iGB Webinar on AI-driven Hyper-Personalisation: Overview

Opportunities around personalisation

With the introduction of AI technologies, online casinos are ready to take the next step in offering personalized experiences to their players. A lot of inspiration can be drawn from outside the industry, where personalisation has already become a significant factor in garnering traction. Steam, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and other streaming services and leading retailers are just some of the companies that are making good use of the innovations with personalised search, recommendations and relevant product placement on high traffic pages. 

Many steps that make the experience of the player more personalised may seem obvious yet are often neglected. Addressing these will have immediate positive results. Competitor research shows that even simple improvements, such as showing trending games, generate increased engagement proving the importance of having personalised content. We have seen that many operators have been challenged in implementing true 1:1 personalization in-house. 

With all the technologies and data at their fingertips, gaming operators have a solid opportunity to gain a competitive edge and leverage personalisation as the core engine of growth. 

Benefits of AI hyper-personalisation in iGaming

We cannot underestimate the benefits of personalisation in our dynamic time. Nowadays, people are bombarded with information every time they pick up their mobile phones. Playing on the go and subject to being easily distracted, the player is spoilt with the abundance of gaming opportunities, leaving the operators just a small window where they can grab the player’s attention and pitch their product. Furthermore, personalisation offered on non-gaming sites is becoming the norm, so naturally, the customers expect to see the same performance and quality of implementation when they go to Casino sites. 

Another trend you may observe is that customers who play a higher variety of games are more likely to carry on playing for longer. This brings up the next challenge – how do you introduce new games to dedicated players? One way that you may notice lobby managers dealing with this issue is when they turn the home page into an enormous catalogue of games. However, quantity doesn’t always mean quality. 

We are already using web-analytic tools to collect information about each player. Behavior analysis shows that when interacting with the gaming content on the home page, over 60% of players stick to only one area. How can we use this information to improve customer experience? 

For once, gaming operators need to figure out how to deliver relevant types of games, display them where the player is most likely to see the recommendation, based on previous behavior and taking player preferences into consideration. Now that you’ve made sure that the players click on the recommended game, next you want them to like it enough to continue playing. If done correctly, you’ll notice a significant uplift in turnover and retention rate, as well as the variety of games played. 

The benefits of personalised content are quite obvious. As a player, you don’t have to waste time going through the website and looking for games, as the algorithm has already learned your preferences – you are offered an easy to consume “menu” right upon login. Imagine it as a supermarket where you go to do your shopping every week. You always buy the same things and each time have to make the same route through the isles to get your shopping done. But what if you could walk into a supermarket and see all the products you usually buy right at the entrance? No more need to wander around the store to pick up bread in aisle 3 and milk in aisle 9. That’s what personalisation does. These are tools that learn and help predict customer behaviour. 

Of course, a website or an online casino is different in a way that your customer doesn’t have an essential need to be there. If they find the website confusing, they’ll click away in a second and you may as well consider your customer gone for good. That’s what makes it so important to grab the potential client’s attention right from the very beginning. 

When Symphony Solutions started working with Graphyte and delivering a truly personalised experience to the players, we found that the number of unconverted sessions, where players log in but did not launch any games, decreased. Nothing says that a customer enjoyed their time on site as improved financial KPIs. Nobody wants to pay for a bad experience.

MARIA GRIGOROVA, CUSTOMER JOURNEY OPTIMIZATION MANAGER FOR GVC GAMING BRANDS

Challenges when integrating AI personalisation solutions

Integration of AI technologies is simpler than you might think, however, challenges arise when trying to connect various data points. Collecting data is just the first step. What you do with it next makes the difference. 

• How do you transfer information about gameplay into your CMS tool to show recently played games? 
• How long can you keep this information to make sure that you deliver the best experience to long tenure players? 
• How quickly can you analyse behaviour and come up with recommendations? 
• Can you predict the customer’s next action and prevent them from leaving the site? 

Another challenge can be with resources. Most of the companies have a delivery road map and sometimes your projects for optimisation of the product don’t receive the level of prioritization they deserve. That’s why it’s easier in some cases to use external suppliers in order to deliver the desired project. 

Integration typically takes only 4-6 weeks; this is due to the fact that Graphyte integration process has now been fine-tuned to the point when we can successfully integrate rapidly. Once you have it on site, you want to make sure that it’s working properly and you’re seeing what you want to see. Generally, the process is very straightforward and there are very few places where it can go wrong. 

Financial upsides

Personalisation allows for cross-selling players to new products with up to 70% uplift on turnover. For instance, if you have regular bingo players who stick to only that one product, you can try recommending them slots, which have a reference to their previous experience of bingo rooms. It will result in an initial uplift that will gradually drop down as the novelty wears off, bringing less impressive yet stable uplift. 

Other important and co-related KPIs would be the variety of games played and retention rate. If the player likes the games you recommend, they are more likely to return to your casino site. After introducing personalised recommendations, Graphyte saw a 50% increase in conversion. Increased session duration comes as a nice bonus, as an engaged player will keep coming back to your site and staying for longer. 

Another positive dynamic was observed in a significant reduction of the dependency on bonusing to engage players. When testing personalised recommendations with added bonus vs. no bonus, customers responded better when no additional perks were offered. The players who received recommendations with no offer were twice more likely to try a new game. Why is that the case? Let’s say that you offered a player to spend £15 on a game to get free spins. Other than the bonus, there’s no indication that the player will enjoy the game enough to keep playing and spend more than the initial £15, or even use the free spins for that matter. With no bonus, the player might spend £1 or £100 – the only thing that matters is if the game is fun to make the player want to keep coming back and voluntarily spend more.  

With the implementation of personalisation for online betting apps, Graphyte showed a 1000% ROI and rising. Essentially, there’s no limit to the ROI you can generate with personalisation as there will always be new opportunities and new games to invest in. 

Key takeaways

Responsible gaming becomes a more and more significant factor, especially with regulations on gambling put in place in many locations. Content is once again king. Personalisation is the future solution for CRM and on-site campaigns. The benefits of introducing AI personalisation solutions are a no-brainer. Consider the cost of delay incurred by not implementing it. 

If you want to make the best of AI technologies and leverage hyper-personalisation in your online gaming business, here are some of the points to keep in mind: 

• Resist the temptation to try to build the software in-house, use an external resource instead. 
• Personalise the lobby. Deliver a personalised home page with a dynamic lobby. 
• Always have customer experience in mind.
• Don’t try to resolve every problem at the same time, build a dedicated solution for each KPI you want to increase. 
• Test and analyse your results to make sure you deliver the best possible experience for your players.