Part two of our feature on loyalty and patron management looks at how the back-end management systems enable casino operators to conduct effective casino loyalty marketing.
As we saw in last month’s player loyalty feature, casino groups that want to directly drive their marketing efforts often employ loyalty programmes to better understand where their members spend money within their properties and to learn how to encourage their repeat custom.
We also learned that the information obtained by tracking their wagering and purchasing activity allows the casino operator to continually update their customer interactions; to make them more intimate and interesting than they would otherwise be, without having any useful behavioural data to base their loyalty marketing plans upon.
Therefore, at the heart of any casino’s customer loyalty programmes is the depth and accessibility of its membership database. The variety and comprehensiveness of the information it contains will determine how sophisticated and accurate the casino’s promotional targeting and customer segmentation efforts can be. A thorough membership database will allow a casino to decide upon any manner of detailed customisable criteria to record against its patrons, in addition to their standard personal details.
For example, if a casino wants to note the favourite hobbies and dining preferences of its players, it can. If a casino then wants to identify its most frequent high-roller guests who, on average, drop above a certain amount each visit, and who also like golf and Japanese food, they can.
From this information, an operator could develop a uniquely targeted event for this hypothetical market segment (golf and sushi, anyone?) in order to produce an enhanced entertainment experience intended to also lead them onto the casino floor to spend. This is an example of the type of specific customer targeting that can be implemented to great effect by a capable marketing team.
The whole process of offering relevant, personalised, loyalty promotions should lead to the development of strengthened customer relationships that make the customer feel highly valued, while also building and enhancing brand equity.
The question that naturally arises, then, is: What are some of the practical ways in which an operator can conduct effective customer loyalty via a systems-focused technology solution?
The most common method is to design an ‘air mile’ style point scheme. For both slot machine and table games play, each amount wagered by a carded member will earn them a number of bonus points that can be exchanged for whatever goods or services that a casino opts to provide.
Complimentary (or hidden) point schemes can also be used to reward ongoing patronage. Complimentary points are generally not visible to players, so when they receive a comp the intention is for them to feel unexpectedly appreciated for their patronage.
A comprehensive management system should be able to award bonus or complimentary points for any customer visits that occur on significant days (such as birthdays or anniversaries) or for attendance during more specific times (say, between 10am and 11am on the third Wednesday of every month). And point multipliers can be applied to drive attendance during historically slower periods of trade (for example, “Triple Point Tuesdays”).
The use of bonus credits is a further means to entice certain customer demographics to increase their casino spend. For instance, select customers can be enticed to play higher denomination slot machines than usual in an attempt to move them up into a more valuable category of customer, in exchange for cashable or promotional points.
There are other established ways with which to encourage visitation and build player loyalty from within the scope of a loyalty programme, such as promotional vouchers, coupons and electronic lotteries that can each be configured using most standard gaming IT solutions.
Brian Macsymic, Progressive Gaming’s director of product management for its Casinolink Enterprise Edition, said: “Casino management systems, such as ours, provide an array of sophisticated promotional and reporting engines that allow a casino to run its own marketing loyalty campaigns and track their profitability.
“They can also be used to identify player characteristics and useful trends, like which customers fall within certain target criteria and when the high and low traffic periods within a casino are. Savvy operators will draw their own conclusions from this type of information and then use their management system’s marketing features to do something about it.”
As a centralised, wide-area capable management tool, the Casinolink Enterprise Edition can maintain a detailed player membership database across one or many casino properties. Therefore, an operator can use it to solidify their existing branding and corporate identity by establishing a unified loyalty scheme that is accessible via a single players’ card.
It is then also possible to issue rewards such as random player bonuses to these carded members based upon pre-defined player criteria. For instance, a casino could choose to advertise random prize give-aways to players who participate on certain types of slot machines (defined by make, model, denomination, etc.), or in certain sections of the casino at certain times of the day.
The introduction of a non-smoking gaming area could well be assisted by this style of loyalty bonusing. Or the chances of a new slot machine model gaining rapid customer acceptance could be boosted during its first week or two on the floor with an accompanying promotional scheme in place. Play the new ‘Brand X’ machines for a minimum of 30 minutes to become eligible to win a prize!
Brian Macsymic adds: “We are constantly striving to introduce new features and complimentary products to assist with the loyalty process. For instance, our recently-announced partnership with IGT has given us access to their high-resolution sb NexGen touchscreen player tracking displays and we are quickly working to integrate them into our Casinolink Enterprise Edition management system.
“The displays open up the possibility for patron-specific loyalty marketing messages, in the form of vibrant eye-catching graphics, to be delivered directly to individual slot machines; and it will also allow us to replicate IGT’s appealing portfolio of advantage bonusing products to further strengthen our own existing loyalty marketing capabilities”.
Ultimately, a casino’s management system simply provides the toolkit with which to initiate various patron loyalty campaigns. Continual analysis and reassessment of these campaigns is always necessary to guarantee their ongoing longevity. Most casino management systems offer reporting tools to gauge this type of performance, such as marketing contribution reports that depict promotional costs alongside campaign profits or losses.
Put simply, how much did a marketing campaign cost to run and how much money did it make; what percentage of target customers responded by visiting the casino as a result of a particular campaign; and how much money did they spend while they were there?
This knowledge is vitally important, as customer loyalty is unquestionably driven by a desire to increase profit levels. But it is as equally geared towards improving the overall customer experience. The more specific and relevant the customer experience can be made to be, the better a casino’s chances are going to be of achieving sustainable loyalty marketing success.
So when you come to assess your current and/or future technologies and how they support your own loyalty requirements, be sure to ask yourself the questions raised in these articles. They may prove to be the most profitable questions you ever ask.
