Case Studies

Sending success all in one platform - The PUBG Story

The video game industry moves at a pace all of its own, and few move faster than online multiplayer games.

The video game industry moves at a pace all of its own, and few move faster than online multiplayer games. Battle royale games like PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG) have dominated the online video game market for several years through their 100 player game modes that pit everyone against each other. Throughout the year, players enjoy different themes, items, characters, and battle types throughout different seasons and can either play casually or competitively against other teams. No matter what kind of gamer you are, you can find a mode of play for you in PUBG.

Since the game launched, PUBG has sold over 70 million units across the globe. For each new player, every customer experience needs to be fast, efficient, and seamlessly integrated with the account systems. In doing so, PUBG players enjoy a quick account creation process so they can hop into the game as soon as possible.

Email plays a critical role in the account creation process. Transactional emails are the cornerstone of the sign-up process, from receipts to account verifications. With emails going out at multiple steps, scaling their email program was an essential part of the player experience.

Outgrowing Their Provider

While PUBG continued to grow at a rapid pace, Scott Glasser and Jesse Welch of the account engineering team saw that they were on a course to outgrowing their previous provider. With a slow domain authentication process, PUBG was beginning to feel that they could find better service elsewhere to keep their account experience as seamless as possible.

As they began their search, the account engineering team at PUBG knew several things had to be true: their new provider needed to be easy to scale with and be quick to respond to support needs. After comparing several email service providers in the space, PUBG decided to go with Mailgun for its ease-of-use and developer-focused user experience. Setup was easy and they were excited to see how they could grow on our platform.

Scaling Over Time

As PUBG continued to see success as one of the largest Battle Royale games, the PUBG team looked to optimize their email program. They were happy with the service they had at Mailgun, but they wanted a dedicated resource to keep an eye on their email streams should something ever go wrong. Alongside that, PUBG needed guidance on how to grow their email program effectively with deliverability in mind.

Mailgun’s Deliverability Service was the natural step forward for PUBG. It would pair them with a Technical Account Manager to advise their team on how to build out their email streams for better overall engagement and performance. On top of that, they would have someone proactively monitoring their accounts to ensure that their email streams would perform as expected, rather than being surprised by outdated records or misaligned domain segmentation.

Bringing It Together

By the time PUBG started using Mailgun’s Deliverability Services, they had already been using Mailgun for over a year with great success. PUBG saw an opportunity to bring their technical and marketing streams all in one platform by adopting Mailjet. Mailjet’s intuitive email builder, advanced segmentation and powerful analytics capabilities help PUBG’s marketing team make every email campaign better than the last.Mailgun’s API was a perfect solution for their account engineering team, and with Mailjet, PUBG was able to get the best of both worlds.

When paired with Mailgun’s Deliverability Service, PUBG was able to build out a custom deliverability strategy to ensure their email program would thrive. Marketing email traffic tends to have more unsubscribes over time, while transactional emails have high engagement rates across the board. With that in mind, the noisier marketing emails tend to have an effect on IP reputation, and that can end up affecting transactional email delivery. Their Technical Account Manager recommended IP segmentation to prevent actions taken in the marketing or transactional email streams from affecting one another. Through this IP segmentation, the actions taken on marketing and transactional emails would solely affect those streams, rather than influencing each other on the same IP.

Once they had an action plan to build out their new email infrastructure that best suited both the account engineering and marketing teams, PUBG was eager to get the ball rolling as soon as possible. As they migrated their traffic over for the marketing side of the house, PUBG got to work on warming up dedicated IPs to ensure that they could start sending without any other email senders influencing their reputation. Like most senders, warming up these IPs was critical for the PUBG team, as sending from a cold IP can send the wrong message to inbox service providers and hurt your reputation.

What’s Next

After a successful onboarding of the marketing traffic and effectively migrating their transactional stream over to dedicated IPs under the advice of their Technical Account Manager – it all paid off. PUBG was able to see a marked increase in their overall delivery rate from 90% to 98%. “It’s been great working with Mailgun,” Scott added. “Having someone we can reach out to during all of this has been awesome.” As they move forward with Mailgun and Mailjet, the PUBG team is excited to see how email can further their communications with players. Whether that be through transactional account notifications or player surveys, PUBG is ready for anything.