Digital-marketing pioneer Engaged Nation is coming off a third consecutive record-breaking year, as it showcases its digital-nurturing campaigns and special offers at this week’s Indian Gaming Tradeshow & Convention in San Diego.
The interactive digital-engagement company has grown exponentially and firmly established itself as a critical marketing component for the casino industry, according to Jerry Epstein, CEO of the Las Vegas-based company.
“Last year was a record year for us, both within and beyond the casino industry,” Epstein said. “At this point, we have a growing family of over 100 casinos and have been sanctioned by the NFL and Anheuser-Busch. In the past 12 months alone, we designed and successfully implemented more than 250 individual digital-nurturing campaigns and more than 20,000 email campaigns that created more than 22 million player-engagement interactions. We’re also proud to say we’re now an official Salesforce partner.”
In the past, casinos were worried that their players weren’t technologically savvy enough to use a program like Engaged Nation. But that’s changed since COVID, as more players are now technologically ready.
“We make it experiential, fun, and rewarding,” Epstein said. “We make it easy for the properties to implement and, unlike many other marketing initiatives, there’s a quantifiable bottom-line impact.”
Engaged Nation is displaying its continuous engagement Festival of Games program at IGA, which is focused on sports and sports wagering. At one property, Engaged Nation conducted a promotion in which players who made a $100-or-greater wager got an extra bracket or prop card as part of their Big Game Giveaway pro-football campaign.
“The bottom line: More than $500,000 was wagered that can be directly attributed to our program,” Epstein said. “What we’re seeing is that the key to success is continuous online engagement. We call it ‘digital nurturing,’ because like many other traditional marketing vehicles, it’s conducted on a continuous basis. A few years ago, most of our clients were partnering with us on one-theme promotions. Obviously, no property would do a single promotion — email, direct mail, social media, or advertising — for the entire year.
“It’s all about strategic effective reach and frequency,” Epstein said. “Most properties now understand that continuous engagement — especially our interactive proprietary REACH system — is very effective at keeping players more connected to their brand and driving quantifiable incremental revenue.”
Since COVID, according to Epstein, consumers now spend more time online than sleeping and the direct negative impact is they’re becoming digitally overwhelmed. Engaged Nation has learned how to break through the digital clutter. For example, it just completed a six-month program at Gold Country Casino Resort in northern California. It started in September at the beginning of the NFL season, ran all the way through the Super Bowl, and is being showcased at this week’s tradeshow.
Engaged Nation sent out “highly engaging emails” with a game that featured graduated payouts; the best players earned the best prizes.
“We got nearly 25% of the total player base by remaining connected and driving visits to the property,” Epstein said. “During the six-month campaign, players came back to the customized website an average of 18 different times to play and earn. The highest group participation was from the top tier, with almost 38% participating.”
Under the program, Epstein said players needed to go to the property and activate their entries, driving more than 2,100 visits.
“We know that people are excited about this long-term continuous engagement, because we retargeted them every week with email. The open rate was more than 57% and the click-through rate was about 30%,” Epstein said. “The players look forward to our weekly emails and for the property, our system is ultimately profitable.”
Many properties are looking at the value of the digital connection they make with players, so Engaged Nation has worked with ad agencies to come up with a verified return on investment. CMOs and other heads of marketing were surveyed and just like a Google digital ad, the program Engaged Nation implements has serious value off the floor. The median value is $1.81 per online minute, Epstein said.
“Up at Gold Country, online engagement accounted for an earned media value of eight times their investment in the program and that’s before we look at the incremental floor play,” Epstein said.
The program was so successful, Gold Country signed up for a second series. Golden Rewards launched just two weeks after the Super Bowl and will run for the next 12 months.
Frank Oppenheim, Gold Country general manager, said they were initially looking at a football program where people make their picks at the kiosk. But then they received an email from Engaged Nation about their Pro Football Frenzy customer-engagement promotion and knew that was what they wanted, not only for the football season, but for components to help in other areas.
