There was recently a discussion on LinkedIN, focused on how a business can keep its loyal customers happy – knowing that they tend to leave loyalty programs when they no longer feel the reward is within their reach. Seeing this trend happening too often on our shady side of the customer management world, I wanted to briefly work out few basics with you guys.

Let me quote here one of my favorite bands: “Know Your Enemy”: without fully understanding your players’ needs, you can’t possibly cater a program that can attract them to begin with (not to mention keep them loyal for years and years and… sorry, iGaming, isn’t it? Week and weeks and…).

So how do you do that? Analyzing. Yup – wipe that boring expression off your face and go right now to your favorite business analyst (let’s be realistic – you are going to do it yourself, aren’t you?), and start building a set of parameters that could specify the gaming trends of your players.

Next step is to combine whatever catches your interest to what your players are looking for. We can probably assume what is that YOU are after, yet this blog does not deal with such a perverted behavior… we would certainly hope that you would know by now what is that YOUR PLAYERS are looking for, since we sure hope you have taken at least some time to check what make your VIPs tick in between those foul acts of yours (seriously – are you into that kind of stuff??).

So what do you end up with? You know the current pace of your players gameplay, and you also know what’s good for your business and what your key revenue makers would like to have in return as a reward. Sweet. Now make a scheme out of this entire process.

If we go back to the original question, my own take on it is that if you know your players well enough, you should be in a position to segment the tiers in such a way that reaching a sufficient level of reward is always within the reach of those same players you care about. You can deal with the others once you make sure that stability is reached in terms of LTV within the more active group of players.

Possibly, the traditional 3 tiers structure might not be suitable for your own operation, and you may want to look into micro-segmenting your VIP levels, either from the player-side, from an analytical perspective, or – eventually – by combining them both in a creative approach, by adding some kind of “bonus rounds” into it – pretty much like some of the better slot games.

In any case, taking care of your players’ satisfaction level is what you probably already do all day long, so why not share with us your own thoughts on the best practices in tiers segmentation or cool ways to attract VIPs.