The expectations of an online casino are that growth needs to be incremental if it is to upgrade its product and become profitable. In fairness, the harnessing of an online gambling platform’s potential is a sliding scale that can lead to racking up outstanding numbers.
However, there is also a lot of volatility in the lifespan of an online casino and its audience. It can have a miraculous bubble of player acquisition success, driving its revenue through the roof at first glance. However, the long-term sustainability of a digital casino must adopt more than just an aggressive strategy and coast from there.
Sustainability means that an online casino must give you, the player/consumer, the option to pick between migrating to another brand or sticking around due to the benefit of remaining there. This is how the discussion also moves to a level where it becomes player-centric.
Each level of strategy that online casinos implement in their quest for growth will automatically have an impact on the opportunities that you can bag. They’re also interesting scenarios that can continue throughout your account span, turning digital gambling into an experience that goes beyond simply playing games of luck.
Entry-Level Attractions for Prospective Players
When it comes to player growth, we are talking about some of the most elementary and long-standing strategies that we’ve seen in iGaming.
There are several reasons why the status quo remains so, but some that we’ve observed and realized throughout the years are familiarity with these models, cost-efficiency, and the tried-and-tested status of such formulas.
Entry-level offers within the coupon code family are still extremely popular among both online casinos and players. It’s very likely that a new online casino would start with 50 free spins on registration no deposit as its opening attraction (or another similar freebie), followed by an on-deposit welcome bonus.
In this scenario, you have simple bursts of bonus gameplay; one is a freebie to nudge you into registering and adding yourself to the casino’s crude number of users. The other is an incentive that looks to convert you into, essentially, a paying customer.
Once you’re past this bridge, you’ve officially become a fully-fledged user at an online casino. Your status is quite clear – a point where many online casinos rest on their laurels and simply expect you to continue to deposit and play.
What follows is where player retention starts having an increasingly solid voice.
Standards Next-Steps
We call these incentives ‘standard’ because they tend to follow the same coupon model that we’ve been talking about. However, they serve a different purpose (i.e., player retention), which gives them a different level of strategic importance for players and online casinos alike.
The longest-standing model in this family of incentive formats is the reload bonus. We can say that it’s the most crude form of promotion for established users, mostly because it gives them a window of additional value to an otherwise standard bonus.
With the reload bonus, we’re talking about a simple strategy: the casino directs the player into a deposit by adding value on top of it.
Moreover, it implies that the player already knows the on-deposit bonus format because it has already completed the welcome offer. As the player, you receive casino credits on top of the deposit that you were already willing to make.
This is where the discussion moves into the cashback part. It’s a bit of a mixed bag since we’re talking about an offer directly tied to the idea of losing.
You get some of your money back (a relatively small percentage), acting as a buy-back-in clause that keeps you in the loop.
Loyalty Systems & Strategies
From an online casino’s point of view, the best thing about an online casino is that it’s an organized and automatic solution.
It implements the system, automates the reward process for when the player reaches their specific, level-related goals, and stretches the incentivization strategy over the course of a prolonged time. It also provides more theoretical depth since the casino can customize this system according to its own standards and ambitions.
From the player’s point of view, it’s a standard take on the gamification trend that has been trying to engage consumers to have a more interesting progression. Instead of random incentives here and there, you’re dealing with a deliberate system that makes gaming have a set of checkpoints, each of which comes with its own purpose and reward.
Such systems usually come with a tandem of objectives and rewards. You need to accrue points (akin to the experience points in RPG games) to clear some benchmarks. In some cases, you also meet some special tasks.
Progression in such a case requires the idea of accumulating certain total gambling spending metrics. Total betting worth, number of bets, and other such standards contribute to your point tally, and the checkpoints along the way come with various rewards.
Before we end this section, we need to mention that traditional bonuses can always work in tandem with the loyalty system format. Since they’re not mutually exclusive, you can bank on them appearing within the same player retention strategy.
Personalized Offers & Opportunities – a New Technological Step?
There are several analytical methods for online gambling networks and operators to consider when thinking about consumers, especially once they become fully-fledged users.
The customer lifetime value (CLV) concept is a method of assessing how much a user brings to a company during their time as a consumer of a certain product, calculating this rate based on their expenses with that product.
This is a very iGaming-compatible concept because it allows online casinos to calculate the average (monthly) amount of deposits per period of time. By obtaining numbers in this sense, an online casino allows itself to know which players are more voracious and consistent bettors.
What can it do with that information? Well, the advent of AI and its undeniable influence means that identifying patterns and making decisions based on them is easier than ever. What can happen is that we see more personalized offers.
By creating templates of player profiles based on CLV and gambling preferences, the AI model can automatically provide promotional propositions that have a personal edge. Thus, these offers gain a special edge that can convince the player to stick around.
Conclusion
As we can see, the arc of online casino incentivization changes along with your experience in that casino. It informs your profile and your value as a customer, which, in turn, can impact your choices and the casino’s long-term sustainability. Naturally, technological developments have the same impact.
Regardless of where you stand with your gaming profile, remember that the consistent necessity of your gambling exploits is to always bet responsibly!
