Marketing

Using a 360 data analytics approach and developing a complete view of your top revenue-generating departments is critical. Through this process, you will uncover money sitting in your database and be guided on how to capture it. This is a higher level view of this concept… ultimately, your goal is to use your data to give your guests what they want, when they want it. The revenue opportunity will follow.

To start off this process, look at the key revenue-generating departments at the property; within each department, focus on specific qualitative analysis. We begin with understanding the natural segmentation of the database. Find the bell curves for your specific metrics including spend and frequency. This gives an overall understanding of your database and gives the history and basis for the story we are creating.

What follows is a list of the top four revenue-generating departments for most gaming properties, with talking points and questions to consider around using a data analytics approach. You’ll need to do this process for all four departments to walk away with critical key metrics.

• Player Development:  With the understanding achieved from the database overview, the next step is to understand the player behavior and what to do to create impact to revenue. Aligning knowledge gleaned from database marketing, creating hyper-segmentation within this group to speak to groups at the right moment is critical. Creating the ability for hosts to manage their book of business through this hyper-segmentation using their training and scripts is valuable. Is the play of the customer going up, down or about the same? Have they missed some trips?
  Imagine this information in the hands of the PD team and having them armed with the training to integrate this new information into their sales process.
• Database Marketing: First, look at the natural segmentation of the database that was created. Review your worth segmentation cohorts to see if you need to make adjustments to reach your goals. These include your casual players, your retail players, your experienced players, VIPs and maybe VVIPs. Are you looking at them year-over-year regularly? Does the mail segmentation align with what you are seeing? You may need to re-adjust your programs if you are not seeing the growth you desire.
  Once you have reviewed this information then apply your knowledge strategically to each of your customer lifecycle programs and your segmentation (based on spend, frequency, and locality) within each program. Often this step is ignored, which can lead to missed revenue opportunities.
• Players Club: Again, with natural segmentation, make sure that your tiers and club program aligns with the database. Are you moving players into new tiers based on the database? Do the criteria to qualify for the next tier seem inspirational to each of the worth segmentation cohorts? Each cohort should be a feeder for the next tier up. Make sure that your promotions and giveaways are maintaining players in the lower tiers and managing profitability. Look at using your kiosks for promotions to drive trips. At what point is the right point to move players into the player development program? This should be clear by looking at the natural database analysis from the beginning.
• Slots: The slot floor is critical to the business. Understanding key metrics like occupancy, theo, win per day, days on the floor and several more helps many teams understand when to add or remove machines. Aligning that with what customers prefer adds another level of analytics and improves the customer experience.

There is also a huge win in applying the information from both slot accounting and the player database. Imagine looking at the games with preference before taking a machine off the floor. If you need to remove a machine that happens to be the primary preference of a VIP, then slots can notify player development and give the player advance notification letting them know what other games they may like. This creates a good guest experience. This is a start. Getting slots and marketing to work together will be a profitable exercise. The final step is sharing key metrics from each department and putting this into an executive overview.

There is so much opportunity when you apply analytics to your top revenue-generating departments. The above guide only scratches the surface on how you should be thinking about this concept. Guaranteed, however, is to apply these principals to stop leaving money in your database.