The world of online gaming is fiercely competitive, meaning that operators must provide the best user experiences to create a loyal player base for the long term. Customer retention is just as important as acquisition, especially when you consider the costs involved with acquiring new iGaming players in a highly competitive market.

In this article, we’ll explore strategies that operators can employ to attract more iGaming players and ensure they remain engaged for the longest possible time.

"How-to" strategies for player attraction and retention:

Promotions and offers
Make your promotions matter
Customer Relationship Management
Special events
Gamification
Cross-Products Approach
Responsible Gambling
Work with the right partner

Promotions and offers

Through promotions such as free spins, tournaments, missions, or special bonuses, players can be informed of exciting features and have the incentive to take part. But, to master players’ engagement, it is important to know what motivates them in the first place.

• Bonuses granted according to user activities like cashback on losses need to be adequate to the personal wagering pattern. For example, if a player usually wagers a €5 bet, granting 10 free spins of €1 will not be attractive.
• The mechanism of tournaments and leaderboards that run for a week or weekend should be based on points from win-to-bet multipliers and not on bets or wins. In this way, players who join the tournament late can still have the chance to win by being lucky to get a big multiplier over their bet. This mechanism also flattens the bet size allowing each player to play with their comfortable wagering size (except if a minimum bet is defined).
• When granting a bonus as a trigger to user action(s) it is better to grant the bonus immediately in real-time to ensure the best player experience. It is discouraging for a person to complete the requirements for a bonus and then have to wait to receive the award.

Make your promotions matter

Whatever promotions you end up choosing, you need to make sure that they are meaningful and not just there for the sake of it. Today’s players have never had more choices and will most likely be comparing your offering with the competition to see which has the best offers and promotions for new and returning players. To really stand out, you will need to be more creative, more generous, and more genuine in your approach to create a truer sense of value.

For instance, think about your high rollers that have a high source of income. They are likely to make up a considerable proportion of your revenue, so it’ll be in your interest to keep them engaged with your business. Competitors will likely be targeting them with special offers, so retaining top valued players be a priority. Consider giving them incentives and privileges that are separate from those offered to general iGaming players, such as tickets to events, special gifts, bigger more effective bonuses, and more dedicated customer service.

Promotional activities that involve cross-selling can also have a significant impact by raising awareness of your other products, platforms, and services. For example, if your business offers both online casino and sportsbook facilities to players, you’ll typically have two distinct sets of customers who prefer one or the other. By using cross-promotional strategies you can encourage them to explore other forms of iGaming to increase revenue streams and player retention.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms are tools used by many iGaming companies to retain their most important players to maximize long-term revenue and ROI on marketing investments. By creating deeper relationships between the business and players of all ages (including Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and even Boomers), you’ll be able to understand more about their needs, spending patterns, and preferences.

Building up a robust CRM system can make a real difference to your bottom line in the long run as it can be used to store and arrange various aspects of customer behavior, such as their game preferences, average bets, win rates, deposit amounts, and other datasets. Then, by aggregating and segmenting based on these different data sets, your team can go ahead and deliver promotions, offers, and relevant communications for more targeted and tailored experiences across the board.

Today’s technology allows progress from traditional communication channels such as email and SMS to push notifications and real-time engagement. This capability facilitates higher contextual and relevant personalized offers, resulting in more efficient retention.

Special events

Events are a powerful retention strategy that can be used to encourage players to keep on playing. By giving iGaming players special rewards based on completing certain tasks or reaching new milestones you can keep them engaged outside of the regular games they are already enjoying.

Events can come in many different forms depending on your marketing goals and branding. From offering ticket-based tournaments through to seasonal events such as Christmas, New Year, Halloween, and other important calendar moments, you can keep users interested and depositing all-year-round.

Gamification

Achievements, leagues, and tournaments let users feel like they're part of a community while also encouraging healthy competition, resulting in a genuine sense of accomplishment when specific goals are met.

Gamification's positive psychological reinforcement provides players the joy of overcoming the system, completing a milestone, or even unlocking a special feature. Even a minor fanfare when they reach a specific number of bets or their registration anniversary might make them feel like they are a part of something and that the operator is paying attention to them.

Gamification in online gambling can foster stickiness (repeated visits and interactions), rewards, retention, loyalty, and can even train players on the usage of a specific product or platform. These tools typically include missions, tournaments, badges, levels, points, and community leaderboards.

