Don’t gamble your customers away. This article will highlight the most important marketing questions you will need answers to.
Online gambling companies know that retaining customers and growing revenues from loyal users beats user acquisition efforts when it comes to return on investment (ROI). They are aware of the importance of customer satisfaction and timely, personalised offers to keep user churn at a minimum. If you are already collecting and processing data from your users, but you want to drill deeper, understand better and forecast more precisely your customers’ behaviour, we have summarised the three most useful mathematical models you can apply for an improved online gambling marketing analytics strategy. Applying mathematical simulations and algorithms to your user data can deliver tangible business results and have a direct effect on increasing revenue, reducing churn and getting the most out of your marketing spend.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Why do you need focused analytics efforts?
Online gambling platforms are operating in a dynamic market. The industry is quick to adopt new technologies, but is also dependent on local, regional and, sometimes, even corporate regulations.
According to a Statista report, the online gambling business had a volume of 37.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2015, and, according to forecasts, this will increase to 59.8 billion U.S. dollars by 2020 . Europe has the largest online gambling market in the world with a market size of 18.1 billion U.S. dollars (2015) and is set to remain the dominant market for online gambling and betting throughout 2025.
Online casinos are adopting cryptocurrencies instead of, or as a complement to, standard payment methods due to their advantages – full anonymity, fast payments, no double conversion, zero commission, no geographical limits, etc. According to Bitcoin Strip, more than 24.5 billion crypto-bets have been made in 2017 and 2018.
On the other side, there are rising concerns towards the increasing number of addictions in some countries and other ethical concerns. This is pushing even more media providers and outlets to impose additional restrictions on gaming advertising or look for ways to empower consumers to block adverts on their own.
Overall, when creating a marketing strategy, online gambling platforms need to balance between diverse local ethical and regulatory issues and the increasing complexity of data sources and technologies – mobile, blockchain, etc. With all these complex factors in mind, it is easy to get distracted what marketing questions you should be focusing on and what topics are of strategic importance to your business goals.
That is why we have summarised the most important questions you should be asking right now and looking for answers within your customer data. This a very focused way to improve your online gambling marketing analytics strategy.
QUESTION 1
How are your customers using your product?
THE ANSWER
To understand the answer, apply customer journey analytics.
Traditionally, every business has a customer journey map – a single representative journey of how a user interacts with your organisation through a variety of channels. Customer journey analytics reveals the wide variety of paths that real customers actually take across channels and identifies the most significant ones. Only by looking at the customers’ experience through their own eyes—along the entire journey taken—can you really begin to understand how to meaningfully improve touchpoints and performance overall.
For example, a journey mapping project for an online gambling platform may uncover that a majority of new sign-ups come from affiliate advertising platforms, but by employing journey analytics, you can go a step further and discover the answers to much more complex questions, such as:
- What steps did clients that ultimately signed up for your website take before being exposed to ads on an affiliate’s website?
- What steps did clients that did not sign up take prior to seeing those ads?
- When is the best time to interact with a given client?
- What is the best channel to interact with the client?
- What other paths do clients take?
- What types of clients take a certain path?
- How do we add value for each client in a given context?
You can examine the customers’ cumulative experience across multiple touchpoints, multiple channels, and over time.
QUESTION 2
How can you make your customers happier and influence them to spend more?
THE ANSWER
To understand the answer, apply segmentation analysis & propensity models.
Customer Segmentation classifies your customer base into distinct groups. These classifications are often based on multi-dimensional customer information, such as observed customer purchases and product usage behaviour, demographic characteristics or even self-reported product preferences, needs and attitudes.
If you are looking to understand not only past, but also predict possible future behaviour, then the best way to approach the task is to create a propensity model. These models look for customer features that differentiate buyers from non-buyers. Basically, creating a propensity model compares a customer to a generalised image of the historical buyers and assigns a score – propensity to buy or propensity to upsell in the case of existing customers.
A micro-segmentation model, based on available user-level data, can be used to properly understand your customer, to design the right products and craft the right offers. In other words, you can personalise offers on a much wider scale, not only for premium players.
Segmentation models based on consumers’ historical behaviour and predicted future behaviour can also be the basis for a real-time marketing strategy – be it a time-to-event models or automated event detection. Getting to the user at the exact right time can be of great impact to certain segments of online gambling, e.g. sports betting.
QUESTION 3
What tactics and channels from your marketing mix are performing best?
THE ANSWER
To understand the answer, apply marketing mix modelling.
There is a wide variety of acquisition channels that are part of your mix – display networks, affiliate, email, etc. If you are familiar with traditional attribution models such as “first touch” or “last touch”, you are also aware of their shortcomings. One of those key disadvantages is they do not take into account the value of each touch point and oversimplify the customer journey, boiling it down to one touch point that has driven the conversion. But consumers are not simple and relying on a traditional attribution model can skew the results and mislead you to undervalue the importance of certain touch points, especially if their purpose is not to directly convert, but to educate or build brand credibility.
Marketing Mix Modelling is the process of identifying which digital and offline touch points have contributed the most to your revenue generation and profit. It allows you to understand which channels are most effective for your strategy and maximise your efforts there. Its main advantage is that it takes the total effect of marketing actions over time and helps you understand the long-term effect of all drivers on business performance.
Short term effect + Intermediate effect + Long term effect = Total Sales Effect
Direct buy+ Creating curiosity+ Brand building+ = Total Business Performance
Types of data you need for marketing mix modeling:
- Product data – pricing, promotions, launches/product changes, retention, etc.
- Advertising data – promotional, competitive, service
- Market outcome data – sales, revenues, profits
- Environmental data – macroeconomics data, industry data, etc.
Achieve your goals with advanced analytics
Our client, a major UK-based online gambling company, was looking for a partner to help them analyse customer usage and create an upsell model. This analysis was further enhanced through text analytics performed on online comments and key driver analysis to identify potential drivers and their influence on customer satisfaction.
We deployed an analytical model that assigned propensity to upsell scores to customers based on their CRM and usage data. We also scraped various online sources to uncover what customers are talking about and how to improve it through identifying the most impactful topics.
Our analytics model resulted in an increase in upsell campaigns by 11%, by better targeting promoter customers. The insights from the text analytics driver analysis were then used for strategic customer experience (CX) campaigns.
Taking the leap
At GemSeek, we deploy data-driven insights to solve our clients’ most pressing business chal¬lenges. We work to unlock our clients’ data and mobilise the organisation to deliver maximum potential with new and existing customers. No matter the circumstances, every company has valuable data that could be put to better use in a cost-effective way. Take the chance now to improve your online gambling marketing analytics strategy.
I am not sure what budget I could allocate to an analytics project? A large initial investment is not a prerequisite to reap the benefits of Big Data analytics. We can start with a pilot project and identify areas where we can dig deeper. Regardless of your initial budget constraints, we will focus on unlocking the potential of your data to increase revenues and profit.
Would I see a positive ROI?
We are here to help you fully monetise the value of your data – by acquiring new customers or engaging existing ones in a more efficient way. We are also experienced in helping companies develop retention strategies and reduce churn- the number of leaving customers. These are all areas that impact directly your business results.
