How Papaya Built a Retention Channel with Proactive Campaigns by GrowthDot

How Papaya uses Proactive Campaigns for Zendesk

Papaya is a gaming company (based in Israel) focused on creating engaging experiences for players worldwide. To support its player retention strategy, the team needed a reliable way to communicate with users and keep them engaged beyond in-game interactions.

With Proactive Campaigns by GrowthDot, Papaya began sending targeted mass emails from Zendesk featuring offers, challenges, and rewards. The team uses the app to maintain regular contact with VIP players, strengthen relationships, and support long-term engagement.

Could you briefly introduce yourself and tell us about your role at the company?

Daniel: I’m the Operations Manager for the Customer Experience department. I’m basically responsible for providing all the relevant tools for the different teams so that they can do the job to the best of their ability. Next to me is Shirl.

Shirl: I’m an Account Manager. I work with the elite players inside the game, the highest spenders. We send them a lot of different kinds of campaigns to keep them engaged with the game, including promotions, retention campaigns, and that kind of stuff.

Could you tell us how you first came across Proactive Campaigns?

Daniel: Honestly, I don’t remember. This is something that we already had implemented before I joined. We just started using it a lot more after I came in, so I got involved.

We’ve been looking for ways to make the work better, get more insights, and make the work more efficient. That’s also one of the reasons why we were looking at Email Tracking, because that could potentially give us a lot of valuable information if we can get it to work.

Was the onboarding process easy? How simple was it to set up Proactive Campaigns and start using it?

Daniel: Yeah, it’s pretty simple. I can’t remember exactly, but I think I did a tutorial. We had somebody here who used it before, just one person, so she showed us quickly how to do it.

After that, it was pretty straightforward. I could also use ChatGPT or whatever if I had any questions, and it was fairly simple to find the answers. Things are pretty clear here.

What are your main daily use cases for Proactive Campaigns?

Daniel: We’re sending out offers and challenges. It’s mainly used for retention purposes — reaching out to our VIP clients either just to see how they’re doing, let them know about something new, or give them a challenge where they can win prizes.

It’s really about maintaining contact and trying to engage them in the game.

Shirl: Yeah, we predominantly send them challenges and links to bring them back into the game app or to claim gifts within the game app as well.

Did you have any success metrics when using the application?

Daniel: The retention team was working a bit differently before. They didn’t use emails at all. We started using Proactive Campaigns, and that’s the first time that the team started communicating through email.

Before that, it was mostly Facebook Messenger, in-game pop-up messages, stuff like that.

So we don’t have anything to compare from before because this was just something new that we started doing.

Do you use Proactive Campaigns only for retention purposes, or do you have other use cases as well?

Daniel: It’s mainly retention. I mean, we do have some use cases where, if we need to contact multiple users, if we have some technical issue and need to notify everybody at the same time or something like that, then we might use Proactive Campaigns to reach out to a large group of players.

But that doesn’t happen as often. The main purpose is retention.

How would you describe your overall support experience with the GrowthDot support team?

Daniel: I was speaking to Adriana, and honestly, she’s great. I’m very happy with her.

It seems like she really wants to get things sorted and solved. So I’m very happy with her style of communication.

Results

By implementing the Proactive Campaigns app in Zendesk, Papaya:

• Introduced email as a new retention channel.
• Built a structured workflow for VIP player communication.
• Sends targeted offers, challenges, and rewards at scale.
• Keeps players engaged through personalized email campaigns.

Today, email is an important part of Papaya’s retention strategy, helping the team stay connected with VIP players through timely and personalized communication.