Retention Is Won Daily: How Operators Create “Wow” Effect Without Killing Margin

Attracting players in a competitive industry is one thing, but keeping them on board for the long-term is a completely different challenge. What is the key to retaining players and extending their life cycle?

Smart Operators Win Their Existing Customers’ Loyalty on a Daily Basis

Customer relationship management is pivotal for every single operator that wants to succeed in the iGaming space.  Retaining players and ensuring their life cycle as a customer of the brand lasts as long as possible is one of the biggest challenges. Two experts on this topic are Maksym Salnyk (ex-head of CRM operations at GR8 Tech) and Ihor Sudak (CRM operations team lead at GR8 Tech).

So, how can you keep a player loyal to a specific operator? Salnyk cites good bonuses, fast withdrawals, and creative, fun newsletters as key factors, but believes the power of a brand can’t be underestimated. He explains: “If you have a good, popular brand and a strategy that has made people like your brand, like Parimatch for example… if people are choosing between a no-name brand or Parimatch, they will go for Parimatch every time.” 

Sudak emphasises how the overall customer retention strategy needs to be thorough. He adds: “You need to have a clear CRM strategy and know the user's entire lifetime from registration onwards.  You should have a strategy for how to communicate with them at each step, and don't lose focus during certain periods of a player’s lifetime. A successful operator should cover all the players’ lifetime with communications and always be in touch.”

But there is always a risk that a player could be tempted to spend their hard-earned cash elsewhere. As industry veteran Jeffrey Haas, venture partner for Dreamcraft Ventures, memorably puts it:

This is an area where over-regulation can cost regulated operators if they are limited in what they can offer a player when compared to unregulated alternatives. Haas continues: “If you're in a place like Sweden, where you can only get one bonus across the lifetime of your account, why would you continue playing with an operator when you have many opportunities with the other operators? 

“Or better, you can go to an offshore operator and get unlimited bonuses as you go because their operating margins are so substantially different. You're not even seeing player retention challenges so much within regulated markets as you are between the regulated operators and the offshore operators. This is because the landscape and competitive environment are so substantially unfair.”

But when it comes to taking action on retaining players, being quick is important. According to Salnyk, you can’t overstate how important the first few days are when it comes to securing a player’s loyalty.

Providing Entertainment

Of course, there’s not just the potential temptation of joining another casino or bookmaker as a risk for an operator looking to keep a new player interested. These days, the gambling industry can be seen as part of the wider entertainment space, where operators must compete for people’s time and money against a myriad of other options. Ivan Voitenko, ex GR8 Tech’s group product manager, says: “iGaming needs to be fun. More and more time is spent on social media like TikTok and YouTube. People don’t just want to make bets; they want to see something real, not only playing casino games or betting on sports. This is about entertainment, and all we have seen for the last 20 years in the industry is just betting and casino games. OK, we have a variety of casino games, but what is the next step?

“Social media takes so much of people’s time because if something happens in the real world right now, it's interesting. We need to think about how to bring players not just to the casino or betting, but also what we can learn from social media? From my perspective and that of my colleagues, we want to see how to really entertain people, such as how we can bring gambling to real-time events. I’m interested in betting on novelty markets, like whether TikTok will be closed down in the US or not. These topics are really interesting, and people are discussing them right now. If we read the comments on social media, we see what people are really interested in and what's entertaining them.”

Voitenko’s colleague Vlad Andrusenko, the head of sportsbook product at GR8 Tech, believes operators should be going after new audiences instead of competing for the same players as everyone else. He explains: “I like the idea of enabling our client operators to attract, grow, and retain a casual audience that is interested in sports as entertainment. When our clients are working on performance marketing with affiliates, they are directly competing with other operators for the same audience. Basically, the same players are going to one operator and getting their deposit bonus. Then another operator attracts the same player with the next registration deposit bonus, and it's a vicious cycle in which, all the time, operators are competing for the same player, who probably would spend the same amount of money regardless of where they play.

“We need to work together with operators to see how we can both initially attract this kind of new audience, which brings additional revenue to the market. And how can we make them come to this ‘aha moment’ when they realise ‘OK, this is one type of fun that I could have’ and when they experience it, they understand that they like it and want more.”

