Bonuses Explained for New Online Casino Owners: It's Your #1 Outreach Tool

[muffincrumbs]

As an Online Casino owner, or one examining this avenue as a prospective future investment venture, there is a lot to know, and a lot to learn. There are many techniques employed in the industry to set your casino apart, and to keep your players once you've brought them in. One of the most popular is the Casino Bonus, which describes a set of benefits given to new or existing players for signing up or putting more fresh money into your site. With US online gambling legal, and UK casinos already well ahead of the learning curve, there is a lot to take in right now. As a long time gambling affiliate, and someone who really enjoys playing slots with a bonus, who better to shed some light on the best way to get the attention of gamblers on the web, both new and old.

One of the benefits to using these bonuses goes beyond merely attracting the player, it also welcomes them and makes them feel as though their contribution to your site is valued. Think of using these techniques for an existing player a bit like the waitress who knows their name, a hostess that greets them at the door, and takes them to their favorite seat with a drink in their hand already. For players who are shopping around for a place to go, this serves the same purpose as a warm and friendly hand-shake coming in the door. Nothing keeps them in the proverbial seat longer than having extra money to play with, and feeling as though their patronage is appreciated. Very often they are your only meet and greet, and as we know, first impressions count.

We’re going to go through some of the techniques you may use in your casino to bring them in, and keep them around. There is nothing more important in your success than keeping customers around and playing. In the following examples, some commentary will be provided on which is best suited to which, but in the long run, experience with your clientele will help you find tune these choices.


The Types of Online Casino Bonuses, Your Bread and Butter

Welcome / Signup / Sign On Offers: It is important to understand that this is a class, rather than a type all its own. These are given when your players first sign up. These are often good for hooking in a new player, but won’t do you much good in the area of retention, as such you should think of these as your first line of enticement, but be prepared to offer others afterwards. Players look for this kind of thing, and won’t generally sign up with a site that only offers welcome bonuses. Still a good hook, but the kind of player it attracts may not be good long term prospects.

No Deposit: This is by far the one that will drag you in a lot of players but that is for the welcome offer, instead these are mean for retention, but there is no guarantee of even short term gain. With no money wagered by themselves, this will get them in the door, but there’s a real likelihood they’ll only keep playing if they win. These help them win and taste a little victory. That makes them feel good, and makes amiable to gamble more.


Matching Deposit: This one is pretty straight forward, you agree to match the players deposit with a predetermined amount or a percentage based figure. This always has a cap on it, and $100 is not an uncommon one, though richer and poorer versions exist. Matching deposits are an excellent example of why playthrough is such an important mechanic in the modern gambling industry. This is covered later in this article.


Percentage Deposit: This is much the same as the above, only rather than matching 1 to 1, you match a percentage of your new customers’ deposit. Obviously this will not be as attractive as the above, but couched carefully with other offers you may get a larger initial deposit. Offering a 50% deposit bonus on up to $200 can be quite attractive to those players intending on depositing a fair amount anyway.

Reload Bonuses: These valuable bonuses exist to keep customers returning and investing more of their money, rather than just sitting on the laurels of their winnings. These are most often Matching and Percentage deposit bonuses, and are offered either sporadically, or in some cases on a month to month basis. These are excellent ways not just to keep players playing, but to get them to regularly spend money on your site rather than going elsewhere. These incentives can be cleverly combined with Loyalty bonuses as described below, and are often useful being scaled as such.


Cash Back: This one seems self-explanatory, but for our industry it bears an interesting twist. Rather than getting cash back when they hit certain levels of purchase, instead this is a method to keep big players playing. If you have a player who sits down and loses 500$ in a sitting, and has emptied their purse, you may see fit to have the site give them back 20% of what they lost. One particularly useful aspect of this is your ability to offset a big player’s bad day. They all have them, and this will help keep them playing. This could also be useful tied in with loyalty programs, increasing how much cash back they get based on their VIP status and other factors.


Increased Loyalty Points: These are another interesting form of incentive that can work out for you in the long run if balanced correctly. Essentially every time a player places a bet, they are awarded points, usually based on the amount being bet. The longer they play, the more points they accumulate, and eventually they are able to turn these in for bonuses. Extensions of this system include being able to climb to VIP and senior VIP levels, where offers are opened to get access to better reload bonuses and matching/percentage deposit incentives.


High Roller: This one is fairly self-explanatory as well, these bonuses are given to those casino customers that invest large one-off deposits in your site. These bonuses are usually given to those investing over $500 or $1000 at a time. A good way to encourage those with the money to invest heavily in your site over others. When working together with VIP bonuses, this incentive program can encourage them to make sizable deposits to your site to reach those benefits.


