Comprehensive Guide on What You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Player Journey

As you decide to buy a poker website or become an owner of an iGaming platform, you might have to grapple with understanding how people get involved with your product, how your iGaming portal is perceived by potential and regular customers, and whether the user experience you provide is positive.

By acquiring this valuable information, you can design more impactful marketing campaigns and build stronger connections with your audiences. From a motivation standpoint to placing the first deposit and keeping referrals coming, a player journey is all about how visitors interact with your online poker or gaming platform and how to turn these interactions to your advantage. A flawless journey enables iGaming operators to stay in control and deliver a consistently great user experience. Let’s dig deeper into the essence of a player journey and what you can do with it to improve your iGaming platform.

What is a Player Journey?

The term “Player Journey” is widely used in the iGaming industry, and it describes the entire experience an individual has during their communication with a given casino website, an online poker room, or a mobile gaming app. A journey starts right from the brand discovery and goes all the way from the registration and making the first deposit to keeping playing or terminating their account. A player journey is more focused on interactions and experiences a user has with a particular casino brand rather than transactions they perform on the platform.

The best online poker software providers generally include all necessary tools for a player journey when designing an iGaming website or a mobile application for a client. Such a solution will be equipped with everything a gaming operator needs to create, test, and automate a customised lifecycle for their customers.

Each journey consists of a set of activities that the user is supposed to complete to reach a specific goal, for example, making a particular number of spins or placing a deposit of a certain amount. Additional conditions can also be applied, such as playing a specific game.

With a player journey toolset, you can set up various “hints” along the user cycle to encourage users to complete their journey, such as in-game messages to remind customers how close they are to a goal, or rewards to keep the punter motivated.

What Are the Instances of a Player Journey?

Basically, a player journey consists of the following stages:

• Brand awareness – this is where a user’s path begins: the exposure of a casino brand to its potential clients is the first point of communication between the iGaming operator and a customer. Brand awareness is all about how people are familiar with the specific casino establishment, and it is gained through marketing campaigns that provide general information about the brand and its services. The ultimate purpose of raising brand awareness is to make more players associate themselves with the iGaming company and become loyal customers.
• Registration – it is when a prospect officially enrols on an online gaming platform. This is the key stage in a consumer’s journey because it grants an iGaming operator the real opportunity to sell their offerings to the visitor. Registration is a great stepping stone in the user’s cycle because it allows a casino platform to collect all the necessary data for future touchpoints with the customer.
• Initial deposit. After the visitor has adapted to the gaming platform, examined the available game library, and tried some titles in a free demo mode, marketing procedures can begin in a full swing. An operator can now engage a client with personalised messages, inducing them into placing a first-time deposit. This is usually done by sending personalised greetings with an exclusive welcome bonus offer to encourage the newly-registered person to start playing with real money.
• First games. These are the games that a beginner tries immediately after entering the iGaming platform. Operators can influence the player’s journey to a certain extent, they can place touchpoints along the way to constantly participate and guide their progress. The iGaming operators may offer exclusive games and provide special offers based on the amount of the first deposit.
• Favourite games. As a person continues their journey on the given casino or poker website, the data gathered along their path can be exploited to create a complete player profile. An iGaming operator constantly monitors and records all activities and behaviour patterns of a player, including the games a person plays most. Once the favourite games are identified, an owner of the platform can furnish these entertainments with exclusive offers and bonuses to stimulate a player to keep on playing. Impressive online gaming engagement and customer retention levels can be achieved through such a target marketing campaign.
• Churn. Users tend to leave once they start feeling tired or bored on the platform. If the iGaming provider fails to handle this situation, it will mark the end of a user’s lifecycle. Therefore, it is critical to constantly keep track of user behaviour throughout their path in order to minimise the churn rate. Personalised messages with lucrative offers sent to members who stay inactive for a while can help to bring the person back to the platform.

A player journey can be used to prompt a user to act the desired way, such as to place the first deposit, try a new game, or return after a period of inactivity. But the capabilities of a journey are not limited to that. In fact, there are many other things you, probably, did not know you could do with it to boost your online casino business. There are a few ideas of how online gaming platforms can benefit from a player journey.

Ensure Safer iGaming

Whether you buy a poker software website or develop an online casino platform from zero, you can create a player journey that will control deposit limits, loss limits, or self-exclusion statuses of gamblers. For example, when a user tops up their account balance for the first time, you can prompt them to set deposit limits. And if overspending is identified, interventions can be initiated in real-time to prevent unsafe gambling behaviours. As such, a journey allows you to better track the observance of your responsible gaming policies.

Obtain Actionable Results

With player journey statistics at your fingertips, you never need to wait for a marketing campaign to end to see how well it works. A user journey supplies you with real-time results, which means you can scale up successful campaigns, or pause and modify flunking campaigns based on what the stats show you.

Evaluate the Effectiveness of Different Communication Channels

A user journey also enables iGaming operators to see from where people get to the platform. For example, you can clearly see whether a person lands on your poker website by following a referral link sent via a messenger chat, by clicking an ad banner on some gambling forum, appears on the site by searching on Google, etc. Once you know which interaction channels attract more users, you can create better marketing campaigns that will surely give you the biggest response.

Experiment with Different Marketing Gimmicks

At any stage of a user lifecycle, it is possible to run a series of A/B tests with control groups. For example, an online poker platform operator can test the effectiveness of different types of messages vs. the level of engagement of players in a control group who do not receive such messages. This makes a player journey a perfect solution for a test-and-learn approach that empowers iGaming providers to find out what works best for their clients.

Keep Players Involved

While gifts and bonuses are an amazing incentive to encourage new players to try your online gambling platform, they can also help enhance the experience in the middle of a user journey as a sudden element of surprise. For example, if you want a person to play at least 10 games on your poker website, you can offer them some privilege or a bonus after the first 5, so the user is stimulated to proceed. You can also choose to reward a player with a surprise bonus based on the value of a deposit they make while traveling through the player lifecycle.

Promote Fresh Releases to the Interested Players

A user journey can also help online gaming operators promote new entertainment content to the right people based on their interests, whether it is a new title from a popular poker software developer or the latest entry in a particular iGaming genre. With a player journey, you can see whether your clients eagerly try the promoted game as well as evaluate how much money they bet on it. This allows you to estimate the campaign’s impact in more detail than taking a wild “Yes or No” guess, and you can also quickly detect your most/least responsive players.

Maximise Promotional Participation

Regular gamesters often start playing their favourite games right away without checking the latest releases on your iGaming website. A player’s journey can be leveraged to let these participants know they are missing the opportunity to try a new fabulous game. Promotional engagement can be increased, for instance, by adding “Try Now” buttons to the push notifications or in-game messages.

Control Your Bonus Budget

If you run a rewards-based campaign, you can limit the number of incentives available to help control your budget and set an end cost for the entire campaign. This way you can have peace of mind that you only give out a fixed amount of rewards, even if more players than originally expected are eligible, or that you have enough resources for all players that qualify for such a reward.

While a player journey is a powerful tool to invite and retain players on a gaming platform, the actual integration of such a feature into a particular iGaming or poker website is not an easy feat. EvenBet Gaming is among the leading casino game development companies of today. We know how to design great online casino and poker solutions, so they make both the players and the owner happy. Contact us today if you want to start a poker site that is destined to succeed.