How Yodo1 cut email costs and boosted player engagement with Proactive Campaigns

Today, we spoke with Dale Stiffell and Kirill Makarov from Yodo1, who shared how their team tackled the challenge of reaching high-value players efficiently and affordably. Facing costly email marketing tools, they turned to Proactive Campaigns for Zendesk to streamline communication and save thousands each month, all while keeping player engagement strong.

Could you quickly introduce yourself and your company?

Dale Stiffell: I’m Dale. I’m one of the Community Managers at Yodo 1, and we’ve been using the product now for quite some time, I think over a year or so. But I’ve been in the community management scene for five years. I do a lot of VIP and high-spending campaigns, and I’m also looking at lots of data on our lapsed players and things like that. So everything like support, community, a little bit of live ops, or a little bit of game design, all wrapped into one, so that’s me.

Kirill Makarov: I’m Kirill, 10 years in the game industry now. I’m wearing multiple hats as Dale, so it’s data, community, and support. So, pretty much everything with a focus more on data. Plus, I’m the one who’s using your Proactive Campaigns.

What was the biggest challenge before using our Proactive Campaigns app?

Dale Stiffell: We wanted a solution where we could reach out to our high-tier spenders with ease. As cheaply as possible, but as effectively as possible as well.

For example, we were using Mailchimp, which was costing us like $1,000 a month. And we couldn’t send newsletters and reach out to all our high-tier spenders because our campaign, which we were running, aimed to offer players a reward to come back to our game. If we did that through Mailchimp, we didn’t have the allocation, so we’d have to upgrade our package.

With Proactive Campaigns, it was much simpler—it was basically like: if you have the email addresses, we’ll send the emails. And it was so cheap when we compared it to Mailchimp.

Kirill Makarov: But I think what is more important is that it is a really nice integration in regard to further communication with players.

When Proactive Campaigns was used, it automatically created a ticket. And when the player wanted something from us, he simply replied to that email. So we had back communication with the player, and we saw the initial message to the player, so it was a combination of both. It was something that we were looking for. Because Zendesk is the main platform we have been using for a long time, and it is our main hub for all contacts.

How did you come across our application at first?

Kirill Makarov: Zendesk Marketplace, I think.

What made you choose the app? Price or something else?

Dale Stiffell: To be fair, sending emails is expensive when you look at other companies. And you were sending emails through Zendesk. So it seemed like it was using our mail servers, not like an external one.

I don’t know the technical details of it, but you found a way to make sending emails cheaper. We can send over 40,000 emails for a few dollars a month. Many other companies out there charge you by volume, charge you by how many emails you’re sending, whereas you guys don’t charge us on that. That’s why it was such a big attraction, that’s why you guys were so different compared to everybody else.

Can you tell me about your onboarding experience with the Proactive Campaigns app?

Kirill Makarov: The user interface was friendly, so it didn’t take much time to navigate inside. It was pretty much intuitive just to go here and there and figure out how it works. So, using phase, I would say nine out of ten.

Were there any challenges with the app?

Dale Stiffell: Yeah, we had a challenge where we wanted to run our newsletter through Proactive Campaigns. Sadly, your tech still doesn’t allow that, so we’re still using Mailchimp to do that. We send a newsletter where people sign up and register, and we send them a monthly or weekly email. That would be great for us, but we still see that the tech capabilities are not there yet.

However, reaching out to players manually and running multiple campaigns based on the data we provide seems absolutely fine.

What about our support team?

Dale Stiffell: Your support team has looked into it, but unfortunately, it’s just a limitation with the software at the moment. Yes, it’s quite sad because we would like to completely cut Mailchimp and use Proactive Campaigns for everything. But we understand that it can’t do everything at the moment. But it does suit our needs, and that’s why we’re still paying for it.

Could you share any examples of using our Proactive Campaigns?

Kirill Makarov: So, we used Proactive Campaigns to send a reach-out campaign to our players who had lapsed. We sent 25,000 emails to those players who started to be inactive before 2025. And it went pretty smoothly. We didn’t face any issues. We simply created the templates for different types of players in your Proactive Campaigns tool. And then, we made different types of messages to different types of groups. And that is it. We sent emails with an invitation to get back in the game.

Do you have any additional feedback?

Dale Stiffell: The only thing that comes to mind is that Email Tracking is a separate add-on. I would honestly just build it into Proactive Campaigns and increase the price.

Kirill Makarov: Yeah, just expand the statistics that you have within. So, the long story short, we were pretty excited to use your tool, and we liked everything about it.

Would you recommend our application to others?

Yep.