Why combining realtime and batch data is the only way to keep players engaged

Last year, a Gartner survey found that 66% of marketers indicate that event-triggered multichannel marketing is their primary approach for delivering marketing messages to customers and prospects. However, this number comes up well short when compared to 87% that back in 2017 projected that their organisation’s multichannel marketing would be primarily event-triggered by 2019.
Why the difference?
As marketers attempted to make their event-driven dreams a reality, vendors focused on providing realtime data solutions. Vendors worshiped the values of realtime data as a solve all. If you are contextually relevant, players will react favourably to your campaigns and promotions.

However, players aren’t as simple as “account balance lower than €100.” They are complex, have a history with brands and expect to be recognised by the operator they are interacting with. Marketers discovered that event-driven marketing does not equal realtime data-based marketing, the hard way.

To fulfill marketers’ requirements and meet player expectations, technologies need to adapt a hybrid approach. Player data is similar to the human brain and as you may know the human brain has two categories.

Professor Daniel Kahneman called them System 1 and System 2, but I prefer Mark Manson’s “feeling brain” and “thinking brain.” While the thinking brain is slow but conscientious, accurate and impartial, the feeling brain arrives to conclusions quickly, is impulsive, irrational and inaccurate.

In CRM marketing, the thinking brain is the result of the transformation, processing and unification of your historical player data, while the feeling brain are the triggers set to react to realtime data streams. If you only rely on the latter, you are bound to be inaccurate. But if you combine both and strike the balance, your CRM dreams might just come true.
Putting the combined approach to the test
Increasing engagement is one of the most important factors to ensuring that a player doesn’t churn. The more activities players have, the more likely they are to continue to play and deposit. With that said, a good time to encourage players to place additional bets is right after they experience a big win, while they are still feeling euphoric. However, the concept of a “big win” is relative to each player.

Using a combination of realtime and historical data, marketers can leverage a player’s payout ratio to trigger a web pop-up after a big win. A player’s payout ratio is a custom attribute, calculated as the total bet amount the player won, divided by the total bet amount the player made. For example, players who bet $100 and won $50 have a payout ratio of 0.5. A big win, and therefore a good experience, would be a payout ratio of 0.75 or higher.

To personalise this pop-up and increase the likelihood of conversion, you can segment your players into three tiers based on their lifetime average betting amount: low, medium and high. Doing so allows you to encourage players to increase their engagement, while providing personalised promotions, maximising your profits without discouraging players with conditions they will not meet.

Effectively rolling out a contextually relevant, event-driven marketing plan with personalised offers requires a smooth integration of both the thinking and feeling brains. By combining realtime customer activity with historical data, marketers can ensure that each customer’s complexity is taken into account before any campaign is sent.

Pini Yakuel is CEO and founder of Optimove, provider of industry’s leading CRM. Yakuel’s extensive experience in analytics-driven marketing, business consulting and sales, along with his innovative approaches to entrepreneurship and business-building, have earned him recognition as a thought leader. He has led Optimove to become a market leader, with hundreds of brands using his company’s software and services to orchestrate and automate highly-effective personalised CRM.