A former CEO and mentor of mine once gave me one of my favourite pieces of advice about sales and marketing, and it’s a mantra that should forever hold true – “Our very best customer is the one we already have.” But the reality is that as much as organic growth depends upon new customer acquisition, too many businesses do not do enough to retain, nurture and develop those who are already onboard.
iGaming is an industry that has struggled with customer retention from day one. It is a sector that is awash with introductory promotions and offers targeting new players, seeking to exploit their greed and lure them away from their competitors. This is an ultra-competitive environment, and your fiercest rival is only a click or two away. Not only that, but with so much shared content, player loyalty becomes a commodity and as we all know, commodity broking is pretty much all about money.
Bigger brains than ours have long considered the dilemma of player retention, but one conclusion we have arrived at is that the sector could do better when it comes to personalisation. iGaming still lags a long way behind other online specialists when it comes to delivering a personalised user experience. Consider Amazon, or Netflix, both of which most of us use, and think about how simple – and yet sophisticated – are their approaches to personalisation and, as a result, loyalty and growth.
Personalisation is the pathway to profit
Personalisation consists of tailoring a product or service to accommodate the needs and preferences of specific individuals. Personalisation is used by a multitude of organisations to increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, enforce branding and improve website metrics. Personalisation is an essential component within social media, with data available from a user’s social graph used by third party application software to personalise communications. Personalisation is then achieved based upon a user’s characteristics, demographics, interests, intent, purchasing or any other pre-determined parameter. The relationship between each user and the site can then be personalised to drive specific actions.
The challenge for most iGaming brands is that returning players are too often presented with what is virtually the same generic offering, in terms of game content and sports betting. And very often, past activities can be ignored. All players leave fingerprints in the form of previous activities, and these should be collected and analysed as a matter of course. If this individually specific ‘insight’ is then automatically used to present the player with a unique experience, the potential to build loyalty and increase longevity is obvious.
Curated content should be a no-brainer
The typical player, returning to a typical gaming site, will invariably be confronted by a maze of a content matrix. Each portfolio will hold thousands of games, with many more now being added on a weekly basis. How are players meant to know all that is available? How are they supposed to identify tomorrow’s favourites? The same applies to sports betting, with bettors presented with pretty much the same tableau of sports, events, leagues and markets every day of every week. Such an approach lacks all ambition.
The eminent US psychologist, Barry Schwartz, teaches us that it is natural to become confused and overwhelmed when presented with too many options, and his book The Paradox of Choice concludes that ‘more’ is actually ‘less’. It is interesting to note that the majority of iGaming operators actually like to boast about the number of games in their portfolio, as if it might be a good thing…
Following the lead set by Netflix
Each new Netflix customer is presented with the full range of categories and titles, as you might expect. But this generic introduction then becomes the only point in the relationship when the customer’s personal preferences and choices are not woven in to the ‘recommendation engine’, to provide personalisation of context and choice going forwards. From the first contact, individual customer inputs are collected, and every future presentation and offering becomes personalised.
Like Netflix, a typical iGaming or sports betting site will offer hundreds of titles and permutations. And yet unlike Netflix, so many gaming and betting sites do not use the technology at their fingertips to maximise the personalisation of the user experience.
The Delasport Example
Gibraltar-based Delasport, a global provider of turnkey software solutions for online sports betting operators, are leaders in this player-centric approach. Their goal is to perfect the user interface, so that operators provide their players with maximum service at minimum friction. Delasport’s mobile UX allows smooth player navigation and elevates their experience through the many sports events and markets with intelligent categorisation, automation and personalisation. The company presents sports events based on past player activities and by geo-location. For example, the second league sports event will be given the top UX position for players who live near to a participating team. The ongoing goal is to create a better product by continuous learning of the player activities, identifying deep insights into player behaviours and offering personalised betting opportunities.
