Mon Petit Gazon Entertains its 1.6M Users Using Automation

From side project to flourishing fantasy football start-up

In 2011, Mon Petit Gazon (MPG) began as a “buddy project” for Martin Jaglin, Grégory Rota, and Benjamin Fouquet and has since become a promising startup with over 15 employees. 

Martin Jaglin, President of MPG, explains how the team decided to create a game to allow users to experience being in the shoes of virtual coaches and play a league with their friends or colleagues. “The fantasy football market is not as big in France as it is in England or the US. So the idea we had with MPG was to liven up our players’ week. We wanted them to joke every Monday morning with their friends on WhatsApp about the winners and losers of their MPG league,” says Martin. 

MPG’s popularity grew during the 2018 FIFA World Cup thanks to another free prediction app they developed called Mon Petit Prono, which gained 850,000 users in just one month. “Our main source of acquisition has been the product experience. We’ve been growing organically for years without having spent on advertising in France, our 1.6 million users come to us from word of mouth,” adds the President.

Ensuring deliverability to maintain contact with a growing fan base

Communicating to a growing fan base started becoming a challenge for the team of MPG, especially in terms of deliverability. To make the most of their various channels, they started segmenting their contact list by championship and language, and narrowed each channel’s positioning. 

“We needed to segment our communication with very different positioning per channel in order not to be redundant whether it’s email, push notification, in-app alerts, or social media. We use Facebook for big announcements, Twitter for delivering news, Instagram for the nice visuals, push notifications for in-game reminders, in-app alerts for product information,” details Martin.  

Leveraging automation to reinforce close relationships with their audience

Shortly after they started using the Brevo platform, MPG started making the most of its automation features. With the international expansion of MPG, the team needed to ensure that their specific humorous tone of voice would be maintained across all markets. 

“Automation has allowed us to be in touch at all key moments in a player’s life cycle. This is very important for us since the game is full of stages: account creation, joining a league, composing a team, activating options, seeing your results, etc… “ adds Jaglin. “And even if these messages are automated, we can keep the same warm tone, that characteristic familiarity… we avoid those unnecessary 2-line intros or ready-made formulas. Same for the subject lines, we write our users the same way we would write to our friends so that they want to read what is inside,” concludes Martin. 

Their weekly newsletter has become a real tradition for their 100,000 subscribers

As of today, the team of MPG is proud to have around 100,000 active readers.

The team at Mon Petit Gazon has unlocked the power of email marketing by making their newsletters a real tradition for their target audience. Their Thursday newsletter is particularly popular and has an average open rate exceeding 35%. In addition, their newsletters have a high rate of multiple openings, often a sign that the email has been forwarded.

This relationship created between the MPG team and their audiences generates a large amount of engagement as well. “It’s part of the game and one of our promises! We respond to each one of the thousand messages we receive on a weekly basis, event if it takes a long time. It’s part of the MPG experience, to chat with the team behind the game,” concludes the President.