Friday view: The importance of dedicated mobile CRM

Dorothy Creaven, co-founder and CEO at Element Wave, discusses the emergence and subsequent importance of mobile-dedicated CRM

Churn, and continuing the whole player experience, is probably one of the biggest problems when it comes to mobile. Mobile gamblers can download anywhere from three to ten different gaming apps on their phones and it’s important to keep them retained and interested in what you’re doing. Because a lot of brands are competing against each other for time with those particular users, churn can be a pretty big obstacle from customers hopping between brands.

It’s a big problem not only in egaming, but across other industries. If you have a mobile app, then you have a problem with churn. A lot of brands and companies spend quite a bit of money designing and developing their mobile app, but ultimately if players aren’t using them there’s not much return on that investment.

The root cause can be anything from needing a good user experience when it comes to interacting the app, to load times. Mobile users are a fickle bunch and people have very short attention spans these days. If you click on a button within a mobile app and it takes two seconds to load, it’s game over.

Mobile-dedicated CRM has really started to grow over the last six months and there will be a really big focus on it this year. It’s not just about retaining them during a session within the app, but about retaining them over longer periods of time and increasing the lifetime value of each customer. It’s here to stay and is crucially important for any firm transporting onto mobile and looking at the multi-channel experience, whether they’re on desktop, mobile or anything else.

Experience is everything

What you need to do is create a nice, responsive user experience through a well-designed mobile app, and a lot of the time native apps can report different load times for moving between screens, loading information and clicking buttons. There’s been more of a focus now on bringing in user experience experts and designers, and that can make a big difference to the flow of the mobile app.

Get gaming

Often you can gamify your app and not necessarily by having a very obvious game. You can have little gaming elements within the app so you can actually receive two-way feedback between yourself and your players. The latest Apple release in iOS 8 means you can now have that two-way communication with your users and get a response. You could send out a notification saying ‘who do you think will be the first goal scorer’ in a particular match and get users to pick an option and perhaps receive a bonus bet if they get it right. Things like that can have a significant impact in driving usage and getting people using the app again.

The importance of analytics

Messaging all depends on context and all comes down to how well you know your customers. As long as you’re tracking what’s relevant to them, what are their preferences, what teams people are betting on, who are they most likely to bet on again you can draw a lot of conclusions as long as you have analytics ingrained in your app as well as push notification features. From studying a lot of mobile app players it’s really easy to consider their average bet or stake and target them based on what’s relevant and interesting.

Keep it relevant

You really need to keep any messaging efforts relevant to your customers. If people are really into handball and football, you know you can target them with offers relevant to those sports. But if you’re talking about ski jumping then that’s not as relevant, so you need to have that background of information as well. You can simply do that by tracking analytics within the app and setting it up so that you’re actually targeting various criteria they’re interested in.

Assess in real-time

Real-time analytics needs a top-class technology provider in order to give a good experience and information for the brands themselves. Real-time feedback can be a powerful solution especially if you’re targeting football fans at particular games, but also for real-time betting and live scores. The investment needs to be heavy on the technology side to make a real impact. Real-time analytics is a buzzword and is definitely an element of a successful marketing campaign, but it is only one element. There are other things you can use in conjunction with your marketing to make your CRM experience a good one.

Know your customer

Personalisation is another one of those buzzwords; no longer is it appropriate to send one message to all of your users. You really have to dig down and find out what people are actually interested in. You need to figure out what are the best times to target, perhaps it’s first thing in the morning or 11am or that evening. It comes down to studying your users and making sure you really understand them. It used to be the case that the focus was on the brand, but that switched to the customer and now it’s all about what the customer needs.

Invest in technology

Gambling operators have perhaps failed to crack personalisation because a major investment is needed on the technology side and I think this is going to happen over the next year. Personalisation takes time to get right but bringing the right technology partners on board can make it easier. Having those right partners can make it easier to integrate solutions into your mobile app.

Follow travel’s lead

There’s a lot of crossover between the gambling and travel industries. If you look at the likes of British Airways, Hotels.com and those kind of apps they really create a unique engagement experience. They only showcase information that’s very intimate that the user has previously been interested in. If you can take that example and bring it across to egaming it could be a success. There can also be a lot of success in targeting fans actually attending live football matches and if you look to target them in the same retailers target their customers that can work well.