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welcome thanks for joining us thanks for having me uh before we actually start can you just give a bit of a journey into the igaming industry and how you came to lead unibo um yeah sure I’ve been in the I’ve been in the industry for 16 years now I started back in 2008 was more on the operator side jump between a few different companies I was at Bon group I was it the V gaming group and so on but then about five and a half years ago we started the unipo as as a gamification we saw that there was a
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need to have these kind of functionalities we being on the operator side we used a lot of gamification tools that came from other providers but we we saw that they worked quite well uh but it was always limited to the game providers themselves so we started unibo as a game agnostic gamification provider that could basically allow operators to set up uh campaigns and promotions on any games they wanted to and all those promotional type we saw that worked really well with the players themselves so that’s what inspired the creation of
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unibo yeah seeing the problem on the operator side see seeing how it could be fixed and then trying to come up with a solution for it and solve it for many operators is kind of where it came from unibo actually comes out of unified back office we wanted to have one back office where we could run all the promotions from okay okay oh as a as a blend of the two words got it I now I now get it um and onboarding is usually a critical first impression what strategies do you think are most effective in getting new
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players hooked because especi like from a marketer’s perspective and of course with my marketing as marketing manager I’m obsessed with that especially in videos it’s important to get the hook right the first few seconds because that can mean so much for the whole video and the retention of the whole video so how’s that in the how does that translate in the onboarding for players I mean onboarding players is very important I mean you need to need to be continuously adding things for the
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players so they they see your whole offering they understand that if they have a problem they can get help from the support you need to have fast sights obviously so they don’t have issues on there and then obviously when they do win you want to be able to pay out their winnings as quickly as possible and have a smooth Journey when it comes to H kyc and so on but then it’s also about offering something else than everyone else um there’s obviously a vast amount of online casinos for everyone anyone to
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choose from whether they want to play on regulated jurisdictions maybe they want to play on Koso casinos maybe they want to play on kanaki there’s a range of online sites available and a lot of them most almost all of them have the same kind of games they all have the big game providers that deliver everything so many casinos look and feel the same and they basically they are very similar so if you add something extra from the players you can actually keep them longer and with customer acquisition
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cost being so very high in this industry it’s really important to be able to get that extra retention and just keep them so a a good welcome Journey where players get rewarded continuously throughout the welcome journey is key to making sure they come back and stay being unique and personalizing their experience and what are some mistakes you usually see in the industry I think historically a lot of focused have been on and a lot of developer development have been spent on adding more game providers adding more payment methods
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going into new jurisdictions adding other features there’s a lot of stakeholders that scream a lot in the industry for various things in your company and your Development Department is only so big people make use of what they have and in many cases that means deposit bonuses and cash back offers and uh deposit bonuses in particular and cash back offers they they promote H let’s say it’s a negative experience players don’t really want to make a deposit they know that they have to to
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be able to game play uh players don’t really want to lose they know they understand that it’s a possibility obviously and probably more like a probability that they in the end they will lose but they Dare to Have Fun so if you create uh positive reinforcements you give reward players when they’re playing or when they’re winning rather than rewarding them when they’re uh making a deposit like a deposit bonus H you can move away from using too many deposit bonuses which are usually quite
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expensive in terms of bonus money as well so those kind of things are us little bit too much and historically have been have led to a lot of costs for operators and then that have led to the operators adding more and more wager requirements to the bonuses which in the end leads to normal players thinking that bonuses are bad and uh you’ll never win from a bonus while the people that are good at using bonuses let’s say bonus hunters or bonus of users they always find a way to get around the
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waitering requirement if d t or just getting the value out of the bonus so yeah you have a it’s a hard way to to be able to offer something that’s still relevant for normal players but something that can’t be abused too much by players that are just there to win money right it’s sort of a dance between the two finding the balance exactly and the and cross Channel engagement like sticking to the engagement part of it how important is cross Channel engagement in keeping players connected
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and what are the best ways to actually implement this um you mean cross Channel as in getting them to bet on different things or keeping them engaged in different communication channels keeping them engaged in different communication channels yes um well I mean the different players are communicating different ways some actually read their emails and take into the account there others might nowadays a lot lot of more players are playing on the mobile phones so reaching out to SMS or other messaging functionality can get them to
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play right away but we also seen an increase in say telegram Services chat groups in that sense that you can actually Drive traffic through that kind of social media or well communication methods I think other social media depending on if you’re fully regulated or not then in a local jurisdiction then you can use Facebook in other areas but otherwise I think players players aren’t I generally don’t think the players are engaging with gambling on social media in that sense mhm I think in many
