Talking the customer's language

Alex Dickerson, business development manager at CRM specialist Celerity, assesses how operators should be leveraging data

What’s the best way for online gaming companies to effectively market to their customers? Before you start thinking about crazy, attention-grabbing campaigns, or the latest mobile-friendly interface, you may want to look closer to home at the data shaped elephant in the room.

The best customer marketing will always be based on highly personalised campaigns delivered at the right times via the communications channels they actually consume. And the good news is you are likely to already have all the information you need to deliver this kind of campaign.

The bad news is that you’re faced with a new kind of challenge: properly analysing, understanding and acting on your data. Data, used well, drives personalisation and interaction. This in turn leads to great customer experiences and keeps players engaged, which ultimately leads to them spending more money.

Online gaming companies collect huge amounts of data every second of every day from their platforms. But whether it’s behavioural data about individuals, or data about broader patterns players follow, there is so much information it can be hard to know where to start. But it’s essential to take control.

Changing attitude
There needs to be a shift in attitude to data. It should no longer been seen as something to store and hand off to the marketing department. Data should be a gaming company’s fourth most clinical application aſter the platform itself, the data warehouse and the accounting and billing platform.

Why? Because your customers can be segmented in an incredibly varied amount of ways: the amount they spend, the games they play, the way they play these games, the time they play. These all affect your interaction with them.

Consumers expect brands to be centred on them. In the past, companies bombarded people with generic material until they got a response. Now, it’s the other way around and bigger players in the gaming industry are sitting up and paying attention.

Effective use
So how do you go about good data marketing? It should go through three stages: you need to get on top of the analytics and effectively query and analyse your data – if you can’t do this then it’s very hard to move to the second stage – orchestration.

You need to orchestrate your data marketing using intelligent, reactive rules and workflows – automating player marketing is the way to increase loyalty – otherwise you’re stuck with a one-size-fits-all strategy you apply to all players new and old.

Finally, you need to execute your strategy across all relevant channels. The important thing is not to get your message out on as many channels as possible and at as many times as possible, but to get your message out on the right channels at the right times, while ensuring you have a way to measure the effectiveness of your communications.

The days of mass email and inflexible ‘if this, then that’ automated marketing are over. People are spontaneous; their preferences quickly shift – even if a customer keeps playing the same game, the way they play that game changes day to day. At a fundamental level the market dictates that companies must always be in acquisition mode – easy access to hundreds of gaming services means you need to be constantly analysing which players get the latest bonuses and offers. But remember this is an investment.

You can’t expect big returns from two targeted campaigns and you need to be pragmatic and realistic. But it’s worth it, and the return on investment is significant. Data lets you talk properly to your audience. But to increase the profitability of the interactions, the conversation must be tailored and continuous.