Daniel Larsson of Enteractive considers the importance of attaining player engagement levels and retention.

So you’re marketing to your players with great messaging and glossy adverts, you’ve got your digital marketing and affiliate activity hitting all the right places and bringing the new guys, but you’re not chatting to them and building real, lasting relationships? Why not?

Sure, you’ve got thousands, if not millions of players, so how are you going to call them all and keep them playing. The answer is, you don’t. You can’t call absolutely everyone…

But what you can do is show the love to players who might not have visited you in a while.   We’re not talking about sending them more emails and text messages. The best way to engage with these guys is to give them a call, and be ready with a good story for them!

If Catena and Better Collective are the foot soldiers in the traffic generator space, you could say Enteractive are Special Ops.  We go in and convert the audience segments that no-one else can.  We’re the guys you work with when you’ve tried all your other methods and can’t get a response.

That’s because we call the players and have a conversation with them on behalf of our operator partners, personalising the experience with them.  It results in considerably higher conversion rates for dormant or lapsed player databases, the NRCs and NDCs.

Personalisation is the new watch word for the iGaming sector.  As time marches on, Millennials and Gen Zs are increasingly becoming the dominant audience in the entertainment era. By 2027, these generation segments will make up 52% of the overall iGaming audience, and we need to understand their specific behaviour and needs, to deliver a more considered approach in terms of how we engage with them. 

Enteractive has worked with iGaming clients and partners since 2009, continually renewing and adapting our approach to make one-to-one calls to players that actually convert. We introduced our market-first (Re)Activation Cloud technology in 2017, allowing operators to integrate their selected player databases with our teams, and providing transparent dashboard reports from day one.   

he (Re)Activation Cloud technology gives us a solid foundation to deliver scalable personalisation services for operators in iGaming markets across the world, from Latam and North America to Europe and Asia.  But it’s not all about the tech.  The secret of our success relies on the native-speaking call agents who connect with players by phone and have a real conversation with them.   And it really makes a difference having a chat about what’s going on with the players – what they like, what they want, and, from a responsible gambling perspective, any problems they might be concerned about.  

There’s plenty of surveys out there that support this closer relationship with players. “68% of customers will leave feeling under appreciated”, states the American Society of Quality Control, and what we’ve found is that players not only feel more appreciated by the operators, but they also want to hear from the brands they choose to play with. 

In our own surveys conducted with players, more than half (51%) said they preferred to be contacted by phone, compared to email (13%), SMS (12%), and live chat (24%). Four out of five players said they’d be happy to be contacted at least once a month to hear about new updates, promotions and offers.

When we speak to players, we’re not making a salesy-type call.   We’re trying to find some common ground and be friendly, relevant, and useful.  We want to chat with them, find out what’s going on in their lives when it comes to iGaming, and share some good stories that they can relate to.

‘Story-selling’ is something of an acquired skill, forging more honest relationships, capturing attention, providing some relevant context, and, yes, selling in the operators’ entertainment offerings.  It’s a method we encourage all our engagement agents to use to be more personable with the players, and it makes a real difference.

On a call, our reactivation agents don’t just talk, they listen.  And then develop the conversation with a story that the player can relate to.   Maybe it’s a story about an amazing accumulator that gave someone a big win.  Perhaps it’s about a massive slots payout they heard about.   It could be about a baseball team that came through against the odds, and won the championship – imagine the payout if you bet on them at the start of the tournament.

Unlike some storyselling techniques, preying on people’s fears (think insurance companies), we tell stories that make players feel different emotions like empathy, affection, happiness, and joy. These reactions help us connect with the player and create a more unique bond.  It’s the shared enjoyment of a good yarn. 

What happens when using this approach is a change in consumer behaviour.   The buzz of excitement can be reignited, memories of the enjoyment the player knows well from their own experiences.   It reminds them what they’ve been missing out on.  And then they’re happier to consider the reason we’ve got in touch with them, to take us up on the operator offer we might have for them.   

Without our personalised outreach campaigns for operators, these player revenue streams would remain missed opportunities, and since we only get paid when the players play, it’s a no brainer for iGaming brands to engage our services and increase the number of active players as well as reviving dormant revenues.

Daniel Larsson is CCO at Enteractive. Enteractive is the industry leader in player reactivation, and the pioneers behind the (Re)Activation Cloud™, building bridges between operators and their players, and ultimately increasing player retention and loyalty by engaging with them in a 1-on-1 conversation.