3 Reasons why Bonuses are crucial for your Online Casino business

3 Reasons why Bonuses are crucial for your Online Casino business

Used right it’s a blessing

Used right it’s a blessing

January 14, 2022 • 5 min. read •

January 14, 2022 • 5 min. read •

The entire success of an iGaming business revolves around our ability to acquire and keep players using our products. The happier they are the happier we are. And one of the main tools we work with to achieve this is the humble “bonus”. Used right it is a blessing, however, when abused it can be the curse that can drag a business down to its knees. Because of this duality, to use it well, it’s important to understand its strong points as well as the traps you can easily fall into.

What is a bonus?

For the purpose of this discussion, a bonus is going to be considered anything that offers your customers more funds to play with. There are multiple forms a bonus can take:

• an extra amount of money, either fixed or relative to a deposit (or sum of deposits) made. These are the ones you usually see for “welcome bonuses” or various higher value retention campaigns. Depending on the conditions involved we can be talking about deposit bonuses, no-deposit bonuses or even cashback bonuses.
• an extra amount of free spins in certain games. This guarantees you’ll be able to play for a certain amount of rounds, after which, you will have the winnings generated credited to your account in one form or another. These are usually lower value rewards which can be found as a supplement on higher value deposit bonuses or stand alone as standard retention rewards.

Now that we have the terminology down, let’s take a look at a few things we should do with bonuses.

1. Use bonuses to attract attention to your brand

One of the main uses bonuses have is to attract attention to the brand. We’re at a point where this has become standardized and the customers expect a certain amount of bonuses to even put you on their map. There is no clearer confirmation of this fact than the welcome bonus situation: in jurisdictions where bonuses are allowed, there are barely any brands out there that can be attractive to potential players without a welcome bonus. Sure there are some Pay & Play brands that focus on the ease of use given by the Trustly integration, however even those are most popular in areas where bonusing is extremely limiting.

Just try not having a welcome bonus in juridictions governed by the MGA; you’re not going to get very far. Affiliates are going to be skeptical, so you’re going to have a harder time acquiring players, potential customers are going to feel like they’re risking a lot more coming to an unknown brand, so your conversions are going to be lower (and thus CPAs significantly higher) and even generic marketing communication is going to be harder since you’re going to have to make some very creative product choices in order to compete with the ease of communication given by bonus promotional offerings.

2. Use bonuses to extend playtime

When customers come to your casino to have fun they have a certain budget in mind and, based on that, they expect a certain time window in which they get to enjoy the games. One of the main factors out there is “fun per dollar/euro” because iGaming sites not only compete among themselves, but they’re also competing with the likes of Netflix shows, console Call of Duty games or the latest Marvel release. Bonuses can significantly alter that, in all of their forms.

A 100% deposit match bonus is going to just double their expected play time. That scales really welll with deposits made by the customers and that’s why you’re often going to see these on the welcome bonus, since it’s important to give good incentives on the first contact with the brand.

100 Free Spins are going to add some time as well. However, compared to the deposit match bonus, this is a fixed amount. The advantage here is that for low deposit amounts the amount of extra playtime earned can exceed that of the other options, which is why you’ll often see them attached to lower minimum deposits.

What you’re aiming for is that players are leaving your site with a good impression, that they had fun regardless of whether they won or lost. And the amount of time they spent enjoying games with you is going to be an important factor. This is also where balancing RTP settings (for games with multiple options) factors in since lower RTP usually means players will go through their available funds a lot quicker; under a certain threshold they’ll just not feel entertained “enough” for the money they put in and give a failing grade to your product.

3. Use bonuses to create a schedule

In today’s world where the amount of options one has for spending their time is overwhelming, analysis paralysis can often be a big problem. Making decision every moment of every day is exhausting and sometimes, clients just want to kick back and go on autopilot. This applies to iGaming businesses as well.

As long as your product is good, people will want to use it, however it also needs to be on top of their mind. What you can often do is creat some bonus promotions on a regular basis to “reward” them remembering. In this way they can get used to come to your site, sometimes even without explicit communication, every Wednesday after 19.30 to claim that juicy 50% bonus.

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What you need to be careful about though, is to not overwhelm your clients with promotions. We need to keep in mind that everyone has a certain budget for entertainment activities and trying to convince them to buy more of our product once that budget is over is not going to end up very well; most often they’ll view those attemps as “spam” or “trying too hard”. It’s going to be a continuous balancing act between just the right amount of promotions and not too many; this is where a data person (or department) is going to come in handy.

Used the right way bonuses are a great way to keep your brand interesting as well as providing good value to your customers. But be careful not to overdo it, because if you overuse them you can lower your financial performance significantly. If you need any help with balancing your promotional strategy, we’re just an email away.