Personalised acquisition: how to offer Netflix-level personalisation (#4/9)

Welcome to the fourth chapter of our new series, From A to I: 9 AI Use Cases to become the Netflix of casinos. Read the other chapters here.

In this use case, we’ll be diving into how Netflix approaches personalised acquisition and extract valuable insights for casino operators - highlighting both the successful approaches adopted by Netflix and the lessons to be learned from their choices.

Why Netflix?

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Here are three key learnings about personalised acquisition:

1. Personalised content

While you might have assumed everyone either has a Netflix account or is 'borrowing' a password by now, there are still many people out there that Netflix would love to acquire.

Subscriber numbers are key to their earnings reports, and where they can acquire, or re-acquire, they look for cost-efficient ways of doing so.

With such a vast, engaging library, Netflix has a catalogue worth shouting about, but that doesn't mean that every piece of content is used in acquisition channels, nor is it a one-size-fits-all approach.

Netflix understands that they must utilise the wealth of metadata and the range of watching behaviours at their disposal and match them as best as possible.

Whether it be a YouTube pre-roll advert to cat lovers or localising content for different markets, every cent must be spent with precision.

This includes analysing different player behaviours, audiences, preferences, and how well certain pieces of content convert. For example, this could be based on preferences and what tends to best convert for those audiences — such as those who enjoy comedy.

What casinos can learn

Programmatic marketing, like most forms of marketing is highly competitive, endeavouring to get relevant eyes on your creative can be a real challenge. What’s more, new entrants are constantly vying for market share, sometimes overpaying for acquisition. This means that margins and methodologies must be highly considered.

While Netflix might be advertising for a long-term subscription over sign-ups, deposit or gameplay, there are still many key learnings to take from their approach to personalised content.

Like a casino, Netflix's wide catalogue enables them to draw from various interests to make an offer seem truly personal. However, many casinos continue to focus on generic, new content, rather than understanding behaviours and preferences.

Marketing teams need to apply a hyper-targeted approach to smaller audiences. Testing different pieces of content based on different objectives. It may reveal that certain game themes are more attractive to new players, while others may be more luring for a re-targeting campaign. The more granular the audience, the more personalised the content offering, the greater the chance of standing out.

As we know, there are almost infinite different game journeys, programmatic acquisition must also reflect such a diversity.

2. Driven by player data

Advertising with personalised content, on targeted websites, only to churn within a month would be very wasteful for Netflix.

Understanding the expected lifetime value or level of loyalty is key to deciding whether a certain group of potential subscribers is worth targeting in the first place. Part of that is ensuring that once you have acquired someone with a House of Cards advert, you have the necessary content to keep them thereafter, and is that content easy enough to find.

In an era where people tend to join and leave streaming services depending on the content available each month, considering beyond the point of acquisition is key.

Netflix knows which content is binge-worthy, and which audiences tend to watch the most content, and by reverse engineering those sources, channels, and journeys, they can replicate them going forwards.

What casinos can learn

Data-driven acquisition is a valuable use case of AI-driven marketing and one with clear and trackable ROI.

As has always been the case with marketing, there is an equation and balance between customer acquisition costs (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV). If unbalanced you can either overpay or, potentially just as negative, underbid for players, not get their attention, and only acquire lower-value players.

This is true not just for the bid placement, but for the bonus offered. If you have identified a group of behaviours that mark high-value, long-term players, you can afford more enticing bonuses that could pay off many times over in the future.

Future Anthem's Acquire module combines transactional data with DSP data to provide a more holistic player view that can utilise machine learning models and custom rules that enable an ROI-driven programmatic programme — rather than generic, uncompelling offers that fail to convert.

Every player can be acquired with a predicted ROI, this ties marketing's desire for increased budgets to revenue uplifts.

3. Providing a helpful destination

Having selected a key audience that is likely to provide a clear ROI and designed personalised creative with curated content, the viewer clicks on the ad...

And this is where it becomes so simple to lose all the hard work you've put in. By offering up a generic sign-up page you could have heavily impacted your conversion percentage.

Netflix's landing pages tend to be very simple; they are designed through thousands of A/B tests to improve conversion, with every comma highly considered.

However, this is an area where Netflix doesn't utilise the breadth of their content on a personalised nature, instead focusing more on the scale of choice and accessibility, rather than honing in on what caught the customer’s interest.

Take the two options above, while they do contain various pieces of content, such that you can look beyond your initial cause of engagement, they don't appear to alter the options on the page based on the ad chosen, this is mostly done with a recency or localisation bias.

What casinos can learn

While Netflix isn't the greatest example of personalised landing pages, there are some important aspects casinos can utilise.

By providing a unified experience from clicking an ad to that same content on a personalised landing page, casinos can provide helpful congruency that makes signing up much easier for a player.

Amplifier AI's Acquire module provides players with consistent imagery and messaging to increase conversions and provides a journey at the level of other e-commerce platforms.

Here's an example of a landing page on a referral code:

When you provide an experience that is seamless and simple you remove friction, and more importantly, drive players to that content once they have signed up. At this point, they have demonstrated clear intent and it's the casino's job to get out of their way and lead them there.

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