5 Questions to Help You Create Your Sub Benefits
One of the most common questions we hear from streamers is that they just don’t know what rewards they should give to subs.
Ultimately, your goal should be to find benefits that fit your community, which means focusing on you, your fans, and how you interact now, and building on that in interesting ways.
So if you are thinking about giving more benefits to your subscribers beyond the standard emotes and icons, but are not sure what to offer, here are 5 questions to get you started.
1. What games do you play?
This is one of the most important questions when it comes to choosing benefits, because the games you play is what pulled in your audience to begin with and to a certain extent, help define your community.
For example, if you play Minecraft, there are certain benefits that you can give based on how Minecraft works (fan servers, for instance). The same tends to be true if you focus on Pokemon. If you play League, Dota or another Esports game, coaching and playing with or against subs can be really motivating and provide quality entertainment on stream.
Are you a variety streamer? Do you focus on a particular genre? Each of these things can help define what sorts of benefits are going to work best for your subs.
2. What kind of streamer are you?
Are you informative? Conversational? Do you spend a lot of time interacting with the chat or are you mostly focused on the game and let your mods keep the chat going?
If you are more interactive, there are a lot of benefits that you can create around doing things on stream. This has the added bonus of not taking up your precious free time trying to manage benefits. On the other hand, if you are more informative, benefits like video tutorials, Q&A streams, or voting on the next game you play might work best.
Your benefits should match your personality and style.
After all, your fans may have come to your stream originally for a game, but they have stayed for you. Use your personality to your advantage.
3. What is your community like?
Benefits are about giving interesting and motivating experiences to subs. Which means that the nature of your community matters.
How interactive are they? Do they tend to talk mostly to each other? If so, you will definitely want a TeamSpeak or some other way for them to chat while you aren’t streaming. You will also want to craft benefits that facilitate interaction rather than things that are just for the individual.
Is your stream full of lurkers rather than active participants? Then you want to craft benefits that are motivating, but require very little interaction.
Do your fans really just ask you questions and ignore each other? Then keep the spotlight focused on you and create benefits that let the fans interact and identify with you as much as possible (or as much as you can stand).
4. How can your brand help you create benefits?
What is your branding like? Do you have a specific nickname for your subs? Do you build your channel around a particular theme?
Branding can have a great impact on the types of benefits you give subs. If your branding is very military, try specialized insignia. If your brand is all about your love of cats, use that to create kitten themed benefits.
Your sub benefits should be an extension of your channel’s culture and weaving in your branding is a great way to do that.
5. Can you partner with other streamers to create benefits?
This question is all about cost. Not just monetary cost, but the cost of time and effort that it takes to manage certain benefits.
For example, wouldn’t it be great to run a sub UHC? Maybe, but the time you will put into to setting it up might not be worth it unless you are part of a group willing to take it on. By sharing the effort, the sky’s the limit for what you can do for subs.
Empowering your mods to help you manage benefits is also a great way to do bigger things for subs if you don’t have a lot of friends who are streamers. (Side note: if you don’t have a lot of friends who are streamers, you should go to more cons and meet as many as possible. The best way to grow your stream is to work with other streamers.)
By thinking through each of these five questions, you are well on your way to coming up with great benefits that your subs will love and that will keep them subscribed for a long time to come.
Originally published at blog.gamewisp.com. Mar 11, 2016 9:00:00 AM
