The first is attracting traffic to your website, and then converting these visitors into ‘customers’: whether that means buying products, utilising your services or clicking on affiliate links to drive sign-ups and revenue. That can be achieved in a variety of ways, and as many business owners will have already learned content marketing and SEO are both sciences that need to be practiced down to a fine art. The second battle that must be won is in retaining your customers, and to do that you have to deliver a user experience that keeps these individuals coming back to your website time after time. This improves your conversion rate, enhances your SEO and helps brand visibility as word of mouth spreads about your products and services. To narrow the discussion to the gambling affiliate sector, there’s one operator that has developed a unique range of ideas that are helping them to attract and retain players at an outstanding rate.

How to Retain Customers in the Gambling Affiliate Industry

In essence, JohnnyBet has developed an affiliate site that ticks all of the boxes: they have partnered with a number of leading sportsbooks and casinos around the world to offer their players a range of ‘off the shelf’ and exclusive bonus codes and deals. There’s nothing unusual in that. And they regularly publish content that drives a regular flow of traffic to their website: be it sports previews, casino review, beginners’ guides to betting and so on. But JohnnyBet are treading new ground in developing unique ways to engage their players with a variety of interactive games and contests, which ensure that they are bookmarked and visited by followers from across the globe.  They were one of the first brands to introduce tipster leagues and contests, but rather simply doing so ‘for fun’ their free contests actually offer real cash payouts to the best tipsters each month, as well as a range of unique prizes and gifts. These tipsters are ranked, and so anybody seeking well-informed betting tips online can browse the rankings for anybody with sustained success in tipping in their preferred sports and markets. Again, this drives traffic and aids customer interaction. Many platforms have now followed JohnnyBet’s lead, so they have continued to innovate and develop new ideas for enhancing the customer experience. They have extended their suite of contests yet further, and today the total prize pool available stands at over €5000 – these are free-to-play tournaments, remember. As well as standard tipster contests, they have devised a fun betting game in which players try to accurately predict the outcome of a series of sporting events – there’s cash prizes for those at the top of the leaderboard and ‘coupon of the day’ winners. There are lots of other ‘pop up’ contests relating to seasonal events and key dates in the sporting calendar, from special Christmas games to contests about the World Cup, European Championships and much more besides. And the jewel in the crown is their unique FIFA league, which players can join for free and win prizes of up to €200 for showcasing their skills on the popular video game. When we talk about improving the customer experience in the affiliate gambling sector, that key word ‘retention’ is simply unavoidable. But it’s a two-way street: in layman’s terms, by giving your customers more cool things to do on your site you are more likely to attract new players and retain the ones you already have – that in itself will increase your numbers of link clicks and account sign-ups. JohnnyBet have mastered the art of the customer experience, and their new product launch BonusCodes enables them to push the envelope yet further with a dynamic range of welcome offers, promos and deals matched by their trademark retention tools.

The Future of Customer Retention in Affiliate Gambling

To talk about customer retention in any industry, we have to take our business owners hat off and replace it with our consumer hat instead. We all know what represents a good customer experience, and often it is the feeling that we are receiving a service that is tailored to us as individuals (even if that isn’t strictly true).  Let’s consider the profile of a typical affiliate gambling customer: they will be tech savvy, given that they trigger sign-up offers on their laptops, mobiles and tablets, and most will be well versed in the sports betting and casino gaming sectors – any attempts at retention have to consider these facts, which is why JohnnyBet’s contests and FIFA league have worked so well.  This will be typically, but not exclusively, a younger demographic too, so any retention-based content you offer has to be mobile-friendly, have the potential to go viral and be social – word about JohnnyBet’s contests has spread via Twitter, Facebook and the like. The future of customer retention in affiliate gambling will be finding new ways to retain customer interest in a world filled with distractions – so far, this is an area in which JohnnyBet, via their main site and BonusCodes.com, have thrived. If you would like to discuss any customer retention ideas you may have, or are a sportsbook/casino manager looking to partner with a successful affiliate brand that is doing things differently to the norm, you can contact partners@johnnybet.com. This article is sponsored by JohnnyBet and does not represent the views of iGBaffiliate.com