus and the thing you really need to do for the platform will be a little bit different because of the nature of the platform. And for YouTube app obviously YouTube is also a search base platform. It is also like a search engine in itself. People are [00:27:00] searching for different type of video. So if you are running YouTube ads, that’s also something you need to do some research on what type of video people might be looking for when they’re trying to find product like yours or what other related video they might be interested in watching. So when they’re watching the video, you can also have like different ad placement of, for those of you that watch YouTube there’s different type of ads you can run. On YouTube, for example, there’s skippable ads and there’s also nons, skippable ads, sound ads. You can skip on the platform but after you watch three or five seconds and there’s all some ads that you cannot skip, it force you to watch like a portion of it as well. So there’s different setting in YouTube that you can do to run different ad placement.

 So the next topic I want to talk about is gonna be email marketing. For our live participant today. I wonder like what kind of email marketing have you tried so far? Have you tried promotional emails, educational emails, or have you tried setting up any kind of automations with emails? And also let [00:28:00] me know like, how often are you emailing your list right now? Are you emailing them once a week? Once a month, once a quarter, or never. Some people I talk to, they never email their email list even so they have email list, but they never use it for some reason. So it’s very important to use the email list we have gathered for our own companies and create and stay in touch with our customer on the ongoing basis.

Jason Hsieh: While people are putting that in the chat, let me explain why email marketing is so important. Email marketing is one of the most effective way to nurture relationship with your potential audience. And also offer a direct line of communication. Allow you to send more personalized message, exclusive offer, and also update to your customer whether it is a newsletter or holiday promotion. Email marketing really keep your audience informed and engaged. So I see some of our live participants saying they are emailing their list for monthly newsletter or quarterly newsletter with content or restock notifications. And I also see people are [00:29:00] saying that they use constant contact. But don’t create newsletter often enough. And when they do is a blend of education and special deal. Okay. Thank you for sharing that. There’s also people saying that sometimes they do play testing recruitment for new product, using email. That’s an excellent way to use the email as well. And the other comment is saying that not enough emailing, that’s a very common issue that we face as an entrepreneur or professional marketer in the toys and game space. Sometimes we’re just not emailing often enough. Usually our recommendation is to email once a week. That’s like a good cadence. But if you couldn’t do it once a week, minimum once a month, if you couldn’t do a weekly emails. There’s some pros and cons of the email marketing, which I’m gonna go into.

First of all, the open rate of for email is still significantly higher than a social media post. The email open rate is roughly about 20%. That’s like the industry average, whereas the social media reach, let’s just say you have 10,000 follower, [00:30:00] usually you reach like two, sometimes 5% of those people. So it depends on the type of posts as well. So email marketing is, it definitely is one of the advantage that you can have as a brand owners. And today’s, I’m also gonna talk about an example of different type of email you can send.

On the high level, there’s two different major type of email. There’s an email that you send manually on the weekly basis, like a newsletter, like a promotion email, and there are also automated email that you can just set it up and once you set up, you auto trigger, for example. I’m also gonna talk about some of those example for the automated email and ideally in your email marketing strategy. You wanna have both. You wanna have automated email that’s set up for your brand that just go out and get triggered. For example, welcome email. Whenever people sign up for your newsletter, it’s gonna trigger the welcome email and start sending them emails like once every three or four or five days. That is considered automated sequence. And you should also have a manual [00:31:00] email that you’re sending out manually once a week, once a month about different event, different new product. Or like one of our participants was talking about like for play test recruitment. Those are the manual email that you should also do. So you should do both. And I’m gonna talk about some example of both.