Cross-Products Approach

In a sports and casino operation, between 5-10% of the players are betting on both products. Conducting retention activities like the above on both products at the same time guarantees a higher level of engagement. Traditionally, casino players enjoy enhanced gamification and engagement features, far more than sports bettors. Having a cross-product approach retains not only casino players and sports bettors separately, but also mutually.

Responsible Gambling

All the above information, tips, and techniques must of course take responsible gambling into consideration so that bettors and players can remain safe from any overdoing. That’s why any player engagement activities must adhere to different regulations per market that observe responsible gambling.

Work with the right partner

The iGaming industry and available technologies are changing all the time, so it stands to reason that operators and their suppliers must change with it. With so much competition out there, retention has never been more important. By considering the above approaches you’ll stand a better chance of standing out amongst the competition. After all, attracting new iGaming players is just half the battle: keeping them is where the challenge lies.

Study your competition, get to know your customers, and don’t be afraid of exploring new ways of working. With decades of experience behind us, the team at Delasport is here to help you achieve the above.

The post How to attract iGaming players and retain them [Updated] first appeared on Delasport.

In a competitive environment where bonuses can be the differentiator, operators need to take another look at their approach to understand how to increase bonus effectiveness and distinguish themselves from the competition. In this article, we’ll be looking at the areas that operators can explore to take their retention capabilities to the next level.

These fields you need to consider if aiming at better bonusing:

Flexibility
Ecosystems
Big data
Automation
Gamification
Innovation

Flexibility

As iGaming software providers, our role is to provide operators with best-in-class software solutions that enable them to offer their players the best rewards in creative and flexible ways. This means that modern bonus platforms need to go one step further to offer the agility and feature sets to accommodate the needs of today, and to be ready for any new integrations, technologies, regulation requirements changes, and more.

A flexible, bonus engine should allow creating bonus bundles, versatile rule definitions with games, events, player segmentation, and actionable triggers like deposits, wagering, losses, logins, and other interactions.

Ecosystems

By thinking of bonus solutions in terms of an ecosystem rather than standing alone, operators will quickly realize how powerful they can be. This line of thinking around bonus engine means that operators can retain their players across verticals such as casino, live casino, and sports.

This more open approach also means that other solutions can be integrated into the wider offering, with specialist software providers being able to implement powerful retention features.

Leverage big data

Knowledge is power and understanding players' needs has never been more important. To excel in player retention the platform should continuously learn about the user's activities using machine learning modules and AI applications. By analyzing their sessions, operators will be managed to reveal deep insights into player behavior and offer personalized betting opportunities.

Big data is already being used by some of the largest companies on the planet to help them target new customers and deliver better experiences for existing ones. With personalized recommendations and tailored offers, data can help operators get the right products in front of the right customers, at the right time.

In terms of the iGaming industry, we are already seeing such implementations through game recommendation engines and reward campaigns. Through more effective personalization, operators can deliver more targeted experiences to players based on their behavior, preferences, and profile.

As technology continues to evolve, so does its ability to collect and organize data. The challenge lies in knowing how best to interpret that data to inform future campaigns and initiatives. For instance, segmenting player bases in more granular ways can open up reward schemes that go deeper than just ‘new and existing player’ and can instead create more detailed groups up to a single-player level on qualitative information such as demographics (determining different ages including Millennials and Gen Z) and psychological profiles (depending on the user behavior).

Automation

Automation is the other side of the big data coin. After all, what use is having all this information if it cannot be processed and understood properly? Analyzing and acting upon all of the insights gained by the collection of big data can be an impossible task for human interpreters, or at least will come with huge operational costs. By employing automation and artificial intelligence, operators will be able to tailor highly targeted offers and promotions for more granular customer segments, ultimately leading to higher ROIs and lower costs across the board.

Automation isn’t only useful for promotions and retention. By being able to interpret all the data, platforms will have more flexibility than ever before, with more features and configurations to fine-tune experiences at a player level and react in real-time.

More than bonuses

In recent years we have seen new tools added to allow operators to successfully retain their players such as leaderboard-based tournaments, missions, levels, badges, points, and more. Through gamification and a highly configured and specific bonus system, the rewarding process can be fully automated for an all-around experience that gives end-users the best performance possible.

