How to make the most of a customer’s first visit

The big challenge facing today’s online providers is how to differentiate themselves from competitors in order to build loyalty – particularly for high lifetime value customers – to ensure they come back time and again.

Prior to the rise in online channels, bricks and mortar bookies enjoyed high levels of loyalty from customers who were largely retained because of the more emotional, personal elements associated with offline gaming. Regular visits fostered a sense of community among staff and fellow players within local branches.

In the online world, these historic personal affiliations have dissipated and today’s typical digital gamer harbours less loyalty towards one operator. Many customers will scour the web for competitive acquisition offers, take advantage of them, then move on to another provider. Come the next big event, they can compare the available offers again and go with the brand that is offering the best odds that time around. In any case, these offers are eroding operators’ already slim margins, making the customer acquisition process increasingly unsustainable.

A key approach to address this conundrum lies in providing a truly personalised experience that builds loyalty through satisfaction – if you’re providing customers with what they want as soon as they open your app, it’s reasonable to expect they’ll return. Personalisation in gaming is yet to be properly cracked, however in 2017 it will become a crucial and competitive battleground.

The good news is that this sector possesses a level of first party behavioural customer data that would be the envy of almost any other sector – user data fuels the success of personalisation, and the number of transactions per customer in gaming, compared to say automotive, is huge. Gaming can lead the charge on the personalisation revolution – and there are already many untapped opportunities across the sector just waiting to be seized by operators:

A single view of the customer

Tougher regulation like the UK’s recent Fourth Money Laundering Directive are driving a need for ever more sophisticated KYC policies and solutions. As a result, gaming operators already possess some of the most detailed customer information of any business.

But this needs to be brought together quickly and securely from across your business and consolidated in order to use effectively in real time. By collecting behavioural data of past interactions, operators can build personas of their typical customers and how they act online.

At the most basic level this could involve logging which games individuals tend to play first, or what time of day sees the highest traffic in different geographies. This information can be supplemented with predictive analytics to identify which persona new visitors with fall into, and in turn this data can be used to segment visitors, identify the high lifetime value customers and pre-emptively personalise their experience from the second they hit the page or open the app.

Make the most of the first visit

With the best will in the world, the reality is that many new customers will cash-in on their acquisition offer then bounce to the next bookmakers’ promotion. This first experience therefore needs to build a personal connection and encourage them to engage further with your services and markets. It can take some time until you have built up enough data about a new customer to accurately infer what they might be interested in.

Asking a few ‘help us get to know you’ style questions can be a good starting point. This will allow you to gather initial data about the user and understand what they’re looking for. Next, you can use what you know about your latest visitor to create cross-selling opportunities; if they consistently bet on multiples, mark them as having a high appetite for risk, and present them with a time-limited introductory offer for high-stakes poker. Get creative with recommendations – don’t limit yourself to a simple “Most Popular Bets” box on the user’s homepage.

Consider where customers engage on your platform and surface next actions there — if a user bets on Liverpool to win, prompt them to add a first goal scorer within the bet slip itself. But be advised: automated recommendations are not easy in to get right in this industry.

Amazon is famed for supplying relevant recommendations to its users, but their product catalogue is much more stable. As a gaming operator, your offerings are transient, with thousands of new markets being added or removed, and prices changing, every second. Relevant recommendations require a lightning fast data supply chain, intelligent algorithms, and it all needs to work in real-time.

Keep in touch

Differentiating yourself from your competitors is an incredibly difficult proposition, so remaining front of mind with customers after they have played is crucial. Not only does your onsite experience have to be relevant to individual players, but the offsite experience must match up effectively too. Email campaigns can be useful, but emerging mobile technologies offer a rare chance for genuine differentiation.

The industry is only just exploring the potential rewards provided by push-notifications and location services and there are some very exciting possibilities. For example, by using geo-location technologies you can identify whether a customer is visiting Aintree and could push a bespoke, onsite offer directly into their device notifications. Conversely, you may consider saving your best offer to those high LTV customers who couldn’t make it.

The most successful personalisation strategies will belong to operators who take full advantage of the data at their disposal – those who build detailed profiles of their customers and use this information to tailor their tactics appropriately. By showing that you have listened to players and are thinking about their needs at all times, you will secure a loyal base of users that keep coming back.

Jonathan Patterson, Qubit’s egaming industry lead