Gaming operators are pouring billions of dollars into player acquisition. There are ads for sportsbooks and online casinos wooing potential customers through seemingly fantastic promotions:
Bet $1 and win $100.
Get instant free play.
Sign up now!
But promotions mean nothing if players are one-time visitors. Or, if players enter the registration process but never complete a deposit.
“You really truly haven’t acquired them until they’ve made a deposit,” says PayNearMe Chief Revenue Officer Mike Kaplan
Leaky bucket syndrome – losing customers at point of sale without getting them to convert their initial deposits into more than a one-time event – will be a point of emphasis as operators seek ROIs for promotional efforts. PayNearMe helps operators by providing frictionless deposit experiences for players who can be frustrated when it takes too much time or effort to deposit funds after going through an initial conversion experience.
“Players go through the registration process and put in their payment information, but then possibly that transaction fails,” Kaplan says. “That’s frustrating and losing a player at that point is sort of inexcusable.”
Most operators still don’t have consistent, reliable player onboarding because they initially scrambled to integrate reliable payment options to get money into their systems. When online payment solutions were first offered there were, according to Kaplan, issues with ACH and bank flows, which points solutions have helped solve for. And he thinks some operators don’t have the time or knowledge base to provide frictionless payment options.
Because PayNearMe’s MoneyLine platform includes cash, debit and credit cards, ACH and mobile options including Apple Pay and Google Pay, there’s more player deposit choice and less of a chance of a player being stalled in a queue trying to make a successful deposit.
“On the deposit side, you have to make sure you have the right deposit mechanisms,” Kaplan says. “Then, it’s having a cashier and a platform in front of the player that makes this payment journey as seamless as possible.”
Kaplan thinks that the best solutions start with combining the KYC (know your customer) and deposit elements that simplify onboarding for customers. Operators that can use the mechanism by which customers deposits funds to do the necessary KYC checks will be able to better retain players who return to deposit more funds.
“The less friction there is, the higher your conversion rates will be,” Kaplan says.
While it’s important to make sure that player deposits are successful, operators should have a backup, called rescue flows.
Say a customer’s deposit method is declined. Instead of dropping the player back to “the top of the funnel and having them make a random choice,” Kaplan says, it’s better to integrate into payment systems and be able to offer the player’s next best choice for deposits. PayNearMe is set up to handle and integrate a player’s hierarchy of deposit methods.
“Regardless of who you integrate in, you need to make sure that the payments platform you’re using has solid integration tools into your cashier,” he says, “and be able to supply significant amounts of data when the deposit completes. Or, if there’s a problem, make sure you’re returning the player in an elegant way back to a place where they can move forward with a deposit. It’s important for operators to get away from kicking players out to a place with foreign screens that don’t look and feel like the application they are using.”
