Stian Enger Pettersen, CasinoEngine CEO at EveryMatrix, examines the transformational impact of top tech trends on iGaming bonuses.

Rewards are such an integral part of iGaming that their efficiency in casino marketing can be easily taken for granted. However, in the highly competitive iGaming industry, getting too comfortable with familiar ways of doing things can be both costly and inefficient.  After all, disruption is bound to happen at some point or another. Why not be the disruptor?

It is good practice to question our ways from time to time and see how they can be adjusted to give us a competitive edge and increase our ROI. This is something just as valid for online casino operators as it is for software providers, and an effective way to do this is by zooming out to see the bigger picture and even look across industries.

Big data and automation in full swing

In the retail tech sector, big data is often used to increase conversion via targeted marketing. Two excellent examples come from Amazon. On the one hand, Amazon delivers advertisements to their shoppers based on the droves of data they control – such as which payment solutions they use and the items they order. The other way in which they brilliantly use data is their personalized recommendations, which shorten their customers’ journey to the products they might want to buy, therefore increasing sales.

The latter is of course already adopted by the iGaming industry though game recommendation engines that can produce game suggestions to players based on player profile and preferences.

Taking it one step further, we can apply something similar for our reward campaigns, seamlessly integrating them in the player experience with data-driven personalization. Say you want to promote some specific gaming content with a reward campaign: you can target the player group attracted to similar content to increase conversion.

The quantity of data at our industry’s disposal has never been larger, and it continues to grow in such a way that figuring out the next casino campaign hit might be just a matter of correctly analysing your data. Its uses are virtually endless, and it still has a lot of untapped potential when it comes to delivering the right bonuses to the right crowd.

Segmenting your customer base is not a novel idea but harnessing the power of data analytics can take bonusing to a whole different level. Rewards shouldn’t be limited to differentiating between low vs high rollers, new players vs regulars, or active vs lapsed. They can go deeper than that and target players by age group, location, game preferences, and eventually events and player actions as they happen.

Measuring the players’ responses to promotional campaigns also helps casinos pinpoint what yields the best results and expand on that.

And analytics are not meant just for your players’ behaviours, as they will also reveal essential data on the ROI of your bonuses, helping you reach your targets while keeping costs under control.

Working hand in hand with big data is automation. While the first allows operators to craft ultra-targeted promotions, handling them is a whole different business. It can require huge operational efforts unless automation comes to the rescue, with platforms that enable casinos to configure and deploy all sorts of rules such as dependencies and exclusions between their bonus programs.

Creating targeted and automated player journeys is key to unleashing the full force of promotional campaigns. Just as a social media user is served advertising for products and services they have an interest in, your players can get the bonuses that will engage them the most.

Benefiting from a collaborative approach to software

While operators focus on the B2C side of rewards, iGaming software providers have a clear-cut task in front of them: provide the industry with the products that fully enable their creativity.

That means that today’s bonus platforms need to be robust and agile enough to swiftly accommodate the needs of an unpredictable future, capable of handling regulatory changes, new third-party integrations and new business needs. The software needs to be an ever-evolving organism with scalability at its core.

Luckily, the software-as-a-service model serves this purpose very well. Casino operators can shake off the significant burden of costs, time and staff of owning the software they use and focus on their primary scope, the business itself.

Now the next step for iGaming tech companies is to go further and think in terms of ecosystems. Take Salesforce’s business model, which is based on partnerships and involves working with clients and partners alike to build the apps and features that can then be replicated for collective benefits.

Apply this to a bonus platform and you get a very customisable product that can transform feedback and requests from clients into viable features. Or, in some cases, work with specialised third-party solutions, such as vendor-side promotional features, gamification platforms and CRM solutions or fraud detection tools. Besides the strengths of the bonus solution and its features the flexibility and openness to collaborate with third parties is a strength in and of itself, and benefits everyone involved – the iGaming tech companies, the operator and of course the consumers.

Serving gamification to increase engagement and prevent bonus abuse

Gamification serves well to illustrate what was said above. Apply to it the possibilities of data analysis, automation and a collaborative mindset, and you can obtain rewards that offer virtually unlimited engagement.

Use the data to personalise rewards and serve them to the right audience in a gamified form – for instance, identify a fanbase for games with a certain theme and create a tournament around that. Then use a bonus system to fully automate the rewarding process. Also, if the right gamification solution for your purposes exists on a third-party platform, then it could make more sense and be faster to integrate it with your bonus technology of choice.

On top of everything, you will get the crucial extra benefit of attracting genuine players that are there for the right reasons, while driving away those with undesired behaviours such as bonus abusers. A gamification layer between the player and their rewards separates those who are there for entertainment from those who just want to beat the house at its own game.

About the author

Stian Enger is CEO of the EveryMatrix casino unit and has a 16-year experience in iGaming. His focus of late has been developing a cross-product bonus technology that allows operators to fully leverage the power of rewards.