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countries still gambling is somewhat of a taboo that you don’t really want to talk too much about sure you have sports betting that you can probably talk a little bit more about but casino gamepl is yeah just like buying a lottery ticket right you’re not really shouting out to the world that you’re gambling in defense right yeah especially that different players using different ch I mean for example with me you don’t want to reach out to me via email because the The Waiting there’s some
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delay there but via WhatsApp it’s usually a lot faster yeah exactly I think a lot of people have moved more and more towards communication via the mobile yeah mobile apps like WhatsApp and Telegram and messaging and so on yeah especially Telegram and uh retention metrics are key to optimizing lifetime value of of the players how do you approach the finding and tracking success in player retention I think you yeah you have to decide what you’re after when it comes to obviously you want the longer
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customer lifetime that’s key you you may not always want to get them to deposit as much as possible the first month it’s more make sure that they enjoy playing with you and they can stay for a longer period of time make sure they kind of push them towards if they do bet too much use the self-regulating tools so they actually yeah it’s much better to have a customer for 12 months than spend €200 every month than to have a customer for one month and he spend ,000 that month right and generally that thing
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kind of only helps affiliations Affiliates to get the money out fast and then they can spend the money on generating more traffic for you but for an operator I think you should be mindful of your players and help help them control the gambling so they don’t go too far overboard in general both players are able to control the gambling they don’t gamble too much in that sense but that’s you you have tools to help them to make sure that they don’t and are specific metrics you’re looking at
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in order to say that something is going in the right direction or in the wrong direction or Are there specific metrics that you have noticed are important over the years that you have already been in the industry I mean from from our end from unable we try to extend the gaming experience for players we are in an industry where we try to fight for say screen time nowadays we fight against Netflix we fight against anyone YouTube short Facebook shorts and so on but uh so extending the game time is something
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we try to assist our partners with by having these promotional tools that just spreads out your bonus cost and and reward the players continuously smaller rewards which make them play a little bit longer with when they’re on the site they get a little bit more fun out of the same kind of deposit if you historically use a deposit Bon for example players will get double the amount of money but they will also know that there’s a huge we requirement attached to it so then they will probably start betting higher than they
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normally would and in the end they might even lose the money just as quickly as they would have otherwise so they actually didn’t get any longer gaming session or game time with their deposit so they might have enjoyed that risk or the chance of winning bigger but in the end they didn’t have more fun as in terms of time units right so we tried to push our partners to create things that makes the player want to play a little bit longer or gives the player the chance to play a b little bit longer
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than they normally would and then that in the long run makes them come back more and stay with the brand for a longer period of time so all in all I mean increased number of deposits are interesting but uh if they at least if they play more with each deposit so instead of if they win a little bit they instead of withdrawing they keep playing a little bit more and enjoying themselves more it’s going to be much better for the bottom line than if to withdraw and then make another deposit because you have additional costs
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related to depositing cost withdrawal cost processing costs and so on so just extending the amount they play with every Euro they deposit can have a very good effect on the bottom line and metrics in terms of I’m not sure whether this is you have this data or not so please do tell me if that’s not the case but data in terms of something like if if we do x i and Z within the first few seconds or minutes then the retention or the amount of time the player spends on the platform increases by so much is
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there any data around that which you you can share or um well I mean we have data on we done some case studies and seeing that our partners that use utilize like daily missions and have a kind of an always on with promotional type do get a significant increase in the retention with the players they double the long double the lifetime compared to theyers who aren’t exposed to these kind of promotions that are just exposed to normal CRM email deposit bonuses and that kind of things so yeah having the
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it makes them play longer as long as you have an early onset where you give them say do these tasks and then you get rewarded be clear about what they have to do and then be clear about what they will be rewarded and then of course real time rewards nothing nothing that comes like if you do this we’ll give you something tomorrow right nowadays everyone want instant rewards so you have to be able to provide instant rewards fully automatically without any anyone have to do anything right thank
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thanks to all the Tik Tok shorts or attention span is reducing massively and what are some of the underlying or the key psychological principles that drive these engagement in the igaming space there are different there’s a very good author called yuk Kaiu he’s written actionable gamification it’s a book I recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about gamification he talks about core drives and it’s drives such as here talks about eight different core drives can’t tell them all right now but it’s basically a
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collection achievement narrative so there’s a reason why you’re doing something so for example if you’re playing a game sort of like Super Mario or or Zelda then the whole reason is to save the princess right that’s why you’re doing it it’s not just like say asteroids where you just shoot something and then you don’t get any further and and then you have things like collection mechanisms players are uh or humans like to collect things uh that creates a oh I’ve finished the whole collection like
