If you are following my articles in this distinguished magazine, you already know a couple of things: (A) you must do something, ASAP, with your lack of social activity, and (B) I talk a lot about RealTime and innovation. In May’s edition, I was offering ways to conduct Geo-Marketing based on proximity from your physical casino location, and in the August magazine the topic was how to select your ideal CRM platform.
To apply the above-mentioned functionalities, your technology must be able to process huge quantities of data in Real-Time, set flexible triggers, operate various third-party systems and target players while they are still logged-in (the best communication channel is… before they leave!). But what’s next? All of these are things we can already do today, given the right platform and providing the CFO is on a “business trip” to yet-another-tax-shelter island and hasn’t noted the extra costs on IT. Let’s allow our collective selves to dream a little, and fantasize about capabilities that don’t yet exist and find out how our future-us will utilise them. (Hint: first of all, they will wish better fantasies for themselves…). Yalla, rabota.
I WANT IT YESTERDAY!
We all analyse previous campaigns to learn from their performance and optimise our future promotions. The common KPIs are most likely the ones relating to engagement, such as open and click rates, opt-in, offer claims and of course financial performance (deposits, bonus costs and profit). These can be benchmarked with other periods, earlier executions of the same promo or even industry stats – and it’s all fantastic; that’s how a functional CRM department should operate.
But given additional abilities, we could even add another parameter: how fast it happens. If we can also track the time between communicating the offer to each and every player and the response time, over the various stages (delivery, open, click, opt-in, meeting terms, bonus award, following gaming activity, etc.), we can optimise our campaigns on a totally different level.
For example: it’s not going to be “good enough” going forward to have a promo that cost XX and lift the profit by ZZ vs. a control group of YY%. We would like to ensure this campaign is working at least as fast as the previous time we operated it. It didn’t? Let’s find out why. Maybe we should have switched from emails to SMS, or even better, designed it in a way where most likely the targeted segment is presented with the messages while they are logged-in and playing? Maybe we should set a goal for the promos to reach targets after defined minutes/hours from launch? Why would this even matter?
1. When your players are occupied on your promos, they aren’t playing elsewhere; such KPIs will allow you, in time, to know how much time they spend on average on your website, right after launching each type of campaign;
2. Knowing how long your players are engaged per promo type will allow you in the future to even set how many different promos you can offer for each segment, as maybe one isn’t enough for them;
3. Clearly, if given the option to choose, you would prefer hitting the same result faster rather than later. Yes, in such a scenario, you are both allowed to pick the option you like (as weird as it may sound), and be praised for being... faster.
HOT OR NOT
We all run tournaments and highlight recent/large wins on the home page, as well as brag about our jackpot winners (while cursing in languages we never even knew we can master that well, and across so many gender pronouns!). We do that to encourage engagement, as that’s our main goal as CRM people – the more they play, it gets easier for the games’ margin to kick in.
What if we could harness these data sources in a different manner? Let’s envision the following User Journey: Player 1 is currently playing Book of Stoya or any similar title => a trigger is set to detect in case Player 1 is losing faster than the normal pace (based on average gaming activity per minute) => in case the trigger is being activated, once Player 1 starts leaving the game, a pop-up is launched => “in the past Z minutes, the Book of Katsuni (i.e. similar title to the game Player1 has just left) has paid $XXX to YY players; CLICK HERE and get a piece of the action!”
It’s taking the existing knowledge and personalising it, to the benefit of the players, as we present them with relevant suggestions, according to the style of slots they prefer; right at the time they would be most willing to give a chance to a new game they haven’t previously tried. From the CRM side it’s a triple-win: 1. An offer that isn’t based on bonuses? Bring it on! 2. It’s literally the dictionary definition of increased engagement 3. Enriching the players’ portfolio of routine titles is always preferred (it contributes to brand loyalty).
SUMMARY
Such functions, be it a KPI we wish to measure or an enhanced User Journey, both require the same thing. They require a technological capability to track mountains of data from various sources, and not only process them in Real Time, but also the ability to first store the manipulated data; and second, to respond within a second to what just happened and in accordance with the previously stored data.
Oh, and most important: being able to execute the full communication across all channels, external and inner-gaming-platform ones. And we also want to do it from a single-screen interface. Hell, while we are dreaming, let’s even make it in neon-pink shades #becausewecan.
In fact, this is all about data management, and accessing it as a separate layer, outside of your common gaming platform. Why? A generic B2B turnkey solution is too busy with meeting regulations and ensuring the games are accessible on a nearly infinite number of concurrent sessions. Sadly, I can’t see how these guys are going to be the ones who would lead such improvements in our CRM automation.
Am I wrong? Take a number :) Or better yet, in case you are a CRM product owner within such a B2B platform, and have some spare development resources, the above is really an enormous task to accomplish. So let’s begin with a simpler (yet much needed) option: allowing us to configure a general bonus, but upon launch – applying it with personalised Wagering Requirements per segment/player. How cool would that be?