A Winning Combination for Bonus Strategies

IN THIS WHITEPAPER

In today’s highly competitive iGaming industry, finding new ways to stand out, attract, and retain players is not easy for operators. Especially when the latter, as consumers, are becoming increasingly educated and looking for meaningful experiences. Therefore, personalised bonuses and gamification are crucial for creating unique player journeys in 2023’s environment.

This whitepaper explores the importance of these strategies and provides best practices and insights from our 15+ years of experience in iGaming.

Read on to gain a comprehensive understanding of how to take advantage of personalised bonuses and gamification to drive player engagement and loyalty and implement these techniques in your operations.

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iGaming in 2023consumer trends

Gamification

Out of the 10 key trends Euromonitor outlines in its Global Consumer Trends 2023 report1, the one that stands out across industries is gamification.

Add personalisation to the mix and you get the ideal recipe to gain and retain more customers, as this once niche segment becomes a mass-market opportunity for providers to convert gamers into depositors.

Personalisation

73% of consumers2 expect brands to understand their unique needs and expectations and 71% of consumers3 expect brands to deliver personalised interactions, while 76% get frustrated when it does not happen.

The study goes on to underline that brands making use of personalisation are growing 40% faster than their counterparts.

Considering that, for example, Europe’s most popular iGaming product by revenue in 2022 was casino4, operators should take the time to understand who their players are and what they want to improve acquisition and retention.

Know your players

Player segmentation

Understanding your customers is a key aspect in creating the right strategies to grow your business.

You can create intricate and spectacular campaigns, but if they do not appeal to (or are not understood by) your player base and target markets, they will fail.

To maximise the impact of your strategy while minimising the costs, player segmentation is vital.

Understand your players

All players are important, but not all are equally valuable for your business.

For example, generally, only 5% of casino players are VIP users, contributing to 60%-80% of its revenue. Therefore, one of the easiest ways to segment your customers is by identifying your VIP players.

You can start segmenting your players based on demographics.

Localisation, wagering, and gaming behaviour are other segmentation criteria to help you better understand who your players are and what they want.

However, in our 15+ years of experience collaborating with tier-1 operators, we have learned you need to dig deeper and consider all the relevant aspects of their behaviour to be able to offer tailormade experiences.

That is why we suggest also looking into the following:

• wallet transactions

• logins

• game preferences

• role changes

A study published in the Journal of Business Research5 states that the habit is more likely to shape retention than customer satisfaction, so that is why it is

fundamental to analyse past behaviour data.

Adapting to today’s player behaviour

In today’s highly competitive iGaming industry, offering more bonuses than your competition to attract and retain players is simply not enough.

Consumers expect personalised experiences.

Therefore, your acquisition and retention campaigns must be creative, genuine, and personalised to your players’ needs and desires.

Player behaviour data has a vital role in creating efficient strategies to help your business grow, so aggregate your insights and use them as fundamentals when implementing the time-tested acquisition and retention iGaming tactics such as bonuses and gamification.

Gamification essentials in 2023

Top gamification benefits for operators

1. It attracts real players and not so much the bonus abusers.

2. It makes it more difficult for players to leave your website for they are losing their gamification progress, levels, or partiallyearned-out rewards.

3. It can foster repeated visits and interactions, increase loyalty and even train users on the usage of a specific platform or product.

From a player perspective, gamification is a fun opportunity to experience the thrill of a tournament or mission to win prizes. It keeps them exited and engaged, while strengthening their bond with your brand.

Gamification can also be used to reactivate inactive players by offering them soft challenges with attractive rewards, or free entry in tournaments. However, as players are motivated by different rewards, we recommend balancing monetary rewards with entertainment, based on the behavioural segmentation of your users.

Cross-product gamification

Make use of cross-product bonusing to expand the gamification experience across verticals and engage sports punters that also like a slot challenge.

Between 5-10% of users in a sports and casino operation are betting on both products.

For casino and sportsbook operators, cross-product promotions are excellent for business growth and customer satisfaction. They come with a series of neat advantages, including:

1. increased Customer Lifetime Value,

2. optimised profitability for your bonus campaigns,

3. seamless experiences for customers across your verticals.

A straightforward gamification scheme

Start by creating a set of milestones for your players to reach, with rewards and unlocks.

Introduce a brand currency (such as frequent player points) and allow players to spend it on benefits, like free spins or a tournament ticket.

Build choice-driven paths: once players perform challenge A, they get to choose between challenge B and C.

Gamification tools

Considering what happens behind the scenes, a central bonus system that supports dependencies between bonus programs can be an especially useful tool for such a strategy. Creating pathways and crossroads with mutually exclusive options can make for rich and fully automated player journeys.

BonusEngine Tip

We recommend CRM tools such as Optimove and FastTrack that contribute significantly to making your job easier in this respect, as well as PAM platforms that have the capacities of assigning roles and tags to players.

You can tailor bonusing programs around player eligibility attributes, such as roles or tags (segment), country, referral IDs etc., which will then automatically grant the right reward to the right player.

Strategic gamification rewards to increase your turnover

Here are some of the behind-the-scenes actions that help you create a mutually beneficial experience and two great strategies to extend player sessions in a natural way.

Rewards triggered by wagering targets appearing to the player as progress bars or similar, such as when an operator creates a wagering program with recurring or individual levels that trigger free spins, free bets, and other rewards.

