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Basic Tenets of a Remarkable Retention Campaign Don’t let your customers simply fade away; protect your market penetration and recapture their business!
Is your database growing while your number of active players is declining? If so, you are suffering from attrition loss and need to pay attention to your retention rate. Think of your database as a flour sifter. While you’re hard at work adding new members to the top, others are falling through the bottom holes of your sieve. One theory indicates it takes $100 to find a new customer and only $10 to keep a current one. Those numbers obviously vary by industry and other factors; the critical point is that once you’ve captured a good customer, it’s more efficient to keep that customer happy and active than to lose him or her and regress financially. It’s hard to improve the bottom line if you’re constantly chasing revenue that you previously acquired but lost due to defection. That’s where retention programs come in. When implemented correctly, they are highly profitable and therefore important for your annual marketing plan.
Why Is Your Customer Base At Risk of Attrition?
As you build your marketing plan, it’s imperative to pause and identify the root causes of customer attrition. Understanding what’s behind the customer defection may help you address the problem and decrease future downturns. Is your customer base experiencing defection due to competitive initiatives, poor customer service or a lack of critical amenities? Each root cause requires a different solution and unique handling by the management team. Taking action before it’s too late is important because once consumers defect, it’s difficult to get them back.
Competitive Initiatives
Knowing what your competitors are offering is critical to your market research. It’s generally easy to see how competitors position their brand, or to compare share-of-voice measurements within your target markets. Identifying direct mail offers sent on a one-to-one basis is a bit trickier, but it can be an eye-opening experience. Generate a year-over-year image of customer spends inlaid with a map of your competitors, and you can view the impact that competitive efforts have made on your revenue. Knowing what offers your competitors are extending to your customers helps you define exactly what you need to deliver to protect your customer base.
Poor Customer Service
Are you hearing rumblings of product dissatisfaction from your core customers? Listen to your guests, investigate their credence and solve any systemic trends you uncover. Retention is about protecting your current share and eliminating the opportunity for your guests to try other casinos. Listening to and satisfying unhappy guests can often turn them into loyal and happy customers. Ignoring their dissatisfaction almost always leads to competitive trial if not complete defection.
Lack of Amenities
Gamers drive long distances to do what they love best: visit casinos. Keep your market research current and stay abreast of your customers’ expectations. Make sure your product offerings meet the needs and wants of your target audience so they stay loyal to your local casino, and so you can attract market share from audiences that are more distant. Understand the subtle differences between the product requirements demanded by your top decile and the minimal needs of the low-frequency social casino consumer. Losing your customers because you can’t deliver the same amenities as another competitive property could turn into a long-term issue. New product development is a time-consuming process involving significant planning and financing, so be sure to remain competitive with your product offering. You’ll discover that falling behind could leave you with a significant gap in customer satisfaction.
