Say hi to Toan Nguyen, a CRM intern at Nintendo
- ExpIns's Writer
- Oct 2, 2019
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 17, 2019
Toan is a Vietnamese born and raised, embarked from his city Ho Chi Minh to go on an international academic and professional adventure through France, Germany, Canada and more to come. Knowing his passion for Marketing and thanks to his affinity for technology and video games, he found his dream internship at Nintendo of Europe for his mandatory internship of the program at Kedge Business School, his home university.
Have you ever had a job that really stuck out in your mind?
I have always wanted to work in a job that is related to Marketing at one point and because at the time I didn’t have much knowledge of all the position options that are available out there. Easily said that when I was looking for an internship for my program, it was totally a shot in the dark. Moreover, I’ve always a fancy for technology and electronic devices so I used to daydream about working in a Marketing position at Sony, Intel or some video games companies. Nonetheless I would never expect to be able to work in a video games company while video games are one of my hobbies. To my surprise, I was accepted to work for Nintendo of Europe in Frankfurt, Germany for 6 months.
What were your main roles in this job?
My internship was internship in O2O Marketing & CRM, which focuses on one-on-one marketing and CRM through email marketing. In the marketing department of Nintendo, me and my team were in charge of email marketing and CRM as in the management of our relationship with our customers with a focus on tailoring and one-on-one marketing.
My first task is online content management for one of Nintendo’s customer program, which I was in charge of keeping the site updated whenever there’s a request from another department.
My second task and also my main one is email marketing which includes setting up commercial, promotional and informative email marketing campaigns with various components and deliver up to thousands and millions of users.
The third task is the process of monitoring the data of those said email campaigns and create report to evaluate the overall performance in order to fix what we did wrong and improve our users email marketing experience as a whole.
My last task is marketing research on the development and changes to email marketing, while keeping up with the video games industry news, especially Nintendo’s news so I’m always aware of what’s happening to the inside and outside of the company.
How would you describe the overall atmosphere/working environment?
The working environment at Nintendo is definitely one of a kind, it was rather interesting to work for a company where everyone is so passionate at what they’re doing and how culturally diverse, respectful the people there at Nintendo of Europe.
Did you feel impactful in your work?
The fact that that I get to or rather have to send email to thousands and millions of people with a click of a button, I would say that I feel very impactful at the job. That asides, in my team, I was usually invited to voice my opinions and have my personal inputs in most matters and because my team was small and everyone was very respectful to each other, I felt like that my opinions were heard and actually put into good use.
What was the workload like?
Nintendo as one of the giants out there in the video games market and how video games companies can be very seasonal with how they operate their business. I would say the workload depends on the seasons of the year, for example during the E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) my team was working really hard to prepare the emails in advance so that we can publish it at the same time as the company’s announcements. On the other hand, there was also time where I would have very little work to do at the company and it all depends on how busy you keep yourself.
Was it what you were expecting? Any surprises?
Coming up on the job, on the first few weeks I ended up spending a lot of time learning how to code and use programming languages. It was quite a surprise to me how much coding it was required to do email marketing and it was rather common knowledge to know computer language when you’re in digital marketing.
What’s your favorite memory from the job?
One of my favorite memory at the job was the company’s first ever Nintendo Employee Smash Tournament. During my internship, it was also the first time, Nintendo of Europe hosted the event for its employees to finally brawl it out at Smash with the chance to receive the company’s gold medal and see who come out on top. Smash being one of my favorite game, it was really exciting to see a crowd of people screaming and cheering to the last players in the last round at the company’s break floor.
What do you miss most about the job?
I would say what I miss the most about the job is the job itself. People isn’t wrong when they say that find a job that you like and you never work for the rest of your life, it was very true for me when I was working there when 6 months just flew past me.
What advice would you give to someone at the start of the same job?
Learn coding and computer languages, you will need it.
If offered, would you go back?
My experience at Nintendo of Europe was truly a very valuable and practical for my future career. Considering how much I love working there, I would even pay to work at Nintendo again.
Connect with him!
Watch Toan's tips on finding and working with Digital Marketing
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