So for promotional email, those are considered like a manual email marketing that you can send out for any kind of upcoming promotion. It could be a new product launch, it could be a new Kickstarter campaign that you’re currently working on. And I know for, especially for Kickstarter, email marketing is super, super important. And a lot of the people that I talk to that have successful Kickstarter campaign, they start creating their own email base of the potential backer months many, months in advance. And that’s how you Kickstarter campaign can be successful. And that’s one way to really utilizing the emails and creating the direct engagement. And you can create a very targeted campaigns with your audience. So that is the type of the manual email campaign. And there’s also newsletter. [00:32:00] So like I say, usually our recommendation is to have a weekly newsletter or you can also consider a monthly newsletter if you don’t want to send out weekly or you just don’t have the bandwidth to send out weekly newsletter. The minimum frequency, I would say we need to send it out at least on a monthly basis. Don’t send them an email right before like you are about to sell them something because people can smell that and say like you want money, so now that’s why you’re talking to me now. So you want to really make sure you’re building relationship and sharing information with them and to create a consistent engagement. And also this is also a, the newsletter is excellent way to keep your audience and your customer in the knowns of what is going on with your brands. Do you have new product that’s coming up? Do you have an event that’s coming up? Are you speaking somewhere? Are you attending to a trade show? Those are all different kind of information you can include in your newsletter, and I know for a lot of the brand I’m talking to within the toys and game industry, usually there’s two type of audience that’s on your email list.

One is your end customer that you know, [00:33:00] the moms, the parents that is buying your product. And there’s also retail store owners. Sometimes you also have a list, so you want to make sure you segment those lists separately. You want to, in most of the email system, you can tag the people in your list and you can tag them to say, okay, is this contact a business like a lead or is this like more of a customer lead so you can send them different messages? By tagging them correctly in your email marketing system is also very important for you to clean out and make sure you’re not sending like email that you want to send to your retail store owner to the consumer. Because the messaging will be very different. Imagine you’re trying to like talk to a retail store owner to carry your product versus you’re just trying to ask one of the parent to buy one of your toys is a totally different message. So make sure you want to attack them accordingly and create different pipeline and create different marketing system for those two very distinct type of customer that you’ll be dealing with. And newsletter is also an excellent way to, [00:34:00] to do that on an ongoing basis. Those are the few different manual type of emails.

On the automated emails. You can also consider to create a nurture email sequence is often referred to as a nurture welcome email sequence. Those are the a set of email that you want to start sending out to your potential customer over time when they first join your list to build relationship and also personalize that engagement and also use that to share your story of why do you create your companies, what was the background story about your companies and using this sequences of email that really help you to strengthen your relationship. And over time all the effort you’re putting is almost like putting a deposit into your email list. So when it come to the holiday season, people will like and trust you more. So when they’re thinking about what to buy for their upcoming for the Christmas or for their, like for a birthday, they will think of you and really trying to go back to your brand and buy one of the products on you. So nurture email is also an excellent [00:35:00] way to do that. And besides nurture email, like I mentioned earlier. Product launch email is also very powerful. Of course, you don’t want to just send one emails usually for product launch email sequences. We’ll start sending email like two weeks or sometimes a month in advance, and each like, and we’ll be sending out sequences and say, oh, in two weeks we have this new product coming out. Please take a look and sign up for a early bird discount or like early bird special to really create an excitement in advance. And you also let your audiences feel like they are getting some exclusive assets to you and the thing you are offering for them as well.

And by doing those things in advance, it really help you when your product is finally ready. Like the Kickstarter or on Amazon, you can use the same strategy to really boost your sales on those platform.

Next the other way to do email marketing is to giveaway. And like I mentioned, the giveaway is also not only very powerful for social media, it’s also very powerful to get emails as [00:36:00] well by, and different thing we have done in the past ourself is to partner with other toy brand and do a joint giveaway. So instead of winning one product, now the people that are signing up will win a whole set of product together. So usually the more you give, the more people will sign up. So this is also an excellent way to create engagement, expanding your reach, and also help you with your customer royalty over time.