Such features can also be set up behind the scenes so that the player is rewarded with (seemingly) random bonus drops every now and then.

Tournaments scheduled to create specific times and intervals when players benefit from logging in to play, as opposed to randomly accessing casino games.

Such actions have the clear benefit to increase the predictability of your gambling business by shaping more organized players’ interactions with your website while offering to your players systematic and frequent actions that will further boost their loyalty.

BonusEngine Tip

Opt for a software that allows you to create in-detail efficient bonusing strategies, empowers you to craft rewarding programs and manage player acquisition, retention, and engagement across all your brands and verticals.

What to look for in a bonusing product:

• Wagering-based challenges that can hold any number of levels, mapped to the same type of bonuses or different ones.

• The possibility to create tournaments across verticals with different win conditions and automatic rewarding of prizes.

• Campaign association, which allows you to create dependencies between various bonus programs.

• Player eligibility filters that enable you to target the desired segments.

Top extra features to look for:

• Features that reduce your operational load

• Features that decrease the risks for your online casino

• To create a seamless and localised experience for your players

Boost player acquisition through personalised bonuses

As an online casino operator, you are already aware that you have little chance to differentiate your brand from competitors solely through gaming content.

Therefore, you must strive to offer your potential customers a distinct experience than your competitors.

Start by analysing the gambling behaviour of the customer segment most profitable for your online casino and create tailoured bonuses to attract new players like them.

All players want bonuses, but not all players are equally valuable for your brand. Therefore, to optimise your efforts and minimise your costs, we recommend focusing on the customer segment most profitable for your business.

BonusEngine Tip

Use the data you already have in CRM to understand what makes them tick. Here are the questions you should find answers to:

• Which welcome / first-time offer did they access?

• Which was the next offer they enjoyed?

• Do they prefer a certain type of offer (free spins, free bets, cumulated bonuses etc.)?

• Do they prefer in-game bonuses or cross-game challenges, tournaments?

Once you have this data, or some of it, you can go on to create promos that the new players you are looking for will actually want.

Boost player retention through personalised bonuses

The ironclad rule of business states that keeping your customers is more profitable that acquiring news ones.

To underline that player retention is cheaper and easier, a Bain and Company study discovered that a 5% increase in customer retention can translate into 25% higher profits.

Data across business sectors indicates than customer acquisition is five times more expensive than customer retention7. We cannot stress enough how vital increasing the player lifetime value (LTV) is.

Another critical KPI when talking about LTV is churn rate: how many of your active players lapse from one month to the next.

More likely than not, you will find that the churn rate is higher among new active players than when looking at all active players, which goes to show that the earliest phase is the most critical.

Our data show that the difference in churn is +/-20% higher for players that placed their first bet last month vs players that have been with a website longer than that. Thus, there is a lot to gain from making sure new players stick around.

According to aggregate data from PartnerMatrix (our affiliate marketing software platform and agent management system for casino and betting operators) based on more than 60,000 gambling affiliates, the average CPA (cost per acquisition) in the iGaming industry varies around $50-100 per acquisition, and for the casino vertical specifically the CPAs go even higher.

The CPA varies, being influenced by a multitude of factors, and there is no unique recipe for success regarding obtaining better player LTVs, but in our experience, online casinos that employ gamification fare exponentially better.

In terms of gamification, our experience demonstrated that online casinos that implement bonus gamification, such as tournaments and missions, increase their percentage of player acquisition and player retention. Furthermore, according to a YouGov study, gamification creates emotionally connected customers that have a 306% higher LTV.

Bonus gamification based on player behaviour can be a differentiator that allows your brand to be creative in offering your customers a better experience.

Want to learn more about bonusing and gamification? Read here.

BonusEngine Tip

Choose a bonus system built with the purpose of helping you deliver bonuses as products to the right players, on time, that acts like a central control unit that uses automation and data management to help you plot the course for your bonuses.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Gamification and personalisation are key for iGaming in 2023. Understanding your players through segmentation (demographics, localisation, wagering, past behaviour etc.) permits catering to their needs to increase acquisition and retention.

Cross-product promotions (such as cross-vertical tournaments, special awards, badges) can expand the gamification experience across verticals, optimise profitability, and improve customer satisfaction.

To improve player acquisition, create the profile of your most valuable player and tailor bonuses to attract similar new players.

Bonus gamification, such as tournaments and missions, increases player acquisition and retention.

Bonus gamification based on player behaviour can differentiate your brand and improve retention.

ACCESS UNLIMITED REWARDS FOR YOUR PLAYERS

At EveryMatrix, we understand the importance of attracting and retaining your most valuable players. That is why we created the ultimate bonusing solution: BonusEngine.

BonusEngine is the time-tested must-have solution for casino and sports bonusing and gamification, created with the sole purpose of boosting player acquisition, retention, and reactivation.

KEY BENEFITS

BonusEngine

Offers a multitude of bonus types for acquisition, gamification, retention or reactivation, be it sports, casino or both

Encompasses limitless ways to reward player loyalty: cash bonuses, free spins, free bets, casino and sports tournaments, challenges, cashback and more

Is easy to configure: copy and edit existing bonus programs or configure in-depth specialised programs

Gives you full control of bet conditioning through player eligibility filters

Allows you to experiment with versatile triggers

Is the future-proof solution for cross selling across verticals