Regions and Seasons

There’s plenty of nuance when it comes to retaining players, and the industry can vary significantly across different geos, even when it comes to communication methods. Sudak explains: “In Latin America, people mostly use phones, and our SMS channel is the most important for being in touch with those players. But if we talk about Europe and Canada, people much prefer emails, so we focus on emails first, as they don't like to receive many spam messages by phone.”

Another geographical variance is seasonality. As Salnyk explains: “We get seasonal users in India where they have the IPL, a cricket league from March to the end of April or beginning of May. So they register only for this event, and this is a huge challenge to get these users to stay with us in the future, because after this event ends, usually they're leaving. We need to figure out how we can make them stay, because they are good users.” There are similar issues in the UK, with bettors who may only gamble for the Grand National once a year. 

Looking at the bigger picture of player retention and life cycle, though, Pragmatic Solutions CEO and industry veteran Ashley Lang thinks it comes down to attraction.

Of course, customers are going to churn from your business if they're regularly having delayed withdrawal requests, high latency in gameplay, or a low variety of new content being added. These are all negative experiences that are going to lead to churn, but even more so, assuming you got the basics right, if you lack excitement for the customer, if you forget to bring some excitement to it, or lack a ‘wow’ experience, and they can find that stimulation and excitement elsewhere, that's another reason why you'll see customers churn.

This may differ regionally because of the accessibility of different markets by operators or the friction of switching between brands. So, if you're in a heavily regulated market where the onboarding journey is intrusive and complex, then you may enjoy greater customer loyalty because they're going to resist going through that again with your competitor. But that doesn't mean you should abuse that. It still means that you'd gain more, you'd have greater customer value if you also focus on creating excitement and a ‘wow factor’ for those customers.

UX and Risk Management

For Andrusenko, mobile-first user experience is the number one factor to ensure a sportsbook is successful and keeps players coming back. He explains: “We see 95% of sports click-through rate of our client operators coming from mobile devices. There is a popular misconception, both from providers and operators, that the desktop view is too much. Because when you're working from your laptop, you open the product from your laptop and you see issues or areas which you could improve. So all the processes on the platform and operator side are quite frequently focused on desktop, but really most of the players and the revenue is in mobile. So the most important thing for a sportsbook to be really usable and effective is a mobile-first UX. 

“The second most important thing is risk management. It’s not something fancy and sexy and, for new operators when they're choosing a platform or sportsbook provider, it's not the first thing they’ll look at. It's quite hard to quantify, but fiscal risk management is the number one reason to switch between providers, and it's something that makes or breaks any operator that has a sportsbook. But some barriers that both platforms and operators could put in to minimise risk could be really hurtful to players’ experience. So, while trying to minimise fraud, you may be hurting casual players’ experience. It boils down to the fact that if you have good risk management, you don't need to budget as much for fraud-related losses, which means you can provide better odds to your casual players. You can restrict casual players less if you're able to identify and differentiate between more risky and less risky players and take a different approach with them. So it’s not a fancy, sexy area that is talked about a lot on the market, but it's really the most critical one. 

Andrusenko is also of the belief that different types of players need to be studied and treated appropriately from the moment they sign up. He continues: “For a successful operator, it's really important to be able to work on the whole life cycle of a player. When we talk with our clients, new players, when they first register and are unfamiliar with the platform, they just go and place pre-match bets on the winner markets on Premier League games. But if you take a look at high rollers, the most valuable commercial players, their playing patterns are really, really different. So how do you evolve players from these one-use cases to find different ways to have fun with a sportsbook?”

One method that is known to help convert these rookie, one-time bettors into returning customers is gamification. This is the practice of making the whole user experience feel like part of a game, beyond just the actual casino games themselves. Sudak says that the most effective types of gamification seen by GR8 Tech and their partner operators are – in order of effectiveness – quests, tournaments, and sticker books. He also believes customisation of bonus offers can be key to keeping a new player hooked. 

Making it Personal

Salnyk adds that the customisation of bonuses can also cover the amounts offered. He says: “When we see that a player is turning and could be churned, we can make bigger bonuses, more interesting ones, or higher percentages – say 120 or 150% match instead of 100%, with fewer wagering requirements. This makes the prospect of staying more interesting for churn-risk players.”

Industry expert Ozric Vondervelden, co-founder of bonus-abuse combating platform Greco, is of the belief that personalisation is the key to player retention. He elaborates: “It all comes down to looking at data on an individual player level. The players need personalisation when it comes to rewards, bonuses, and communication. The utopian experience for a player is an experience that's completely tailored to them. The game, the game recommendation, and the bonus in the form that they like, whether that's free spins or a deposit bonus on the game they like. It should be worth a value that's tailored to them as well. I think if every operational decision on a player is tailored to them, you can't really go wrong.”

