Microsoft’s Xbox division is a $15bn business with over 100 million monthly users. These users, ranging from passionate hard-core gamers to more casual players, can choose from over 3,000 games to play, many of which are available for free through the Netflix-like Xbox Game Pass subscription service. But which game to choose? Helping players to find the perfect game for them is a key goal of the Xbox Relationship Marketing team, serving the twin purpose of ensuring players are getting value from their investment in Xbox, and driving ongoing revenues for Microsoft.

The lifeblood of relationship marketing efforts is data - data about the players, which games they’ve played, how long they’ve been playing, and which other Microsoft products they also use. Ian led a team of data scientists, marketing automation specialists, data engineers and marketing analysts to provide this data to the marketing team at massive scale, enabling tightly targeted campaigns that resonated with players, helping them not just to access great entertainment content from MIcrosoft, but also to feel connected to the broader Xbox community.

However, all this data created its own challenges - with so many customer attributes to choose from for campaign targeting, the marketing teams were spending a lot of time building segments manually. Ian and his team implemented cutting-edge AI-based campaign targeting and optimization technology that automated much of this process, making it easier to deliver finely targeted campaigns and tailor both the content and format of messages to appeal to different elements of the player base.

Delivery

This project comprised the following major elements:

• Building and growing a diverse team of marketing data specialists who could bring the value of data to life for marketing teams

• Partnering with multiple Microsoft engineering teams to architect a next-gen engagement platform, featuring innovative in-product promotional capabilities

• Defining a common set of customer engagement measures across Xbox and other Microsoft consumer products such as Windows, Office and OneDrive

• Implementing innovative AI-based targeting capabilities to reduce the workload of the marketing teams and drive better campaign performance

Results

• Supported delivery of $15m incremental revenue per year via cross-sell, up-sell and renewals

• Increased response rate on campaigns by 200%