Operators should switch their focus and use bonuses to reward “gameplay and winning” rather than “depositing or losing” according to Scatters Group’s CEO, Alexis Wicen.

Speaking on the latest SBC Webinar, titled ‘Reimagining Engagement: Retain, Engage and Protect the modern player’,  Wicen emphasised the benefit of utilising smaller bonuses more often to “extend the gaming session of players”.

He said: “Deposit bonuses [have] a very high bonus cost. You can get so much more out of giving some free spins and [players] get more fun out of it. They get the enjoyment out of actually playing those free spins. 

“If you give someone a 100% deposit bonus, people know that they have a huge wagering requirement they need to go through. They often will start betting higher so they will actually bet maybe one and a half or two times more than they normally would, which in the end leads to them probably losing the money just as quickly as they would have had they not had the deposit bonus. So in essence, they might not feel that they got more fun out of it.

“Moving towards rewarding players when they’re playing continuously with smaller rewards, so you get more dopamine exposures for the player, is probably much better than one huge deposit bonus in the beginning.”

Graeme Powrie, Chief Commercial Officer of EEZE, agreed and noted that a wider expectation of “on-demand entertainment”  from consumers means that smaller rewards more often “has to be more prevalent”.

He also added that due to the “insane” costs of bonuses and promotions, it is key to understand the demographic you are targeting.

He said: “Back in the day, it used to be login and spend X, get Y and you would send it to everyone. But very quickly you spot that 70-80% of those are just logging in to do that. If you’re not getting the returns, it’s about having the data to see which segments [are] getting a return rather than doing a shotgun approach and hoping your activities spike.

“You’ve got to be a lot more targeted and run multiple campaigns, which feels like more work, but you should get a better [return on investment].”

The Game window

Also present on the panel was Christian Melin, Chief Product Officer of Blixx Gaming, he detailed the importance of keeping customers within the game window rather than requiring them to leave in order to collect rewards or search for new games.

“Not many are taking it as seriously as they should,” explained Melin. “We worked a lot at Entain on how you show leaderboards and how you show if you have a mission you need to complete, which is very hard as you need to make sure that you do not take the player away from the feel and mood of the game. 

“If something is around that you want to keep them there and not have [them] go out and collect the free spins, not many operators have got that right. [At Entain], we made [the game window] shorter and had a bar on top where you could see where you were on the casino tournaments.”

Melin added that when a feature was included to search for different games within a game window, session lengths improved by 12-13% which“makes you more money”. 

On this point, Powrie added: “When you speak to customers, intuitive navigation and attractive designs are much more important, but the most important thing is not to overcrowd the interface and that there is  a fine balance between  giving the customers just enough information and pulling away things they want.”

Gamification

Also on the agenda during the discussion was the increased prevalence of gamification within betting products.

Powrie warned that gamification should be a “frictionless” add-on to a product and you can’t make players “jump through hoops”

“Everything right there next to the game is what players nowadays are expecting because they have it readily available in other areas of their apps,” agreed Wicen.

“More and more apps have everything just one click away. [Getting away from] going to a promo and scrolling through a video about different promos and about deposit bonuses or welcome bonuses is key to making it easier to enjoy your site and play the games on your site.”

Soft2Bet’s Chief Business Development Officer and host of the webinar, Martin Collins, also shared some insights from data gathered from Soft2Bet’s Motivational Engineering Gaming Application solution (MEGA), explaining that different demographics have different needs to optimise the impact of gamification. 

“What we found is that you actually have to provide the different cohorts a different experience on the gamified side,” said Collins.

“If you have a mobile native who sits and plays these types of games on a daily basis and you make it too easy for them, the engagement drops. But on the other hand, if you have a traditional casino or sports betting player and you make it too hard, then the engagement drops.

“So you need to get these guys into a particular cohort and give them the journey that their expectation requires. And if you don’t do that, then you can end up with a mishmash of flows being on for the wrong customers. It’s very much about building a personalised journey.”

Collins previously detailed how the MEGA solution, which takes popular mobile games and transforms them into real-money gaming titles, has uplifted “every key metric you can imagine,” including quadrupling player screen time. 

To hear more about balancing the bonus budget, gamification and more, click HERE to watch the full webinar.