Refer-A-Friend: This is anything but an uncommon concept in the realm of incentives in any industry. Referring a friend who then registers and/or makes an opening deposit rewards your players with additional money to play with. It is not unheard of for this to take two forms, the initial one for them signing up, and an additional when they make a deposit or deposit over a certain amount. There is some incentive for long term players if you utilize a strategy that gives the referring person a spiff every time their friend makes a deposit. Carefully managed this can encourage people to refer their higher spending friends to the site with the knowledge that they’ll benefit from it.

Free Trial: This is really a test period disguised as a benefit program. This allows the players to take on ‘Free Chips’ to play with on your site. These chips have no real value, but can be used to play in multiple games and tables throughout your site. The chips cannot be cashed out, nor can the money they win using them be cashed out, it merely allows them the opportunity to play. The experience alone may be enough to encourage them to continue to play, having gotten a taste of the excitement, winning will also encourage this of course. One of the side benefits actually comes in the form of players who play as free players’ on a long term basis. Their winnings essentially disappear from the bank-books, allowing this profit to be soaked in a form that will never require you to pay it back. Combining these free chips with a trial period, making it so they have to make a deposit before they can continue playing, can further serve as a sink for their winnings.


As you can tell all of these methods, when properly mixed and balanced, can create an environment that will keep your players actively returning, playing, and pouring money into your site. Presentation on these can be considered to be of paramount importance. The players need not just to know they’re there, but how they can be leveraged to give them the most bang for their gambling buck. Finding someone who knows how to do this form of copy writing can greatly enhance the amount of income you see from it.

Now, as you may have noticed, some of the above situations create a cyclic situation that could be leveraged by shady players to gain a large amount of cash, and then cash out without actually spending any of it. This is referred to as "bonus abuse". As promised above, we’re going to cover a few powerful techniques you can use to bring your players back and to stay safe. Furthermore, if done properly, you can even use them to direct traffic to the areas of your site with the greatest house advantages. This, of course, means more of the money you've put out on these investments coming home to you.


MaxCashOut: The first thing we’re going to talk about is a concept called MaxCashOut. This is pretty much what’s written on the tin. A MaxCashOut value is the maximum amount your players can process out of your site and into cash in any given length of time. This serves two purposes, the first of which is preventing you from having a lucky or particularly skilled player suddenly pull his entire winnings out of your site. The second, and related to the first, is to keep a player playing. Career gamblers will often see the max amount they can pull out in a time period, whether that’s month or week, as being their ‘max income level’. They will strive to hit that amount in the given time period, and then pull it out. Everything else becomes expendable play money, after all, they can’t withdraw it yet so it’s just numbers on a screen. This applies even to less ambitious players, the moneys there, they can’t get it, might as well play with it.

PlayThrough or Wagering Requirement: This is yet another useful tool in the Online Casino owners’ playbook for keeping players pumping money into the system and it is present in 99% of casino bonuses. It does come with its own inherent dangers though, so much so that potential players are often looking for "no rules" attached to eliminate the playthrough required to withdraw. The basic concept of a playthrough value is that the player must wager at least that amount before they can participate in any kind of cash out. This is of course designed to keep players from joining, grabbing their bonuses, and bailing out. No matter how much they deposit, this amount must be met before they’re able to cash out their money. Further, it is typically employed as a multiplier of their most recent deposit. What this means is if you employ a 10x multiplier as your playthrough value, a player who deposits 100$ must play 1000$ worth before he or she is able to make a withdrawal. Values of 10-15x are not terribly uncommon, but you do have to be careful employing this technique as canny players will watch that value, and determine if it’s worth it to join your site. There are sites out there that employ 40-50x playthrough values, but be wary, your reputation will get out among serious gamblers, and it may lose you people who choose to go spend their money elsewhere.

One way to carefully leverage this, however, is to assign different playthrough wager values’ to different games throughout your website. Due to the nature on online casino slot-machines, and slot-machines in general, most casino’s that employ this give a 1-1 payback on slot machines. The favor is so heavily with the house, and the Skinner box behavior of the slot machine so refined, that it’s a fairly certain bet they’ll meet that limit without trouble. Also, slot machine players are the most likely to sit and play for the simple joy of it, happily pouring money into the machine even when the payout isn't treating them well.
However, in the case of table games, percentage values are often employed. 40-60% wager values for games like Poker and others, it can be as low as 40%. Meaning that for every dollar they wager, only .40 count towards the minimum playthrough value.


Sticky or Phantom: Most bonuses at RTG sites are like this. This is when the value of the casino bonus is actually nothing. Meaning the players can gamble with it, and potentially win more, but the original bonus amount will be subtracted directly from a cashout. This can really help keep your numbers in order. Be careful, because smart gamblers will pick sites that do not employ this rule over yours.


As you can see this can make every dollar they deposit stretch that much further. Don’t let this get too comfortable though, online casino players are a savvy bunch, and they’ll notice tricks like this and take their business elsewhere if you are too aggressive. Sites that come to mind are Dendara and AC-Casino where they give match percentages up to 3000%. We, the gambler knows that they are sticky, have a wagering requirement of over 60x, and are just not worth using. Most us use would much rather have something like 200% with no rules.


