iGaming CRM

That’s it – we are about to board the flight to Dublin in order to co-host the “2012 Viewpoint” panel discussion at the iGaming Super Show, with quite a non-Irish forecast:

During the week I will try to share you with as many professional insights as possible (i.e. pictures), so please stay tuned, as if you thought that this conference will allow you a week off with no highly moral posts – think again, baby. 

What can you expect from next week’s iGaming Super Show? Here is a partial list:

• Fantastic Beer – checked!
• Amazing Parties – checked!
• Leading a lifestyle way beyond your budget and expense your boss – checked!
• Sunny mornings and warm nights – checked!  (well, sort of… Ireland, you know)
• Women you can only dream on being actually with you on the same planet – checked!

(yes, but considering your looks, you are probably used to that already) Continue reading →

This is just a quick note to our highly moral readers: we have just passed the 10,000 all-time views mark on this popular blog, all by top iGaming CRM executives –

At first, our intention was to simply amuse ourselves, but unlike Thomas, we have successfully avoided the stains and kept our clothes on, turning this into the #1 source of the online gambling industry’s latest Retention Marketing Tips & Player Development Insights. As I usually comment with sincere modesty: WE ROCK :)

Now just imagine our traffic stats if it wasn’t for that Bloody Sunday…

In the old days, Poker was a very straightforward game. All you needed was liquidity and as many Poker celebrity icons you could sign to your operation. It also helped if you kind of, you know, actually managed to pay your players back, but hey – nobody is perfect. (Except us CRM people, of course.)

And indeed the retention work in the past was, as always, crucial. It usually focused on fine-tuning the VIP program of your brand and ensuring that your play makers were properly rewarded, even if in some cases this meant outrageous rakeback percentages. Because liquidity was king, you needed multitasking sharks to open as many tables as possible. Since the other rooms were paying the same, you couldn’t change that fact unless your brand name was composed of massive, luminous spheres of plasma held together by gravity (No Thomas, it’s not PokerMassiveLuminousSpheresofPlasma.COM – take another guess).

But recently, a new trend has begun. As Poker lost its shine, and bad, bad people started taxing all sort of jurisdictions, there was hardly any money left to earn in this vertical, even for those gigantic rooms. So these days, the focus has shifted to the recreational player – the same guys usually referred to as “fish” by the pros. The guys who dared to have some sort of life away from the olive-green felt-covered tables.

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We all like to be liked. So when you see your loyalty program is drawing more players to your games, you may break out in a big smile. But if you’d look a little more closely at the numbers, that smile might turn to a frown. And the frown might turn into a yell: “Stop the loyalty program! Stop it now!”

Sometimes operators get a little too sure of themselves, convinced that they’ve got the edge over the players. See, for example, Tropicana vs. Don Johnson.

Humility is a helpful attribute, but math skills are what it really takes to stay profitable. What we need to calculate is the exact percentage we can give back to our loyal customers without harming our profitability. Better still would be to figure out the expected growth in play due to these incentives.

I recently read an article Continue reading →

Ah … if I had had a million dollars for every time I was asked this question since beginning this blog, I would easily be a millionaire by now (that is, if I wasn’t spending so much money on high-end booze). The short answer is that every company has a Thomas in it. He’s the guy who has a high-ranking position but is never around when a decision has to be made (ANY decision, really), provides enigmatic answers to questions, can’t commit to anything beyond his own bonus, and does absolutely nothing to assist your KPIs – apart from leaving early :)

There is a real Thomas who possesses all of these characteristics. Continue reading →

You know those anti-fraud guys at your company? They give themselves respectable titles such as “Director of Risk Management” or “Vice President of Financial Security,” but we all know what they really do – check on large winners to see if they violated any T&C before “cleaning out the house.”

As CRM executives, we work closely with these anti-fraud guys because, after all, we share the goal of trying to maximize our players’ lifetime value. And of course, any illegal action certainly doesn’t help our stats.

But what happens when these friendly investigative people can only shrug their shoulders and tell you that no rules were violated by a player who just nabbed the equivalent of your daily NGR? You stare hopelessly at your Excel sheet, trying to run whatever sorting you can devise to make the horrific report look as if this was actually a good thing. You might even try to suggest that this fits nicely with the seasonality trend.  And your boss, being an ex-D.J., might even accept that explanation or anything else you say that doesn’t keep him from leaving early. (It’s your weekly manicure appointment, isn’t it, Thomas?)

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OK, so we really like to brag. Like this is any breaking news to you if you have been around this highly moral online gambling industry for more than 5 minutes…

Yet this time it’s a biggie: our experts have been shortlisted for the prestigious “Retention Partner of the Year” annual B2B award by the great guys from eGR (yes, we know, you read them regularly – right after your daily Dilbert).

Click here for the PR :)

With Easter soon upon us, we thought about another competitive analysis of holiday-themed promos by the leading online casinos, much as we did for XMAS 2011 (Part #1, Part #2). But the universe wasn’t aligned with our ideas and we ended up making God laugh quite a bit. Why? Nearly all operators whose promos we reviewed in December either didn’t have an Easter promo or if they did, they weren’t making it public.

Would that stop us? Dream on. We are a serious consulting company, and we want to see bunnies in promos! Really – no matter how contrived, bring us the widdle wabbits, as our hero, Elmer Fudd, used to say.

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