Shahar Attias, is the founder and CEO of Hybrid Interaction Ltd., is a globally recognized Retention Marketing and Loyalty expert. We sat down with Shahar to ask him what types of promotions perform best for poker players. Shahar was kind enough to share some of his top tips for the CAP audience.
1. What types of promotions tend to perform best when targeting poker players (both newbies and experienced players)?
The best promotions require three things: A) knowledge of the players B) a campaign tailored toward those players and C) buy-in from everyone involved with the campaign. To explain, first you need an in-depth understanding of an operator’s specific types of players, not players in general. Your campaign is designed to generate more of what you already know is creating revenue for the operator. But this only works if both you and the operator understand what you’re trying to achieve with the campaign and everyone does their part to make it a success.
2. What simple things can affiliates do to improve their conversion rates when running these promotions?
Think one step ahead. Yes, conversions are nice, and nothing can happen without them. B you’re here to run a full marathon, not just a 100-meter dash. So don’t focus just on how many first deposits you can score before the next pay day, but how you can work with your client (i.e. the poker operator) to make the most money from your overall hits.
3. What’s the best converting source of traffic for poker?
The easy answer is that affiliates linked to a well-organized group of players can always provide not only the highest conversion levels, but also the highest level of engagement. But you rarely get hold of such a ready-made source of players. Instead, your channels count as only one of many forces that contribute to the conversion tunnel. Everything plays a role, from the overall campaign structure and presentation through the landing page, the offering, a call to a support rep, etc. And each campaign is going to vary in terms of how much importance each element has.
4. What creatives tend to generate results or is the offer more important than the creative?
I have witnessed an amazingly successful campaign that had no creatives at all — just the offer in bold, black font on a blank grey background and nothing else in the frame. So was that a perfect “offer-only focused” campaign? I’d contend that having no creatives at all is actually a form of a creative. Any communication with end-users employs some kind of creativity that hammers home the message. Which creative is best? Woody Allen once said that he doesn’t know what the question is, but sex is definitely the answer. That might apply to promotional messages to online poker players, but I guess at the end of the day, it depends on your crowd’s characteristics.
5. Is it effective for affiliates to focus on more than one promotion at a time?
Tough one. Magnitude definitely has its advantages, so if you work with a large enough population, it makes sense to diversify your promos. That said, what is large enough? Trial and error is the only answer, I am afraid.
6. Social media gets a lot of publicity these days. Can poker affiliates use it as a promotional tool?
The question probably should be whether affiliates can afford NOT to use it. Like it or not, that’s probably where you get the highest level of attention from your potential players. So I can’t imagine how poker affiliates – or any other business with an online presence, for that matter – can skip this spectrum. Not having social in your mix of promotional tools is like not having a web connection on your phone. It’s fine if your target audience is the Amish community, but otherwise it just doesn’t work anymore.
About Shahar Attias
Shahar Attias, the Founder and CEO of Hybrid Interaction Ltd., is a globally recognized Retention Marketing and Loyalty expert and the blogger behind iGamingCRM.com. He is a frequent speaker at iGaming Conferences and has a deep understanding of all vertical-specific KPI’s in the online gambling industry, as well as an extensive experience in Forex & Binary Options, and recent case studies with applying Player Development Strategies at casino-style gaming applications on Facebook.
You can meet Shahar at this coming G2E conference in Las-Vegas during the first week of October 2012.