In today’s competitive casino marketplace where there are plenty of online slots for players to choose from, making a game stand out from the crowd is increasingly difficult. Once acquired, there’s then the added issue of keeping players engaged when they can easily switch to another title.
More recently, game studios have introduced in-game marketing tools to help attract new customers and retain players for longer periods. We spoke to five slot studios to find out how advances in technology are improving these new techniques and their impact on retention rates.
CasinoBeats: With increased competition and regulation, just how important are these in-game marketing tools in today’s marketplace?
Anthony Singer, High 5 Games: In-game marketing features have become a valuable asset for operators, providing them with alternative ways to engage with their customer base, while also creating better experiences for players. The days of a provider simply delivering a slot game are dwindling.
Nowadays, you have to offer additional benefits to help games stand out in a competitive
marketplace. The new High 5 Games tent-pole strategy has customer-centric features at its core, aiming to bring exciting new experiences to players. In-game marketing forms a big part of that strategy, as we understand the need to evolve slot games to keep players interested.
CB: Which of these features work best and why?
AS: The best features to add are the ones that add excitement to the game being promoted. The best way to accomplish this is to add extra features or enhanced wins that keep the players engaged and wanting more. This will ensure that they will get the best experience from the game and will return over and over again.
CB: How is technology helping to improve the in-game marketing tools that you offer? Are the offers and features becoming more sophisticated?
AS: Advances in technology are helping operators and suppliers to sharpen how they present promotional offers to players in play. At High 5 Games, we have developed a promo engine that cleverly pushes offers such as free spins to the consumer. The AI-powered platform produces adaptive offers depending on the player’s behaviour during a particular session.
Our promo engine uses machine learning from large quantities of historical data that has trained our math models over many iterations. This will ensure that we can give the best personalised customised promotion to ensure player enjoyment is maximised.
CB: Are these promotional tools customisable at all to allow operators to differentiate themselves?
AS: We know how important it is for operators to differentiate themselves, which is why the promotional offers we provide can be customised. For our latest release Shadow of the Panther Power Bet, we gave an option for operators to promote a discounted rate to our innovative Power Bet feature, which turbocharges wins for 30 consecutive spins.
Through a simple back-end configuration, this bespoke offer allows operators to target players for a specific period and helps raise the profile of new games and features. Our plan is to add more and more configuration options over time. The other benefits that operators will see is a self-correcting promo engine that ensures the best optimised settings for each promo are maximised over time.