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football cards or or baseball cards obviously people have collected so the last 100 years now they’re worth a lot so these whole kind of collection mechanisms if you add those things to your site it can help with the renion it creates a sunken cost prison as it’s called in World of Warcraft where players they want to stop playing but they feel that they if they stop playing the the World of Warcraft and they will have lost everything that they have spent so much much time building up so
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if you add things on your site where players collect things like leveling up and and receiving things that actually makes it more fun for them to play then they will have much less reason to leave for another site because they will then know okay but if I go and play somewhere else the same games then I won’t have these things or I have to spend a lot of time playing there until I’ve gotten it and so on I think just uh for example clearing kyc and verifying your account can be a very very cumbersome process in
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different sites I was uh myself I had to verify the site and I had to take a selfie with a photo and then I got that denied because apparently my whole hand have to be in the selfie photo I had to retake the photo again and again and this is just problems for the players that makes it harder and makes them think like when they’ve gotten verified at one site they might actually stay there just because it’s such a conversome process so if they go somewhere else they think okay but then I have to get verified there it’s it
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feels more valuable that’s isn’t it called the Ikea effect that because you put you put more effort into it that is has more value that’s the word for it right and in terms of emotions because that’s definitely very interesting like these underlying psychological um important things but and and the emotional effect how what’s your experience with that the emotional effect as in being feeling accomplishment if you’ve say let’s compare it to Candy Crush you you might feel accomplishments that you’re
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continuously making the level and now you’re at level 350 out of 800 and there’s always 10 more levels coming as soon as someone reaches top level there 10 more levels added and so on so there but there’s always that leader board accomplishment or you have if you competing against other people you you can feel in complishment that you beat someone else and but you can also Empower your customers by showing them that they reach a certain Milestone look you managed to do these things so you
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managed to do this and this but then of course it’s also the social social side if you which of course in I game is a little bit harder but if you can for some reason include a social site there’s the platform the mill entertainment Adventure they have this live streaming with the where you can look at the play play behind or bet behind bet with the like pool betting so you pull pull your money together and then there’s a streamer who plays the money and everyone can be in the chat and talk to each other about and
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everyone then wins together obviously you have live spins that also have a similar kind of bet behind functionality where they have live streamers and you place place bets and if the live streamer wins then you win as well so there are certain social areas that you can go get behind like telegram channels as we said before as well uh but yeah there’s many we actually recorded the podcast with Xiao the Chief Architect of the M Adventure okay nice yeah what I was thinking of as well is more of the the
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seven deadly sins I’m Dutch so I mean the the the the painter of is bch it’s called I think it’s Bosch the the painter of the Ze thatly Sims that immediately came to mind there yeah but anyway are there moving moving to reten the retention part Are there specific strategic or strategies or campaigns that you believe have a lot of uh impact on the overall retention of of players yeah just adding that little bit extra for the player and making sure that they can have something outside of as I
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mentioned everyone has the same kind of games everyone has your payment method normally so so those things aren’t something the players nowadays look at as a separator between different casinos right before let’s say 10 years ago then we had that people actually some casinos might have one game provider that other casinos didn’t have and if you wanted to play games wrong William interactive back then I guess it’s Scientific Games now but they change everyone changes name but every five years then you might
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actually choose certain casinos based on the games they’ve had but now it’s with aggregators having the being able to connect all of the all of the games to their sites then usually players aren’t missing their games with to go from one side to another so then having that additional extra be it a super fast sight or clear functionalities or just enjoyable additional things like missions tournaments other things like that that actually adds a little bit more extra to the games themselves I I
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don’t think that these kind of promotional gamified things should take over from the game the game is still the thing that the players are there to play but you can add something to it at least as uh Naval on said people don’t like the the thing they people find interesting is the elephant on the bicycle right so adding things on top of the thing which is already interesting makes it more interesting so bit of a weird comparison but but my final question if you had a magic one and you could wave it to solve or change one
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thing in the industry what would that one thing be oh that’s a it’s good question I guess uh yeah I would say that a centralized verification tool would be very nice for a lot of players I think verification is something that getting your money out when you’ve won and then having to go through a verification process that might be very cumbersome if we could have some sort of centralized verification tool that maybe everyone would need to use not just in igaming then you can have your online
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identity and then you can just choose where who to share with and when to share it and so on and then that could probably be on the blockchain or something similar and that would actually support support a lot of players and normal people with their everyday identification needs right as what make it a lot easier for everyone yeah all right I think that would be it’s a magic one so you can do whatever you want thank you all right that was the final questions thank you so much for for joining us thanks for
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every me it’s been great
