Michael Byrne, chief operating officer of B2C at Nektan, discusses bonusing at platform level and how it can create greater choice for players and simplify the process for operators

BONUS offers are deeply rooted within the online gaming industry as a means to acquire and retain players but the overall practice has become a little generic and is in need of innovation.

While they are still effective tools for driving engagement and raising excitement levels, from an innovation perspective, they have become stagnant.

The incentives attached to the bonus offers, along with the way they are presented have not changed much since the transition online.

“Newly regulated markets are also setting stringent rules around bonusing

It is surprising, particularly when you consider how content has developed and matured. Newly regulated markets are also setting stringent rules around bonusing and as a result operators will have to look at innovative ways to engage with their customer base.

Customisation has been a big focus across all industries in recent times, especially within
online commerce. The focus has largely been driven by the boom in business intelligence and the belief that tailoring the user experience is the most effective commercial use of data. It’s our belief that the same thought process should be adopted to bonusing in the online gaming space.

Taking a player-first approach within online casinos is imperative. Operators can achieve this by developing their platform level bonusing and gamification features. In simple terms, it’s about giving players relevant choices in terms of the games they like to play and customising promotional offers to match their choices.

Simplifying the process

Platform-level bonusing eases the back-end tasks like setting up campaigns across a multitude of sites and games and can only be achieved through flexible and easy-to-use software. This poses a challenge to many legacy platforms built before the advent of mobile.

To make this possible, operators need to have a single access and point of configuration as is the case here at Nektan. Having this at our disposal increases the amount of campaigns we can deliver concurrently, essential for a white-label network with more than 140 sites live at once.

Giving operators the ability to create bespoke campaigns using their own creative licences will give them the freedom to select offers based on player data while in turn encourage and drive engagement levels. Requiring bonusing features to be available on a specific game provider’s back office portal can become a hindrance.

“Our number-one objective when developing our proprietary platform was to make it player centric.”

At Nektan, our number-one objective when developing our proprietary platform was to make it player centric. Our in-house bonus tools allow operators to create campaigns across all games, or take a more targeted approach, with one simple configuration, regardless of the provider or supplier.

Furthermore, the platform can provide marketing teams with deep insights on player behaviour and game performance to measure the success of these campaigns.

Taking bonusing to the next level
Platform-level bonusing is now essential, particularly when it comes to operators being able to offer the same bonus incentives and gamification tools across all games and not just per supplier. We have invested a lot of time and resources into our tools for this very reason.
To keep Nektan moving forward and adapting to the demands of our players we are constantly innovating to deliver an experience that is as smooth and as engaging as possible.
Flexible and easily-configurable platform-level bonusing is key to Nektan in driving player engagement in the long-term.