Pulse

Making data-driven decisions easy and automated

By Lewis - 15 January 2018

Netrefer’s Timothy Buttigieg discusses the ways in which operators can make sense of big data

Did you take any big decision this morning? Are you sure that the information used to make that decision was accurate? If so, how can you measure the effectiveness of this decision in a S.M.A.R.T manner.

Data should always be at the heart and soul of strategic decision making within organisations, whether these organisations are the multinational behemoths or the small family-run businesses. Data leads you in the right direction, generating insights which can then be switched to data-driven decisions for effective business practices.

Data comes in all shapes and forms; data which can be used to form accurate business decisions usually comes in the form of personal data, web data, sensor data and many more. Transactional data, especially in e-commerce is highly important; be it from secondary resources or driven from your website is an incredibly important of data because it helps expose variability and can be used to optimize operations. By examining this data, it is possible to uncover hidden patterns, trends and correlations which can help digital operations end up more efficient and effective, resulting in the creation of competitive advantages and increased revenue.

While all this data is well and good, what organisations lack is what to do with this data when it is in its most raw form. In comes NetRefer, the industry leader in the provision of Unified Performance Marketing. NetRefer powers the most successful and high-volume partner programs through a centralized and scalable platform of products. Nowadays, NetRefer provides a fully-fledged Performance Marketing Ecosystem, while also providing its robust, feature-rich and award-winning performance marketing platform it is now loaded with two innovative products; Performance Marketing Intelligence & Loyalty and Gamification.

The Wizards of Performance Marketing Insights
NetRefer understands the importance of actionable insights; Performance Marketing Intelligence is NetRefer’s cloud-based BI Platform providing self-service intelligence, enabling users to make faster, well-informed decisions based on a 360-degree view of their data. PMI enables marketers to swiftly identify trends, gaps and opportunities in real time. Businesses will be able to take informed decisions that improve campaign effectiveness for better results, and at a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), without requiring any expensive in-house IT infrastructure, BI tools or an army of data scientists.

Making sense of large amounts of data and visually presenting this directly to the decision maker requires a mix of technical, analytical and presentation skills. PMI provides this out of the box. Giving the business full control over their affiliate rewards and ensure that customers’ LTV keeps rising. Our data scientists and BI specialists have built a ready-to-use statistical and Machine Learning (ML) models together with industry KPIs that enable self-service analytics: descriptive analytics (what happened and why), predictive analytics (forecast what will happen if) and prescriptive analytics (how do we make the best happen).

All this is packaged into easy-to-use visual dashboards, reports and industry KPIs that requires no prior knowledge of BI, data science or analytics. All this enables marketing teams, product teams, VIP teams, senior managers and executives to focus on what they do best – as all intelligence is available at their fingertips.

Back-Office Loyalty and Gamification Administrator
It is clear to say that the future of online casinos and sportsbooks is gamification. With more and more operators sprouting, differentiating oneself from the competition, and creating unique selling points is a difficult task, especially since most of them offer the same games, from the same game providers.

A lot of companies, new and old have embedded some sort of gamification within their product; these might include sign-up bonuses, referral bonuses, gamified campaigns to increase conversion rates and so on. Whilst these are a good first step and can reflect well within the company’s targets, these are generally highly limited in scope and duration. In many cases, they are simply tacked on temporarily, with nary a concern for the collection of performance data, and the effect it has on player retention and encouragement.

Now this question looms over organisations; how can an operator use gamification to increase loyalty, customer retention and motivation to play?

Connecting with the operator’s clients on a more personal level
By basing the system upon a rules engine, considerable power has been placed in the hands of the operator, with the ability to target certain segments, as well as automatically segment customers based on certain behaviour. Systems can be configured to meet any business needs, using a myriad of features. The operator is fully in control to choose how they reward their customers.

Leader boards, badges, points and online currencies are all ingredients for a proper gamification engine within an operator’s platform. The real trick behind this, is to know how to use them. The application of these tools to increase customer LTV must be catered to the core values of the brand. Certain attributes and processes must be built to scale and integrated to give the customer the best experience possible. Positive re-enforcement to drive desired behaviour is the usual method, companies recently are going beyond that and creating a customer journey within their gamification engine.

Auditing practices within the software is useful, to reflect upon past player activity and understand how to cater for specific segments on a more effective level. This gives the ability to observe their LTVs, costs and accumulation of milestones within the system. This can then help operators segment and target their customers with the rules configured. The operator can then set up and fully customise the rules which govern the loyalty programme, to meet their exact needs.

Consider customised gamification, especially as many operators are entering into regulated markets and use certain platform providers that provide their iGaming solution out of the box, there is a massive need to differentiate and creating value for the bulk of the players, be it; a first-time depositor, an active player or a VIP.

Configure. Operate. Deliver
NetRefer’s Loyalty and Gamification Platform drives customer brand loyalty and retention, increases LTV and helps drive desired behaviour. Our L&G Platform uses gamification backed up by a sought after, robust performance marketing ecosystem which brings game mechanics to campaign management, affiliate management and performance marketing. Regarding analytics, L&G provides advanced and powerful customer tagging for easier segmentation and personalisation across multiple game providers by managing multiple organisations, brands and games in one place.

A rules engine is created with pre-determined conditions (created by the operator) which is easily configured that puts into consideration; groups, actions, multipliers, wallets, compartments and much more. Unlimited customer segmentation possibilities with the ability to link to activities, products and sub-products. With NetRefer a business can truly stand out and outplay competitors.