The online casino business can be very rewarding, but there are definitely some tricky aspects to it if you plan on making it big time. You’re going to have to learn how to make your site attractive to guests and financially successful, and I hope this helps!

[vpp]

Of course a casino that offers high paying bonuses will attract more players. The sites that have the most offers will also be appealing. The key is to offer bonuses for returning players as it is the frequent depositors that will generate revenue. When selecting bonus offers, don’t focus on promoting those with the highest bonus value. Instead, make them appealing to the majority of players, who are low or mid rollers, by offering deals that have realistic and attainable wagering requirements.

Casino owners may make their money on each deposit, but you also have to make this appealing to the customer. Once they see ongoing high wagering requirements, they may simply switch to a site that has lower requirements, even if that means smaller bonus amounts. Use extreme caution when selecting what bonuses to offer. Don’t try to make a killing off of every player. Instead, make the offers appealing to many so that more players will join and stay with the site.

[FruityJelena]

Nice text
Might come in handy, thanks for posting.

Nowadays free spins made themselves into a special category, in my opinion. Either if they are given on sign up, on deposit, for free to celebrate a new game or on top of the welcome package. They are both good to attract player and to make them come back (aka retention "tool").
With or without wagering, with or without deposit..

Regarding the traffic quality, I don't think that big and experienced players are wasting their time with sticky or no deposit bonuses, which are followed by strict rules and limits. High-rollers, quality matching bonuses or nice VIP program is great to have if you wanna get whales.
Although I think sometimes that they even skip bonuses very often. Just come and deposit, but for this you need to meet their picky criteria - big choice of games and softwares, languages, support in many languages, deposit methods suitable (and popular) to different countries, fast payouts, top notch service in one word.

This is just how I see things in some points

[Muppet]

Wow that is a long post. I'm not sure why you posted it here instead of on your own website where it would be far more valuable for you. Anyway I have a small correction:

Sticky or Phantom: Most bonuses at RTG sites are like this. This is when the value of the casino bonus is actually nothing. Meaning the players can gamble with it, and potentially win more, but the original bonus amount will be subtracted directly from a cashout. This can really help keep your numbers in order. Be careful, because smart gamblers will pick sites that do not employ this rule over yours.

This is not right. Sticky and phantom are two different things but, after having to explain this to more than one person (including operators) a couple of times, I realise that a lot of people don't get it. Here is the simple explanation.

- Both type of bonuses cannot be withdrawn by the player. They are non-cashable.
- Sticky bonuses remain after the player withdraws, allowing the player to try to win more with the bonus money after withdrawing their cash winnings.
- Phantom bonuses disappear after the player withdraws, leaving their balance at zero. This is what you are thinking of when you mention RTG.

Sticky bonuses are more or less extinct these days. I haven't seen one for a long time. It is not correct to call non-cashable bonuses sticky because
they are almost always phantom and do not "stick" to the player's account after they withdraw.

Here is a quote from the current terms of a casino:

Welcome Bonuses are sticky- i.e. the bonuses are for play purposes only, to help you generate winnings but the bonus credits cannot be cashed out. The bonus amount received will be deducted upon withdrawal.

As you now know they contradict themselves in the space of one paragraph. If the bonus is sticky, it should not be deducted upon withdrawal. I told them to fix this months ago and explained the meaning of sticky to them and they still don't understand or change it. They are leaving themselves open to disputes with players due to their contradictory and misleading terms.

In addition, their value is not nothing. I can go into the maths if you want but suffice to say that if you open a casino and give away phantom bonuses, thinking that they have no value, you will soon be broke.

Aside from that I think that anyone opening a new casino these days that relies purely on bonuses to differentiate themselves and win customers is lazy, naive, and foolish in the extreme. Unfortunately that describes most new casinos I see perfectly, the majority of which are white labels run by people with little or no casino experience.

[muffincrumbs]

Thanks for the replys so far.

Thanks for the correction Muppet. I get it now and I did not understand the difference between phantom and sticky until now.

This is the reason it is posted here, so that I can give back a little and smart people like those that replied can help us. If I linked it to an article on my site it would help build my sites authority, but not those in the community. I am an older member who only stops by from time to time so offering something of actual value appealed to me, and thus here we are

[GCG]

Thanks for the replys so far.

Thanks for the correction Muppet. I get it now and I did not understand the difference between phantom and sticky until now.

This is the reason it is posted here, so that I can give back a little and smart people like those that replied can help us. If I linked it to an article on my site it would help build my sites authority, but not those in the community. I am an older member who only stops by from time to time so offering something of actual value appealed to me, and thus here we are

Indeed a lengthy post and I read about the phantom bonuses, I thought Rival casinos had them in their booming days ?

[GCG]

Nowadays the one hour free play casino bonuses have lost popularity as most Netent and Microgaming casinos offer free spins to have players try their casino.