Giveaway campaign or giveaway strategy is also something I highly recommend. For those of you that haven’t tried you can try it with your brand to do a giveaway campaign. Then there’s also survey or ambassador email that you can also consider, like one of the participant today was talking about using the email for play tests. That’s an excellent way to use the email marketing and try to get people that will be interested to play test your product and you can also do that in a survey format or for those of you that’s more advanced, you can also consider to create an ambassador program. And what I mean by ambassador [00:37:00] is that you can offer a different incentive for your ambassador. For example, for our ambassador program, they’ll get like some free product. They’ll also be the first to test our new product and they will get a discount code as well, that we give them a whole bunch of different perk as part of our ambassador program. And you can also, you just need to consider how you want to design your own ambassador program so you can incentivize your audience or your customers to engage with you. And in return you can also ask them to upload picture of their kids using your product or their friends and family using your product and even video. The ambassador program, also tied to us a way to get additional user generated content. Then there’s also abandoned card email. This is considered automated email that you can also set up with usually with Shopify or whichever, e-commerce website that you’re using, either WooCommerce or Shopify. There’s a different way to integrate your email marketing system with your website. So when people add the product in their shopping cart, but they didn’t bought at the end you can send them like a reminder [00:38:00] to recapture those lost sales and send them reminders. Oh we save your item here temporary, do you still want to complete your purchase? And those are considered like an automated email campaign that you can do.

Last but not least, I wanna talk about text-based marketing. Like I mentioned, the open rate for email marketing is usually about 20%. However, for test-based marketing, the open rate is in upward of 90% or higher. So it’s totally different type of engagement. Put it in the chat if you have tried SMS marketing or test-based marketing in the past, yes or no, if you have tried, how effective it is for you. So just put it in the chat and let us know to see if this is something you have already tried. Okay? Some people are saying that haven’t tried it yet.

So for those of you that haven’t tried this is a very powerful marketing strategy that you can also engage with your consumers or your customer base and why the test SMS marketing is so important because of the open rate, most people open the text. It’s like I say, it’s 90% open rate compared to email [00:39:00] and also much quicker response. Usually you’ll get a people text you back almost within a few minutes. It’s very ideal to deliver any kind of very urgent type of campaign, like a fast sell campaign or a special promotion that you’re doing with them. Text-based marketing is very useful for new product launch as well. That where, because it’s a time sensitive offer and you want them to engage and know about this like time limited time offer. So text-based marketing is very powerful for this kind of marketing. And you can also do flash sell as well for your brand using text-based marketing. And you can also incentivize people to sign up or join your text based list and giving them special like VIP discount by providing their email or their phone number to you. And when you’re creating like a lead generation funnel, you can ask them for both their email and their phone number at the same time.

And you can make the, like phone number optional because some people don’t like to give out the phone number. So you can say in order to join the giveaway, please enter [00:40:00] your email and you can also share share your phone number to sign up for our test SMS list as a option. So you can offer that as a second option as well.

And you can also use it as a back in stock notification. That’s also an excellent way to use the text base, email marketing, and also holiday promotion, et cetera. So in today’s webinar we talk about all the different pillar, but the power of the five pillar is on using it in conjunction in each other, so that way you have a unified customer journey with content marketing, social media marketing. Pay ads and then email marketing and SMS marketing.

By utilizing all five pillar together, it really amplify the brand visibility and having a consistent messaging across all the channel and then you can make the data driven decision to decide on what can you make your brand better and also increase the conversion and the customer retention. We also have our own marketing software called [00:41:00] Toy Marketing Hub. You can visit toymarketinghub.com to find out more about our marketing software. In our marketing software you facilitate all five Pillar. You can do the social media posting, you can do email marketing, you can do SMS marketing. Feel free to schedule a demo with us if you want to learn a bit more about our marketing software that we designed for the toys and game industry to facilitate all the five pillars for the digital marketing. And that conclude today’s webinar and feel free to check out our software. And thank you so much for participating. Feel free to leave any additional question in the chat and we’ll try to answer it. Please comment it in our YouTube channel if you have any additional questions. But thank you so much for everyone for joining this month’s webinar and hopefully it was very informative for you and for your business. Go out and take some actions and use some of the information that we share today. We do the webinar every single month at the last Thursday of the month. So just look out for the emails. Each month we’ll talk about different [00:42:00] topic when it comes to digital marketing for the toys and game industry. Thank you again everyone for participating in today’s, and I’ll see you again next month.