Two more key areas to focus on for player retention are, according to Salnyk, both to do with speed. Firstly, speed of withdrawals, for players looking to take home their winnings; and secondly, speed of service – namely, customer support. GR8 Tech’s head of CRM operations explains: “Payments are the most important thing. If a player can make a deposit, you can earn money, and that's it - you can close your company and go! But seriously, each market or region has its own popular payment method, and for us, it's very important to have them all. Fast withdrawals are a very, very important thing. 

Unlimited Potential in Data

The reams of player data that operators and platform providers can track these days can be particularly useful for formulating retention strategies. As GR8 Tech’s head of sportsbook product Andrusenko explains, when data is used correctly, the value of a player could almost be limitless. He says: “We have so much data about what players are doing with the product, it's not like in some other areas like Netflix, where they just need to get customers to sign up and then make sure they don't churn. Here in iGaming and specifically in sports betting, if you have a player who is a newbie and places a bet once a week on a pre-match winner market, you're taking your 3%, 5% or 7% margin once a week and that's it. But if you succeed in driving this player to other kinds of iGaming fun, we can take the margin from this player's turnover much more frequently.

“So while working on players’ life cycles and maximising the effectiveness of the product, there are so many ways that you can generate value almost endlessly.  It's not like you either retain a customer with a fixed subscription fee or you don't retain at all. There is so much data to work with, and if you have enough of a player base, which is frequently the case with the bigger operators, you can A/B test anything. Everything's transactional, so you can directly convert things which you're working on into additional revenue.”

Making Mistakes

Of course, the counter-point to keeping players on board with personalised bonuses and well-executed gamification is losing players due to getting bonuses wrong. Sudak and Salnyk say they have seen operators make this mistake before. As Salnyk puts it: “An operator might communicate to players that a bonus is waiting but it can’t be found when they actually log on to the site. A player will be like ‘I didn’t see any bonus. Where is my bonus? Where is it? You lied to me!’”

Sudak continues: “It can also affect retention if an operator gives unclear descriptions or doesn’t give full bonuses, but sends communications about them.  Players can decide to leave your product after this and it may also increase the workload of support teams.”

Another – surprising – danger area when it comes to losing players is fraud prevention. Artem Kolodyazhnyy, head of risk and anti-fraud operations at GR8 Tech warns: “Risk management is not only about protection. It can absolutely be the best friend for your platform and your clients but also be an absolutely terrible blocker for your business.

Total AI Control?

Looking ahead, Salnyk believes artificial intelligence will be pivotal to player retention in the industry. He goes as far as saying: “I think it will be total AI control. Not only in gambling, but like ‘Big Brother‘ from Orwell, the system will know all about you. It will know what you need at a specific time. It will know if you need to go to sports, or you need to play online slots, or you need to put bets on Manchester United. I think AI will totally control things and know all about you, and can predict all future things you want to do. AI is the future and will understand the player's needs better than us.”

Industry expert Haas doesn’t go quite that far but certainly agrees that AI is the future for improving player retention. He claims: “With life cycle management, it's increasingly around using AI to ensure one-to-one offers in respect to pre-made accumulators at sportsbooks. You need to make sure you're hitting somebody up with the sport they want, the team they want, the player they want. You need the right offer and the right games and also unique games and tools in order to differentiate yourself from the industry. Look at what a company called i3Soft is doing with a crash poker game - they're only available at a handful of operators. You look at what a company like Insight Play is doing with voice-based AI tools. These are incredibly powerful companies that are innovating with AI to retain players.”

At GR8 Tech, they have decided to build their own AI model to help improve player retention. Sudak and Salnyk are clearly excited about its potential. As Sudak explains: “Our AI model learns text from our copywriters and makes more relevant content for our industry than ChatGPT, which is a more universal thing. Our text AI model is specifically for iGaming and it learns the behaviour of players and can predict churn. We can segment our base by players that have a 90% chance of churning, and we can then communicate with them and offer additional bonuses to try to prevent this churn. We’ve also got an AI model in development that will learn the times when players open messages so you’ll just click send and the system will choose the best time to send it so we have a better chance of it being opened.”