“Like many casinos, we’ve been striving to collect more email addresses from our customers,” Oppenheim said. “I don’t see the day when we’ll completely replace snail mail, but certainly most casinos are striving for having more email addresses and the ability to digitally communicate with guests. We’ve seen a huge increase in email-address collection since we started that initial campaign with Engaged Nation and we’ve more than doubled the number of email addresses in our database.”
By the end of football season, Gold Country was getting an email open rate of more than 60%, which he called a “crazy number,” and a high click-through rate to go with it.
“All of the numbers were very strong, but the core component of the program was highly adaptive,” Oppenheim said. “We knew well before the football season ended that we were continuing with this program. We wanted to make it seamless, so that when football ended, it flowed into a new Golden Rewards program with the same components.”
Players were also earning entries into a drawing with a grand prize of an all-expense paid trip to the Super Bowl. “It was a strong promotion that got a great response from our guests,” Oppenheim said.
Currently, Engaged Nation is promoting an Alaskan cruise for Gold Country that will have a drawing at the end of April.
“Our goal with Engaged Nation is to create these bucket-list kinds of trips for different events,” Oppenheim said. “Right now, we’re doing March Madness, but we’ll do non-sports with them as well — a Triple Crown promotion with the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont coming up. We can apply this program to all kinds of different events and structure it in different ways. The number-one goal of marketing is to change guest behavior and this product immediately started changing behavior and generating trips.”
With either Engaged Nation’s Festival of Fun, geared toward the general casino market, or Festival of Games, more focused on sports betting, there’s $13,000 in savings when buying one of the extended packages.
“The Festivals have become hugely popular with players and are quantifiably driving property visits and bottom-line revenue,” Epstein said. “Our Festival campaigns are one of the key components that we’re educating people about and showing results at the show.”
Engaged Nation is also “seeing tremendous success” with an internal program called TEAM, as casinos struggle with hiring and retaining employees. “A severe disengagement epidemic is ongoing in the industry,” Epstein said.
Properties were rewarding employees for retention by giving small bonuses, but Engaged Nation is doing it through what it calls “edutainment.” It’s an annual program that engages employees monthly; if employees correctly answer all 10 questions on quizzes, they become eligible for a financial bonus.
“The excitement at the property has been pretty astounding,” Epstein said. “Almost 80% of team members are participating and the feedback has been outstanding. In this version, we’ve partnered with Inspired Hub to provide an easy way for team members to access this program from their phones. A bonus is that the system has two-way communication. Senior management can send messages to the entire database. There’s a heightened awareness of what the property wants them to do as ideal team members and people are enjoying it.”
One question, about how a Team member should respond to an inquiry about the location of the players club, provided the following multiple-choice responses: 1. I don’t know. 2. It’s somewhere in the corner. 3. Go find it yourself. 4. Let me walk you over there.
“Things like that, which add a bit of humor, drive home the key point about the value of customer service,” Epstein said. “It’s turned into a beneficial program that helps educate team members. As time goes on, it will hopefully make them more productive and happier to be part of that property’s ‘family.’”
In addition, senior managers can go onto the floor and ask team members directly for the answer to the key quiz question of the day. Those who answer correctly get a bonus for the next big prize drawing.
JJ Garcia, vice president and general manager at Jacobs Entertainment, which operates four casinos in northern Nevada, two in Colorado and two truck stops in Louisiana that offer gaming, used Engaged Nation’s program for team-member engagement. He said they offer games and run monthly quizzes that deal with the employee handbook or promotions planned. Random winners of the quiz get rewards, while points are accumulated for quarterly giveaways.
“It gamifies the education that we want to reinforce in our employees,” Garcia said. “For us, it’s a great tool. Employees seem to like it and we’re happy with our results.”
Finally, Engaged Nation is now a certified partner with Salesforce and an industry leader with more than 80 email-specific clients. The company sent more than 200 million emails in 2022 and has set up a system where it can be managed either by the property or by bringing in expertise to help them do automated journeys, gamified emails, or email acquisition.
“Properties are still struggling with how to capture emails and we have a tablet program to help do that,” Epstein said.
“We’re becoming a key component of our clients,” Epstein said. “It’s an exciting time for us, digital nurturing as a whole, and for our clients as we partner with them to continuously develop new ways to drive more engagement and revenue.”
