7 Cool Tools & How Online Casinos Can Use Them
One of the things I enjoy doing is researching new technologies that can make my job as a marketer easier. OK, that’s not the only reason; it’s also to satisfy a masochistic tendency I have of making myself incredibly jealous that someone else out there is making cool, simple tools that I myself want to be creating. Oh well…
These tools, of course, can be used by non-casino operators, but since I work in this industry I thought I’d shed a bit of light on how they can be used for our specific gain.
The tools I’ll be focusing on are:
- KissInsights
- Flowtown
- Unbounce
- Usertesting.com*
- Survey Monkey*
- Visual Website Optimizer*
- Clicktale*
*The final 4 tools will follow in a future post.
- Oh, I almost forgot to say that each of these reviews is based on my own opinions and I’m not being paid in any way to write them.
KissInsights
KissInsights is the latest tool from Neil Patel’s innovative company (their more popular tools are Crazy Egg and KissMetrics).
As with all Neil’s tools, KissInsights’ beauty is in its simplicity. This tool allows you to create mini-survey’s for each individual page on your website. A little pop-up appears in a discreet location – normally at the bottom right of your screen – and a user can click on this to answer either one or two questions (whichever you choose, as the webmaster) related to that page. In fact, you can see it on this page right now.
Why would you want to offer this functionality as a casino operator? Well, there are many micro-reasons, but the overarching idea is that most websites need to be doing more to understand what their users are trying to do on each page, and whether those visitors are completing the tasks they set out to do. This thinking aligns with Avinash Kaushik’s theory that generally only 1-5% of visitors come to a site to ‘buy’, so we must have additional micro-conversion metrics to measure the satisfaction of the multitude of our visitors.
Avinash suggests a better conversion metric could be task completion rate by primary visit purpose. In other words, you measure what the visitor why this visitor navigated to this page, and whether they were able to complete their task. So, in practice for our casino site, we could tailor the KissInsight questions we ask on each page to measure whether:
- visitors to our support pages are able to find answers to their query.
- those attempting to make a deposit can do so successfully. If not, why not?
- players visiting ‘how-to’ pages now know ‘how-to’.
- punters playing the games are satisfied that they know what’s going on (though it may be difficult to insert this JavaScript-based mini questionnaire into a flash client, though I’m sure someone will work it out).
- our visitors first landing on our homepage are there to learn more about the site with a view to signing-up, or are there for non-transactional tasks such as researching for a job interview, looking for the casino contact details or logging in to an existing account.
This last point is an important one, as once you know that 60%+ of your ‘new’ homepage visitors are inexplicably not there to buy, you’ll be able to go easy on yourself when your analysis shows that you have a 0.05% click-to-depositor rate from the homepage. Realistically, this would have been more like a 6% click-to-depositor rate if you’d only included the rough percentage of your traffic that were potentially open to signing up and depositing. Not so bad, but difficult get past your boss in a review!
Anyway, you should be measuring task completion rate by primary visit purpose instead of solely looking at click-depositor metrics, and KissInsights is the easiest tool to help you do this.
Flowtown
You’ll notice a trend within the tools that I’ve chosen – they are all very simple ideas which are well executed and Flowtown is no exception.
In a nutshell, Flowtown allows you to upload a CSV containing the email address field from your player database, and in return you’ll receive a list of each player’s social network usernames. So, in one fell swoop you’ll be able to see which of your 80,000 players has an account on Facebook, who is active on Twitter and who has an account on any of the 50+ social networks they cover. This is obviously very valuable information. If you are a bingo site, for example, and you see that 95% of your user-base have Facebook accounts, this could certainly be a catalyst for cranking up a Facebook community outreach campaign.
Knowing where your players hang-out online is one major benefit of Flowtown, but this tool has two additional features that can help you take your social media efforts one step further.
Firstly, you can automatically send ‘connection’ invites to your players through the tool. No more individually sending Facebook invites or LinkedIn connection requests! With a few clicks you can invite 10,000 of your players to become a fan of your Facebook page, and I’m not going to tell you how beneficial that can be.
Secondly, you can delve into how influential your players are on the various social networks by viewing their pre-calculated online influence score (as provided by Flowtown’s partner, Klout). This gives you the advantage of being able to segment your social media efforts to ‘favour’ those who are more influential online.
Unbounce
Those marketers working for small casino operators with a lack of tech-resource or a large behemoth where it takes an age to get anything done, might appreciate what Unbounce offer. Their service allows marketers to create bespoke landing pages on-the-fly, with almost no need for assistance from a tech or web-dev team.
If you’ve worked for companies like I have, you’ll know that sometimes getting tech and/or creative resource for building landing pages can be like pulling teeth. No more! Unbounce first ask that you set up a subdomain which they’ll use to host each landing page you create. That’s right, they host the landing pages (and also offer a step-by-step process to getting this set up). So, if I was using Unbounce on betfair.com, I could set up a subdomain like offers.betfair.com and use this to host my bespoke landing pages. Once this stage is complete, your tech team no longer have to be involved – all your success will be down to your creativity as a marketer.
If you are unsure as to why you should be creating bespoke landing pages for your campaigns, then I’m going to be extremely lazy and point you towards this blog post by Oli at Unbounce – he describes why with more articulation than I ever could. In a nutshell, you absolutely should be using landing pages!
So, what does Unbounce offer that makes it easy for me, a busy marketer, to create bespoke landing pages for my PPC, display, email or affiliate campaigns?
The core feature of the service is a WYSIWYG editor that allows even the least artistic marketers to create landing pages. Using the drag and drop functionality, you can have a landing page ready in minutes, and set live with just one click. Furthermore, Unbounce has built-in functionality to allow the marketer to insert video, custom HTML and even data-capture forms onto the landing page and there’s even a ‘one-click A/B test tool’, for all those test-heads amongst you.
If you are handy with Photoshop and have the basics of HTML down, then you can create some really nifty landing pages and as the tool integrates with Google Analytics, you should be able to track everything too. If you are as useless as a chocolate teapot when it comes to creating webpages then Unbounce has many templates you can tweak to your heart’s content.
OK that’s enough tool-related nonsence for now. Tune in next week for the final four tools, usertesting.com, Survey Monkey, Visual Website Optimiser and Clicktale.
Related posts:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by David Flipboard, BrAndrsn. BrAndrsn said: http://bit.ly/amex51 7 cool tools and how online casinos can use them… [...]