Giving the players more choice in how we contact them keeps them coming back for more, writes Enteractive CCO Daniel Larsson.
He explains why it makes sense for igaming operators to nurture established revenue streams, i.e. existing players, and that personalising the experience to reduce churn rate for these players isn’t a problem for the future – “it requires a solution now”.
The main ingredients for our igaming industry are often seen as entertainment and innovation, but sometimes we need to pay more attention to the health and longevity of the most important ingredient – the players themselves.
While igaming operators and affiliate sites spend lots of time and money to keep bringing new players onboard with enticing offers and bonuses, there’s less focus on keeping those players happy and enjoying the entertainment and this could be the undoing of your carefully developed player databases.
Even though many operators are seeing record results at the moment, there’s no reason to disregard other revenue opportunities across the audience. “Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves”, they say… Reactivating players and reducing attrition can bring more revenue with less costs compared to acquiring new customers in the first place, so it makes sense to nurture those revenue streams already established.
Player engagement and CRM has developed over the last decade, with technology providing a data-led digital approach, but what the industry needs now is a true evolution of player engagement. Our industry competes with countless other entertainment platforms, such as Netflix and other screen-based services, so our ability to retain the interest of our customers is more important than ever.
Combatting churn
Customer attrition, or customer churn, is the rate of turnover of players that defect to a competitor or simply never return to a brand’s igaming site. Most operators define a customer as ‘churned’ after an inactive period of three to six months, but that’s a long time to be losing out on possible revenue, and generic email campaigns or other digital CRM activities just aren’t enough to prompt action by the player these days.
The key steps towards building better customer relationships must start with being able to reach them in the first place. You can’t settle for one approach over another – you need to think about what your players want, and how and when they are happy to be contacted.
That’s what we’ve found over the last 12 years of helping our operator partners to dig out extra revenues from their player databases, and now we’ve launched a new mobile service – Engager – to give players more choice in how we get in touch with them.
The Engager is a new player-centric mobile web-service, integrated into our (Re)Activation Cloud platform. Fully branded for each operator, Engager is a player-facing extension of the (Re)Activation Cloud platform. With it, Enteractive’s agents can reach out to player databases more effectively, offering the players various options for engagement, whether verbal via a scheduled call, or using the chat function built into Engager’s UI.
True personalisation
Research shows that 68 per cent of players will leave a brand if they feel under appreciated, while 51 per cent of players feel more loved when we call them for a personal chat. That’s why ‘personalisation’ has become a keyword for engaging with customers, not just in the igaming sector, but across global consumer markets.
These figures show we should be spending more time developing relationships with the players, rather than automating the B2C marketing processes. We should approach the players on their terms, not when it suits us.
Both millennials (72 per cent) and gen Zs (64 per cent) think that brands should provide a more personalised experience. Since these two groups will make up 52 per cent of consumers by 2027, it’s important that we adapt now as an industry to ensure we don’t lose touch with them.
But this isn’t a problem for the future, it requires a solution now. Reactivating churned players can have a big impact on operators’ P&L, bringing back a sizable percentage of lapsed players, emphasising the need to have a solid strategy to reduce customer attrition in the here and now. The longer operators wait, the more players will churn and move to other brands, increasing their market share and making the competition stronger.
Improving ways to engage with the players might take a bit more effort, but the pay-off is worth it. A degree of personalisation can boost success rates fourfold; this increases even more when the player receives a phone call from a real person for a two-way conversation.
Through our conversation campaigns, Enteractive converts up to 15 per cent of a client’s inactive player base into active depositing customers, resulting in around 250 per cent ROI on average. With more personalisation through our Engager platform, we only expect this to rise.
