Xtremepush to host acquisition and retention strategy session for US online casinos

Image source: SBC

The US igaming sector is thriving but casinos can still do more to onboard new players and increase wallet share, writes Brandon Asgeirsson from Xtremepush.

The company’s US Business Development Specialist was talking to SBC Americas ahead of Thursday’s (13 May @ 11 am ET) webinar on High Stakes Player Engagement: Key Acquisition and Retention Strategies for US Casinos. You can register for it HERE.

Everyone in this industry knows that customer acquisition cost (CAC) is astronomical, even just to get a potential player to your website. So that nurturing process should begin as soon as they arrive. 

There’s a huge amount of work being done to expedite the anti-money laundering and Know-Your-Customer processes, and obviously we encourage casino operators to continue to optimize those, but that’s only one aspect of the onboarding.

Players won’t always complete the registration process on their first attempt. They may need to submit multiple documents or they may need to visit the casino in-person. 

So you need to make it as easy as possible for a player to get themselves set up. You’re looking at maybe two or three, if not more, visits before a player is actually in a position to make their first deposit and start playing.

And to optimize your volume of new accounts, you should be proactively nudging them through the process with emails, SMS or push notifications. It may require a combination of channels. But whatever channel you use, make sure you’re deep-linking the player back to the exact point in the process where they left off.

For the best results, we recommend you have a detailed, automated journey in place that factors in how much time has elapsed between each stage. Let’s say a player has got three quarters of the way through the process, but hasn’t been back for a week or so to complete the last step. You may need to offer a bonus to get them over the line. 

Or you might have a player that’s registered but has yet to make a deposit or play an actual game. Again, we’ll be asking “how are you segmenting this audience? what is your approach to get them active and engaged?”

And looking at the other end of the lifecycle, how are you pre-empting players that seem likely to churn, or may have already churned? I think that sometimes casinos wait until it’s almost too late to re-engage players. 

Ideally, you’d want a campaign running 24/7 that’s specifically engaging with VIPs and high-rollers who are showing signs of dropping off. They may be only active a handful of times in the last month, for example. If you wait until they are totally inactive then it’s going to be harder to win them back.

One of the major things we’ll be covering, across all of these use cases, is how to leverage the data that you’re collecting on your players so that each campaign is individually relevant. So if you know a player likes the slots, let’s make sure that’s reflected in the message. 

These are the kind of high-impact tactics we’ll be showing operators how to orchestrate as part of Thursday’s webinar. We’re expecting a big turn out for the event, and it’s shaping up to a hugely practical session. We look forward to talking more with operators on the day.