Episode 65 - Driving Retention in Betting & Gaming

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📰 Top Story: Drivers of Retention in Betting & Gaming 

The Acquisition-Retention Alignment Problem

The uncomfortable truth: your acquisition and retention teams are probably working against each other right now.

The Issue: Acquisition attracts bonus-hungry, low-value customers, while CRM responds with high-value onboarding sequences. 

The Solution: Kat nailed it - these teams are "two arms of the same department." Your strategies must be aligned from day one. Know where your players are coming from before you decide how to onboard them.

Pro Tip from Matt: Establish that constant feedback loop. If customers from Racing Post convert differently from those from football sites, your journeys need to reflect that. And sometimes you need to know when to cut your losses on those low-quality YouTuber boxing match acquisitions.

The Onboarding Problem Nobody Talks About

Simon: "Most gambling onboarding journeys are fundamentally broken."

The Breaking Points:

• Customers don't understand offer restrictions 

• Poor signposting leads to confusion and immediate churn

• Regulatory interventions interrupt the flow without proper education

Matt's take: You're dealing with customers ranging from complete beginners to those with 3-4 competitor accounts. Your onboarding must educate appropriately for each segment.

The Fix: Engineer your journeys with crystal-clear signposting. 

Avoiding the Bonus Race to the Bottom  

Everyone's obsessing over bonus costs, but you're asking the wrong question.

Matt: Over-aggressive bonusing in early lifecycle creates "bonus abusers" who are actually just customers taking what you offered. The same player flagged as problematic at one brand can be profitable at another - it's all about early treatment.

Kat's insight: Let customers tell you who they are through their bonus choices. Offer multiple bonus types and use their selection as actionable data for future retention bonusing, so that when you offer a bonus, it translates into business value. 

Simon's framework: It's not about the bonus amount - it's about return on ad spend. Model your acquisition cost (marketing spend + bonus) against payback periods. Then build a cost to retain into your business plan.  

The Identity vs. Behaviour Paradox

Customers see themselves differently from what your data suggests.

Kat's Poker Example: 80% of players who identify as "poker players" actually spend more on slots. Insult them with a casino bonus and lose them. Give them a poker ticket and they'll deposit for slots anyway.

Matt's Sports/Casino Reality: Sports bettors who spend more on casino still need sports messaging to trigger their login. Treat them like sports customers to get them in, then guide them to where they actually spend.

The Strategy: Honour their identity in your messaging, but incentivise valuable behaviours.

Safer Gambling as Commercial Strategy

This isn't about compliance, it's business sustainability.

Matt's Deposit Limit Logic: If a customer sets a £50/month limit, don't email them "Deposit £50 Get Free Spins" on day one. Break it into weekly £10 stakes to extend their lifecycle and reduce harm.

Kat's Data Approach: Settled customers don't change behaviour quickly. Rapid changes in gaming patterns are red flags for developing problems - and that shows up in the data before it becomes obvious.

Simon's Organisational Insight: Don't ask marketers to police themselves. Create separate compliance teams that provide "safe pools" of customers for targeted marketing.

The AI Revolution

The real short-term opportunity is in removing the grunt work that's killing your team's creativity.

• Eliminate operational busy work (uploading banners, building bonuses, creating promo pages)

• Opens up recruitment to creative, strategic marketers instead of project managers

• Enables "air traffic control" approach to campaign management

Matt's Reality Check: No CCO is going to hand over their budget to an AI-driven bonus engine immediately. Start with 5% of your base during quiet periods and scale as you learn. 

Simon's Guardrails: Agentic AI needs to maintain player protection at its core. Your utility function can't just be "maximise LTV" when your most valuable player can become one of your least valuable in a single bet. 

The Creative Challenge

AI-powered campaign optimisation is pointless without AI-powered creative.

The Problem: You need 300,000+ creative variants for Saturday afternoon football across Europe. Manual creative can't scale to match AI campaign optimisation.

The Opportunity: The first operator to crack real-time, contextually relevant creative generation will steal market share from everyone else.

Key Takeaways 

1. Align acquisition and retention from day one - they're not separate functions.

2. Fix your broken onboarding - most operators are losing customers in the first few interactions. 

3. Honour customer identity while incentivising valuable behaviours - understanding customer psychology beats purely data-led decisions. 

4. Treat safer gambling as a business strategy - burning customers today means no customers tomorrow. 

5. Start small with AI - but start now. 

6. Focus on removing operational overhead - your team should be strategising, not uploading banners.

The Bottom Line

Kat’s insight: The next generation of gamblers grew up with better games, crypto culture, and interactive experiences that make traditional gambling look archaic. 

The operators who combine deep customer understanding with smart AI implementation will capture this market.

Everyone else? They'll be competing for a shrinking pool of elder millennials. 

Episode 3 of the Customer Retention Show Podcast drops next Sunday, 14th September. It's one you can't afford to miss, whatever sector you work in. 

Until next week, 

Tom

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