When Station Casinos, a gaming company based in Summerlin, Nev., implemented Teradata‘s Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, Relationship Manager and Warehouse Miner tools in 2008, the company wanted to use real-time data to better market to potential return customers. The company needed to consolidate and organize information from its disparate systems to discover what games visitors play, how much they play, what hotels they frequent and where they like to eat.
The company operates 18 properties, including 10 that are full-scale hotels and casinos. Inside these properties are roughly 70 restaurants. To target customers that visit these properties, Station Casinos leverages direct mail and email, as well as the Boarding Pass loyalty program, which has more than 5 million enrolled accounts and 1.5 million active accounts.
“We send everything — detailed booklets, self-mailers and postcards,” said Marc Oppenheimer, corporate VP of relationship marketing at Station Casinos. “It depends on the campaign. We send 1.2 million pieces a month across all campaigns. We also send a tremendous amount of email. Some months we have more than 500 different email campaigns.”
Without understanding who their customers were and what they liked to do when staying at a property, it didn’t make sense for Station Casinos to send out so many communications. Gamblers that play certain types of games are more profitable than gamblers that play other types of games.The company needed to be able to determine their interests and form an accurate valuation as to what each returning guest was worth and then market to each of those segments.
“We needed to get more and more granular to how we market to an individual,” said Oppenheimer. “We had to drive from segmentation-based marketing to marketing to one [consumer].”
Prior to implementing the Teradata tools, Oppenheimer said Station Casinos did ad hoc analysis using Microsoft Access and Excel.
“We used to collect data from five sources and try to put them together with an Excel spreadsheet,” he explained.
With Teradata’s platform, Station Casinos marketers were immediately able to share detailed analytical intelligence with customer service representatives to make more informed decisions about customer requests. These conversations could happen across sales and service channels, as well as in marketing communications to drive higher response rates and more profitable returns.
The results are staggering. For the past three years, Station Casinos has been able to consistently improve player development profitability by $2 million per month. The company cut more than $1 million per month in targeted promotional campaign expenses. Station Casinos guest retention improved by nearly 10%. That is a far cry from the Excel and Access days.
