The key to anxiety-free holiday promotions

Disclaimer! This article does not contain any fancy advice on how to make your life easier this holiday season. It may comfort you that almost everyone faces the same challenges in delivering that magical holiday season promotion. It is a summary of the mistakes I have made, wrapped in a slightly preachy tone.

Most common pain points revolve around planning, timing, communication and positioning, but the size and scale of operations you work for will dictate the challenges and mistakes. Those managing promotions for a large-scale operation will find it difficult to simply break the silos and collaborate. Quite common points of pain will be implementation of cross-product and cross-sell initiatives, and division of budgets. Get a senior guy in your team who can bring everyone to the table and define the broad objectives to be achieved.

The big boys have the budget and team size to roll out monster promotions, but then given the chain of command there will be that one poor soul who will end up setting the mechanics of a six-figure budget. And he will forget to add a zero or add an extra one in the back-office settings. Even distribution of efforts in execution is necessary to ensure success. It is also not surprising to find half-baked promotions with substandard design, no personalization and user experience. The usual excuses would be big numbers (or rewards) will be enough to get the players in, or the brand name is enough.

And last but the least, I do have a special place in my heart for the customer services team who will end working in shifts on these days.

The mid-sized and small operators

Try to avoid the ‘John Lewis syndrome’ of aiming for a big-ticket emotional response, instead look for smart hacks. A lot of ground is lost in trying to scale promotions to compete with the big boys. It simply leads to a promotion which may sound wonderful but usually fails to deliver because of low budgets and missing tools to bring the mechanics to life.

The basic question is who do you want to really target and why? Is a good place to start. For example, simply agreeing that the focus should be on retaining your active customer base and VIPs, and not letting them get poached by competitors is a good starting point.

If you have screwed up the entire year, don’t expect things to dramatically get fixed around the holiday season. The competition for share of wallet is not just with the peers within the industry but also external. The holiday spirit cannot be brought to life with just a static page decorated in green and red. At the core of every promotion and communication, an emotion has to be evoked and followed through with execution.

Simple questions like how easy should it be for the players to opt-in, how clear are the requirements, what messages are expected during the different stages of the promotion when asked during the planning phase should save you a lot of trouble.

Definitely have someone who can keep the entire crew grounded and balance the commercials with the intended level of creativity. It always helps define the uplift you expect across your segments and the ROI. Alternatively, do not let the reporting ninja’s hijack your ideas and be ready to take some risk if you believe that your concept is worth it.

Bhopendra Rathore is a CRM specialist and consultant with more than 10 years of experience in the online gaming industry. His portfolio includes working with industry majors like bwin.party, Mansion, Boylesports and Probability. He is currently the head of player retention at GG.Bet (an Evoplay Group company).