Player Retention: Tips for Keeping your Audience Engaged

Player retention is directly linked to relevance. If your players see your offering as relevant to their gaming preferences they will keep playing with you.

However, a nice-looking website, decent odds and fun games won’t be enough to keep players. It’ll help but in a competitive market, you need to be willing to offer more.

Determining how to maintain relevance to your players is a challenge. It not only requires internal analysis but a deeper understanding of your players.

Both from a perspective of what they engage with currently and what their expectations are.

The current level of technology available means you can create a more personalised experience for your players.

Moreover, that’s exactly what your players expect. While there will always be a transactional element to the relationship between you and your players, they want something more substantial. 

The willingness to invest in your player retention is the first tip. You have to take it seriously and you have to look at your players differently.

Understanding your Players

If you want to boost player retention, the first thing you need to do is understand them. While there are multiple options in terms of interacting with your players, you already know a lot.

Your business is a veritable treasure trove of player data for you to make use of. Everything from demographics to player preferences, deposits, wins/losses and more.

The more data you have available to you, the more insight you have.

Data advantage of customer data platforms to consolidate all this data into one place. From here you can analyse player behaviour. Combined with any player feedback you may have collated, you’ll start to build up a pretty clear picture of how players interact with your platform.

Between your first-party data and information collected from tools like Analytics, you will know what’s working and what isn’t. You’ll know where your players exit the site and if there are any patterns.

There will likely be a correlation between existing and losing. But look for other indicators that may suggest problems with the user experience. Equally is the loss rate excessively high on any of your games? If so it could be turning players off to your platform. If they feel like they can’t win they will churn and you’ll be very unlikely to ever win those players back.

With this data, you can create personalised journeys for all of your players. Aside from a personalised online experience, you can create personalised marketing campaigns too.

The more tailored the campaigns you create the greater the engagement. The more engaged your players are the more likely you are to keep them. And, more importantly, the more likely they are to become loyal players.

Achievements and Rewards

Gamification of your player retention strategy is a perfectly valid approach. Your audience already has a predisposition towards gaming and competition.

There are a number of ways you can approach this but the key element is to keep your players wanting more. That means making any levelling up obtainable and the rewards appealing and valuable.

Daily rewards are an effective way of increasing both player engagement and player retention. Adding a weekly bonus incentivises players to keep playing as they will get a sense of satisfaction from achieving it.

Underpin this with a sliding scale of rewards for playing and player retention increases significantly. 

Again, the emphasis must be on relevance and value. The rewards need to be varied and get better over time to keep players coming back for more.

Leverage your deposit data. You have the option of creating segmented reward schemes that scale relative to how much players deposit, and how often.

You can spice things up by adding some competition by introducing league tables. It’s up to you if you want to introduce monthly or quarterly prizes. Sometimes bragging rights is enough.

If your platform operates a forum then badges, along with defined levels or ranks, serve as strong drivers. Player retention will increase because they will want to earn specific badges and the credibility that comes with them.

Push Notifications

One of the best things about consolidating your player data into a customer data platform is the ability to tailor communications.

You will be able to segment your audience by type of games, play duration, deposits made, win/loss ratio and more. As a result, you can create highly personalised communications.

While email is an obvious and effective method, push notifications are a powerful tool to drive engagement.

You can send highly personalised messages to your players inviting them to try your new game. Or to prompt them to go back to the game they were playing earlier that day.

If you operate a loyalty programme you can use push notifications to alert them when they’ve hit a points threshold or they’re eligible for a reward. Or if they’ve slipped down the leaderboard.

There are a near limitless number of ways you can use push notifications to serve timely, relevant and personalised messages to your audience.

Depending on your IT infrastructure you have the option of sending web push or app push notifications. Or even SMS.

It’s worth taking the time to determine what campaigns you could create that would drive player retention.

This approach can also be used to catch players who created an account but didn’t deposit.

Sending a notification with a bonus offer, as they move to exit your site could be the difference between losing a customer and not.

Think Outside the Box

A lot of the methods around player retention aren’t anything overly new. In fact, retail has been leveraging a lot of these methods for some time to great effect.

Explore how you could take advantage of the same tactics to engage and retain your players.

With the data you have, you can create a completely tailored experience for every player.

You can create a loyalty programme that rewards them for using your platform and sharing their successes.

Your most loyal, most engaged players can get singled out and rewarded.

Essentially you need to take your players on a journey. Sports betting and gaming is an unusual industry in so far as players and providers are competing against each other.

This makes it more difficult to build trust. It’s hard to trust someone who is trying to win your money. But this is where player retention strategies come into their own.

If you provide enough value through loyalty programmes, personalised user experiences, and relevant and tailored communications, players will see the value in the relationship before the transaction.

It will shift the focus away from winning or losing and put greater emphasis on the relationship, fun and value.

Players won’t mind losing as much if they received their daily reward or levelled up to the next loyalty tier.

It will mean greater investment on your part in terms of free spins, bonus deposits and other incentives. However, because your player base will be growing, and player lifetime value will be going up, it will be vastly outweighed by the increase in deposits and the money saved in acquisition.

Where to Begin

Knowing where to begin is difficult. With a wealth of personalised campaigns to run, choosing the priority isn’t always apparent.

But in all instances, the first step is always to unify your data. Without consolidating your data into a Single Customer View it’s impossible to deploy any campaign with great effectiveness.

Remember, your players want to be wowed. That means an end-to-end personalised experience. Without it, they have no reason to stay with your platform.

Delivering a hyper-tailored player experience is what will drive your player retention efforts. But it’s only possible by utilising the data you have available.

Start with your data. Get the insight you need and build your customer segments. Then you can build winning campaigns that grow customer retention.

To learn more about customer data platforms, get in touch today to request a demo.