Missions boost players' engagement, making gameplay fun and challenging by creating real-time tasks for users to complete. For instance:

- Badges allow keeping people feel more engaged by giving free spins or bonuses with each badge.
- Points allow users to unlock new games and encourage more gameplay.
- Leaderboards and tournaments allow operators to create competitions and reward players with daily, weekly, and monthly prizes.

Never stop innovating

Operators are operating in a highly competitive environment. iGaming platforms should supply a flexible bonus engine and advance retention tools by utilizing the most advanced technology. While bonuses have long been a staple of any operator, simply offering them without any of the above considerations means your gambling business cannot reach its full potential.

Contact us to learn more about how to increase bonus effectiveness and take players retention to the next level to offer a superior iGaming experience through real-time engagement.

The post How to increase bonus effectiveness in iGaming first appeared on Delasport.

But how to do it in the best possible way?

Here are six factors you need to take into consideration when choosing the best iGaming platform provider for you:

1. Business strategy and target region
2. Choosing the right software provider
3. Trust your business in experienced hands
4. Stand out with unique and competitive features
5. Check credentials and licenses
6. “Managed services” are another key to success

1. Business strategy and target region

First of all, you need to do your homework and prepare your business plan. Decide what your target market and region are and if the desired growth is achievable in terms of size and time that it will take. Estimate how quickly you can grow and how well you can position yourself among the competition. Perform research in your business niche and establish your competitors, as well as their advantages so you can better understand your business requirements. Turn your competition’s weaknesses into opportunities for your business, having an edge over them.

2. Choosing the right software provider

Main factor for success is to enter the industry “the right way” by choosing the best iGaming software provider for your plans and business needs. Stepping in well-prepared with the proper tools at hand and an easy-to-follow business strategy is essential for the successful establishment of your brand and good initial positioning on the market.

The fierce competition in the sports betting and casino industry would make it harder if you haven’t chosen the appropriate operational, retail, and product development tools and capabilities. Going with a flexible, stable, and customizable iGaming platform is pretty much “a must” and very important to think to consider.

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3. Trust your business in experienced hands

It’s easier said than done. Finding and choosing a reputable iGaming provider to partner with and watch your business strategy go into action is a must. Make sure that he has the industry knowledge and expertise to help you grow your brand. A leading sportsbook solution provider with an extensive portfolio of partners, suppliers, and payment providers in your target market is what you want. It is the main factor ensuring that you’ve made the best choice to stand out among the competition.

Find out more information about his main product and retail solutions and what makes them unique. A white label solution that is stable and customizable will enable you to brand your desired platform with the features you need to achieve your strategic goals.

4. Stand out with unique and competitive features

Make sure your brand stands out and is competitive in the market by offering a unique product to your customers and users.

But what makes a branded product unique?

Your gaming platform/product should be versatile and flexible, as well as multi-optional offering added value. The white label solutions features have to be customized to not only best fit your business needs but to be adjusted in accordance with the requirements and needs of the market and region you’re operating in. Fully localized sports betting and iGaming platform with integrated local payment methods and marketing campaigns that will best suit your customer’s needs will surely set make your unique offering stand out.

5. Check credentials and licenses

Take time to analyze the software provider’s background, history, licenses, and certificates. Check if their products are licensed to operate in compliance with all regulatory requirements of the target market. The certificates that the company holds will give ease of mind that they are operating in compliance with all standards and requirements.

6. “Managed services” are another key to success

Risk management, customer support, marketing, finance, fraud detection, and so on is what your business needs.

Consider what kind of managed iGaming services you require and if the provider is able to offer them. A skilled and well-trained customer care team will maximize your customers’ experience and increase loyalty and engagement. Effective fraud detection and expert risk management may help you increase the profit of your sportsbook while keeping the risk in check and under control.

Choose a good iGaming software provider that will give you all the tools and support to enable your growth and help you establish a successful and reputable brand. And also, will continue to develop their outstanding offering adjusting it to your needs throughout your long-lasting and profitable partnership.

Summary

In conclusion, we can add that starting a successful gambling business is not an easy task. The competition is strong, the demands are big, but the “price” is even bigger.

Going with the all-in-one solutions is the perfect choice you can make. So choosing the best provider with a complete iGaming platform for your needs is essential! Make sure all six factors above are available and ensure the bright future of your business.

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The post How to choose the best iGaming software provider for you first appeared on Delasport.