Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming JUly 2015 36 that layers will work for, no matter how many there are,” Ms Gordon said. “They’re going to stay and play. You just have to be careful with your low- and mid-tier, that you’re not offering them something that you can’t continually offer them…make sure you reward appropriately according to where they’re playing and where you expect them to play,” Ms Gordon said. When marketers start looking at tiers, are there ways to make adjustments? “I think it’s a lot about experimentation and pulling levers slightly,” Ms Gordon added. “I don’t recommend pulling a lever all the way one way or the other. I think you need to pull them slightly and see where that shift happens in [player’s] behavior.” The “sweet spot” for a promotion was another question generated by the audience. They wanted to know how long a promotion should be in order to be successful, especially long term. All panelists agreed that a month was usually best. “I think you still have to do a little jazzing up in the middle of it to keep the momentum,” Ms Carcamo said. “I’ve done quarterly promotions, but they’ve typically been a launch around something bigger for the property or a larger program, like a new loyalty program. I think you have to create that promotion as a bit of an umbrella and create smaller month-long chunks. You have to keep people interested, and three months of the same message and doing the same thing gets boring after a while, and it also gets boring for your staff.” COMPILING RESULTS Another discussion was based on measuring promotion success by doing post-formas. An audience member asked the panel, “Do you always run a post-forma on the promotions that you do? “I think that the process I’ve had in the past has been very simple,” Ms Carcamo said. “You take some assumptions and your pre-forma and then someone has the ability to say this looks like a good program lets go ahead and put it in place. I think post-formas for me have been more than just numbers. Numbers tell you if you had revenue, you have to look at behavior modification… and also some research on what the impact was on the property. Sometimes you can have a really good promotion that’s very successful, drives the ROI, incremental revenue, every finance person’s dream, but somehow, for example, the buffet got slammed because we weren’t prepared enough. So you’re hurting the employees, which hurts the customers, so there’s a lot more to the post-forma than the numbers.” Mr Thornton agreed but cautioned, “One of the pitfalls that I’ve seen in some of the post-formas that I’ve done is a case of grading your own homework. I’ve seen departments where they’ve done their own post-formas and they’ve been able to fix those numbers to make them look however they want, so I’d warn against that kind of scenario.” In conclusion, casinos need to do what’s right for them and their players in order to have a successful promotion. In order to do this, marketers need to calculate incremental revenue efficiently, survey their players and get to know their wants and needs, combine direct and digital marketing in this new age, and study and learn from past promotion success and failures to determine how to move forward in their next promotions, while always keeping in mind that entertainment factor. CASINO MARKETING “We started using something as simple as SurveyMonkey… You know that customers love to give you their opinion. And it’s a really simple way to collect information. Send it out in an e-mail, they answer the questions and you get really good answers very quickly.” Julia Carcamo | J Carcamo & Associates