If online marketing is a game, igaming companies are proving to have the best game plan. And it is a game plan that includes speed and agility, all driven by deep customer insights. Other online marketers can adopt the igaming game plan to drive customer loyalty and sales.
The igaming consumer “buying cycle” is likely ten times the velocity of online retail. igaming companies have minutes, or even seconds, to retain or lose a customer. Their reaction time to lure a player back is almost real-time. In addition, gaming companies have learned that they must tune into every player’s quirks, likes, and dislikes. It is a hyper-buying cycle where a player can be here one minute – and gone the next.
This is in contrast to retail, where a customer may browse for products before buying. It is often a cycle of learning and then buying. Some basic stats underscore the difference in consumer interaction patterns between gaming and retail. And the difference is like the flow of quicksand versus molasses.
Research
In 2019, research revealed that igamers spent 7 hours and 7 minutes each week playing. By 2022, a separate consumer survey revealed igamers had upped their time by 37% to 9 hours and 48 minutes. It averages to about 1 hour and 24 minutes daily of igaming.
Comparatively, studies from 2022 reveal that 80% of US shoppers shop online. Seventy-nine percent (79%) of shoppers shop at least once per month, comprising 22% once per week, 27% once every two weeks, and 29% once per month.
Overall, igamers often engage daily with gambling and other sites, and retail shoppers do not. A gaming site constantly interacts with its VIP customers, while retailers have intermittent interactions with their VIP customers.
Products and Services All in One
I-gaming companies provide products and services that are in parody. Two gaming sites may typically offer near identical games. Or sports betting sites offer the same betting opportunities for the consumer.
As a result, in real-time interaction by players (consumers) with gaming sites, gaming companies have watched how, why, and when consumers leave in an instant. This mercurial tendency by players has forced gaming companies to dive deep into granular information about their customers out of necessity. Highly personalized customer relationship marketing can be the differentiator for these sites. Keeping gaming consumers engaged can entail the personalization of communicating with them about their favorite teams for a sports betting site or having timely new promotions for those who enjoy online casinos.
Gaming companies do have an advantage in gaining deep granularity of customer data. I-gaming companies, on average, communicate with 1147 weekly consumer segments versus 401 for retailers and other companies (according to Optimove’s analysis of marketers in each industry). It is safe to assume that gaming companies are privy to more data than retailers and other marketers.
Personalization and Loyalty
But, for both retail and igaming, a natively integrated customer data platform (CDP) and multichannel marketing hub (MMH) enables greater personalization based on deep insights and granular segmentation for gaming companies to react to players’ (consumers’) desires in near real-time, assuring greater player loyalty and maximizing lifetime value.
Due to parody of igaming sites, they have quickly employed proven disciplines to drive a winning game plan include the following:
- a 360° single customer view across all products
- Management and automation of highly personalized customer interactions across all available channels
- Getting customer retention campaigns out the door in minutes rather than days
- Easy deployment of hyper-targeted, customer activity-triggered campaigns
- Continuous experimentation, testing, and optimization of marketing strategies and messages
- Focus on the incremental uplift generated by every campaign instead of its total revenue
- Using predictive analytics to automatically identify and respond to customer behavior, preventing churn, and maximizing the customer value for VIPs and every other distinct customer type
- Also, leveraging AI to discover untapped potential in their customer base
Retailers are now also upping their game by doing the same. They start with deeper micro-segmentation and analysis of consumers using a CDP. According to a survey of 514 US consumers, 32% of consumers say if a brand offers recommendations based on previous shopping or browsing, it increases the chance they will buy more.
Service is critical to customer loyalty.
Another 2022 survey revealed the following:
- 78% of customers would be willing to go out of their way to go to a company that has better customer service
- 74% of customers would switch to a competing brand or company if they found out they provided a better customer experience
- 83% of customers trust a company or brand more if they provide an excellent customer service experience, up 4% from 2021 (79%)
For retailers to increase the odds in their favor, they can speed up their personalized marketing game plan and mimic the igaming companies.
