For a long time, Asian online gambling operators have been focused solely on acquisition. But to build sustainable and successful businesses in what is becoming a more competitive market, they will need to also consider retention.
At present, many don’t understand retention, how to monitor and analyse the flow of players walking in and out of their digital doors, let alone the tools at their disposal to drive engagement and foster loyalty.
Here is a quick guide to help you better understand retention and reactivation, and keep your hard-earned players coming back for more:
New active churn:
The first thing to do is understand how many newly acquired players are staying around once they have burned through that overly generous welcome bonus you offered them. We call this new active churn, and here is how you work it out.
If you sign up ten players and five of them are active in the first week, five have already churned. This means the churn rate is 50%. Next week, if you have two actives the churn rate is 60% as we now calculate it based on the five, not the ten.
This is the new active churn rate. This can be done on a week on week basis for as long as required. You can also assess the churn rate across a particular period, in the above example it was 80% across the two weeks.
These calculations can help decipher how sticky a player is.
What is stickiness?
Stickiness is how loyal customers are to your brand. Stickiness is measured in hierarchical timeframes, which means it can refer to whether a player is active every day in a week, every week in a month, or for a number of months per year.
If a customer is 100% sticky, this means they play with you every day of the week over every month of the year. While this is the ultimate goal when it comes to retention, you will find that most players are less sticky.
A good stickiness rate is around 60%.
How to improve retention:
Leverage the data you collate and the detailed understanding it gives you about each player. You need to provide bonuses, incentives and rewards that encourage them to engage with your brand on an on-going basis, and not just as a one off.
While bonuses are certainly effective, they need to be structured in such a way that players are encouraged to keep playing via your casino brand in the long-term. This is to eradicate pesky bonus hunters.
This can be done by rewarding players for logging in every day of the week, depositing three times per month, or playing popular NetEnt game Gonzo’s Quest at least twice a month for an entire year. Rewards schemes are also a powerful tool at driving retention.
This is an area where European operators have become particularly creative; Casumo, for example, requires players to complete tasks to earn trophies – the more they collect the more levels they clear where additional prizes are unlocked.
In summary:
Player stickiness is pretty good in the online casino operators Flow Gaming works with, but new player churn is frighteningly high. New actives are making up a significant percentage of total actives, and this needs to change.
By deploying some of the tools mentioned above, new player churn will come down, which in turn will push player stickiness even higher. It will also help operators speed up the growth of their customer base, reducing their reliance on big players.
In short, it is no good bringing players in with generous bonus offers, only to watch them leave a few days later. Welcome bonuses need to be supported by proper retention campaigns that foster long-term brand loyalty.