MRI Casino Marketing Blog
Winning With Technology: Bringing It All Together

Is your casino brand using a player loyalty mobile app through your player portal? Customer relationship management (CRM) and other relevant technology, but not bringing these tools together into a single strategy? Chances are, you need more than just a fractured casino marketing toolbox to help you deliver the big data-driven, personalized experiences your customers want.

In today's casinos, we can automate almost all of our business and customer communication processes. The advantages of automating processes are apparent. You glean lucrative insights mined from your market data to improve responses and results while freeing up your staff to implement smarter marketing strategies.

Your CRM can trigger your casino player loyalty app to send a specialized birthday offer to your customers via push notification. By combining all communication channels: mobile apps, kiosks, CRM customer data, geofencing and push notifications, with creativity and predictive analytics, your casino's bottom line will increase. You’ve also entered the world of omnichannel marketing. Putting the right message in front of the right person, at the right time. Data enables this communication flow.

In the first post of this Series, I described the power of customer relationship management (CRM), a process and a tool to help you respond to, manage and strategically grow your casino player base and boost your revenues.

In the second post of the Series, I highlighted the tremendous functionality of casino player loyalty mobile apps to entice, engage, and make loyal customers out of new and existing players.

In the third post of the Series, I talked about bringing today's technology home to your casino customers to create fully customized apps and communications that increase brand loyalty. 

Technology Shouldn't Feel Like Technology

Combining technology in the right way and simplifying processes will enhance the player's experience. Per marketer Danny Bluestone, "Ideally each experience should build their trust and strengthen your reputation." It's about building a multi-channel customer experience that feels seamless, personalized, and like it's driven by a human touch. 

Your marketing technology shouldn't necessarily be obvious or in their face. Sure, your players will be aware they're interacting with apps or that their physical location in your casino is allowing them to unlock personalized offers via geofencing. However, if you've successfully brought it all together, what's going to stand out is the convenience and relevance. They should be delighted by the quality of your offers, and not think about the software integrations or the "how" behind it. An omnichannel experience feels like consistently high-quality interactions with a brand, not random interactions with various pieces of technology. 

Myth: Gamblers Aren't into Apps or Technology

Your customers aren't opposed to using technology. Casino brands that struggle with app adoption and loyalty program enrollments are often suffering from deeper, hidden symptoms. These could include a generic app that doesn't "feel" like the casino the customer trusts because it doesn’t match the brand in design or look like other digital communications from their favorite casino. Maybe your online check-out process is confusing, and maybe they avoid your kiosks because they're hard to use and they'd rather talk to a person. In all of these cases, it's not about the technology, it's about how the casino brand has put the pieces together.

Tools for digital communications should be desired by your customers. You've hit the sweet spot when convenience increases for players and marketers. Your player data is organized and up to date in your CRM, which ensures that birthday and point rewards are sent to the right person at the right time. While a fully integrated multi-channel casino customer experience seems complicated and expensive, it's not. It's often more cost-effective than print and direct mail.

Technology Isn't Everything

Technology is a series of channels to communicate with gamblers. It can automate tasks, but it doesn't win a customer's heart and mind just because it's there. A skilled marketer's touch is necessary to use technology in ways that create value for the players.

Perhaps even more importantly, your technology shouldn't be a megaphone. No matter what new social media platform or kiosk feature comes along, your customers can't feel like you are shouting at them. They need to be able to interact, share feedback, and build a human relationship. 

Don't Ask Yourself What's New — Ask Yourself What Matters

Winning marketing is more about the emotional impact on the customer, your player. People want to play and dine with casino brands they know, like and trust.

Gadgets and technology are changing. Anthropologists and other human-centric researchers believe that technology is changing much faster than human behavior is, which is the reality of understanding how to bring it all together into great marketing.

Having the shiniest gadget might be cool, but wait a month, and your really sweet new kiosk could lose the “new car smell”. New technology isn't what's going to stand out to your customers. The human side of your brand, or how you bring big data, software, apps, and automation together into a personalized experience, is what matters. And that fact almost definitely won't be changing anytime soon.

Contact us today to transform your casino marketing tech stack into a people-centric technology suite, with integrated CRM, casino apps, and other tools to transform your customer data into a seamless experience that builds loyalty.