In today’s intensely competitive gaming market, the cost of player acquisition is high – and shows no signs of letting up. In this environment, it is certainly more profitable to hold onto existing players – rather than find new ones. Therefore, knowing how to sustain interest is as important as attracting it in the first place. For most casino marketers, that means creating effective casino loyalty marketing programs that foster player engagement.
Experiture’s suite of player engagement marketing tools can help you retain your players by enabling your loyalty marketing with triggered, automated multi-channel marketing programs for the entire player lifecycle – including online player portals — that can all help develop deep insights into players and attract their loyalty and business over time.
In this article, we will look at getting the most out of your casino’s loyalty marketing programs with online player portals.
Step 1: Make your Data Accessible
To lay the groundwork for player portals, your casino must first make data accessible to marketers – without relying on their IT departments to help them get insights.
Experiture’s centralized Marketing Data Warehouse can aggregate and integrate all your data and create a personalized experience for each player that enhances your brand in the consciousness of the player. For example, all the player data that you have in your organization can be aggregated with Experiture’s Marketing Data Warehouse—including demographic information, wager and other transactional information, loyalty tier membership, and more —so you can personalize your loyalty program for the specific needs and wants of your patrons.
Step 2: Create Player Portals
Once your casino has wrangled data into Experiture, it is easy for marketers to create, personalize, and maintain their loyalty program’s online player portals – without continuous involvement from IT. And with an online player portal, you have boosted your opportunity for player engagement. In fact, Americans now spend 4.4 hours per day in front of digital devices, and 90 percent of all media consumption is screen-based (mobile, laptop, PC, tablet, etc.). With players visiting their portals multiple times each week, you now have the ability to create sustained engagement with your players in between property visits.
Best Practice: Make Your Player Portals Responsive
When creating your player portals, it is critical to optimize the interface for multiple devices. Players are fickle — and switch between digital devices fluidly to view online content. As a result, players need their portal sites to translate well across devices. If your loyalty program portal is difficult to access on a mobile or tablet device — for example, by relying on complex menus that are not mobile-friendly — your players simply will not use it.
Step 3. Personalize your Player Portals
The key to loyalty is individualized communication. Your players need to feel that your offers are tailored to them personally.
With this in mind, it is critical to use the data you have on your players to personalize their portal experience. With Experiture, you can key off of the data you collect about players to present variable images and offer text. Are they table gamers? Show them an image of green felt, cards, and chips. Do they prefer slots? Show them a one-armed bandit. You can even personalize dynamic offers that are specific to the loyalty program tier to which the player belongs.
Step 4. Use your Player Portals to Close the Loop on your Other Marketing
The key to loyalty is individualized communication across disparate marketing channels — both traditional and digital. When players are recognized as the same person across all channels, engagement and redemption skyrocket.
Your player portal can help unify these channels — and help boost the results of your loyalty marketing — by centralizing offers you may be sending out via direct mail or email, and mirroring them on the online portal. As a multichannel marketing automation tool, Experiture can personalize your casino’s outreach across direct mail, e-mail, mobile, and more — and centralize these offers within your online player portal. Examples of marketing prorgrams that can leverage your player portal include on-boarding and activation campaigns, tiered loyalty offers, promotions and incentives, winback campaigns, and more.
Step 5: Use Social Media
Visiting a casino is a social event. In fact, over 70 percent of visits to your property are by two or more players. Gaming is inherently social in nature – and so your casino should acknowledge and reward social behavior. The best casino player portals enable players to share, brag, and invite friends to participate in casino promotions via social media. With Experiture, you can easily add social sharing, social follows, referrals, and more to your online player portals.
A Word of Advice: Executive Leadership is Imperative
The best casino loyalty programs offer a robust suite of features and opportunities for players to engage with properties in between visits. But they are far more likely to succeed if there is a company culture that stresses the importance of making data available for marketers to analyze and act upon, without relying on IT.
Experiture’s player engagement solutions can help enable this by giving casinos an easy way to make player data available to those who can most benefit from it — your marketing department.
The more committed you are to making data available for your loyalty marketing, the better Experiture will work for you.
Conclusion
Experiture’s suite of player engagement marketing tools can help you retain your players by enabling your loyalty marketing that marry online player portals with triggered, automated multi-channel marketing programs for the entire player lifecycle. When you put it all together, only Experiture can enable multichannel player engagement that marries online player portals with your other marketing efforts – and helps keep your property top-of-mind in between visits.
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