Chasing that elusive bet

Engendering loyalty in the online gambling sector is tough. The majority of online gamblers have multiple accounts that they compare odds across, with the aim of placing a bet at the most competitive market rate. Part of the challenge for marketers is therefore spotting what a non-committing customer is looking at on the site and knowing what to do with that knowledge.

Gambling online is not something consumers generally fall into; for the majority it is a destination. And others don’t want to be ‘gamblers’ as such, they just want to bet on a specific event. When a large volume of registered customers will only ever have intended to ‘dip their toe in the water’ in the first place, how do you get them to place that elusive second bet?

It’s all too easy to send a plethora of bonus reminder emails when customers haven’t done something you want them to, like play more regularly, and send service-style emails when they have done something, such as adding funds to their account. To be innovative you need to know your customers intimately and craft communications accordingly for each individual but, to do that, you need effective insight.

The first step is to work out why the consumer has decided to try the service and how a company can identify and respond to their preferences. This, in turn, comes down to a strong marketing strategy, using consumer insight to develop an intelligent communication strategy based on clear analytical insight.

Unless a customer follows through on an action a provider can’t tell what the customer was planning to do. If a customer always logs-in, checks the odds of a certain sport or team and then leaves, the provider doesn’t really know whether or not their reason for visiting the site was satisfied. But if a provider can tell what a customer is doing then they can incentivise them to place a bet. The intelligent use of data analytics is a key requirement to be able to understand and then drive consumer behaviour.

Once a consumer is on your site, you have a pathway to be able to use persuasion marketing to get that bet. The combination of web analytics with A/B multivariate testing can be used to understand what works for which consumers and deliver a solution accordingly. For example, with odds chasers you can implement anti-defection measures as a result of monitoring behaviour ““ noting the absence of that behaviour and employing a strategy to combat customers defecting to other brands. You can also look at conversion metrics to further identify how to predict and encourage by identifying what behaviour a “free play” player exhibits before becoming a “registered” player.

Brands can use the analytical technique of behavioural character-based segmentation to determine player value and drive contact strategy. While typical segmentation works by either segmenting customers’ behaviour by using simple RFM variables (recency, frequency and monetary value), behaviour segmentation does more than just highlight your best and worst customers ““ it divides buyers into groups based on knowledge, attitudes, uses, or responses to a project.

Typically, as with any brand that is able to create an informed CRM strategy, holding all the data in the same environment is a must. Ensuring that you have a full Single Customer View (SCV) is vital to understanding your customers. This transactional data can come alive through data enrichment, where you can start to fully appreciate and recognise motivational drivers for visiting the site. By joining up behavioural and transactional data, and email systems in order to respond and engage with the players intelligently, the experiential chasm between the virtual and the physical can be seamlessly bridged.

At the heart of effective insight lies data quality. Duplicate accounts are increasingly commonplace, as normally inactive players who maybe just have the annual flutter on the National have a tendency to set up new accounts each time. Meanwhile, small-time opportunists will try and take advantage of free bets and bonus offers by registering duplicate accounts. This all creates issues for SCV, data quality, and data decay.

Tremendous scope exists around a true understanding of what the customer is looking at or doing. If you can tell your customers are predominantly Manchester United fans ““ as they always bet on that team ““ then you know you can enhance their experience by getting offers and ads placed to buy replica kits from an affiliate, further extending your revenue streams.