Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) play a significant role in the growth of the business, diversification of value offerings, increase brand image, and aides in rapid business expansion. In today’s data-powered world with data fueling everything from essential management systems to customer-focused AI solutions, one thing that often gets in the way is data fragmentation.

Why Data integration plays a vital role for gaming companies?

Merged entities often capture data using multiple systems and platforms resulting in numerous data storage points, which in turn fail to create a complete organizational business picture for better data-driven decision-making. Another major issue collected, Organizations are increasingly under competitive pressure to not only acquire customers but also understand their customers’ needs to be able to optimize customer experience and develop longstanding relationships.

Ensuring mergers and acquisitions perform successfully, having capable data integration objectives to rationalize, consolidate, migrate, and integrate data between operational and analytical systems is critical for gaming companies to stay ahead of the competition and player journey insights.

The top 5 objectives for data integration for M&A in Gaming and iGaming:

Visibility into Player Journey

Player journey data has a significant role in gaming industries as it has information like the previous game, spends, purchases and preferred room, etc. To start, it will be helpful to create a common understanding of a core revenue story. DAU (daily active users), MAU (monthly active users), and ARPU (average revenue per user) are simple KPIs that are easily measured using an analytics platform like Indicative. This knowledge helps ineffective marketing campaigns to build efficient customer relationships.

Naturally, the player journey is segmented into six parts,

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Consideration
  • Purchase
  • Retention
  • Advocacy

These six segments together contribute to the player’s behavior which helps in understanding why a particular player is showing interest and why not other players. Maybe you notice a spike in daily active users and want to explore the impact on the company; customer analytics helps you understand the dynamics behind this trend and they even help you build on finding common threads between players, their behavior, and revenue.

Enhances Player Retention

There is no point in going behind new customers if the existing ones are not kept satisfied. Data integration aids in advanced behavioral analytics, which enables gaming operators to gain the key knowledge of what attracts their customers, which can effectively be put to use for enhancing retention in case any issues are detected.

This can be done either by offering better marketing incentives to certain sections of the demographics or by coming up with new loyalty bonuses, which are tailor-made to offer compliments to a specific category of their existing player base.

Customer Lifetime Value Optimization

An accurate estimation of how much a player is potentially worth will have a direct impact on customer retention strategies. Evaluating LTV can help determine which marketing, CRM strategies are effective, and which player segments are the most valuable.

Players will provide value to the business as long as they feel it provides value to them. Using loyalty and VIP programs to make sure players know they are important will result in increased bet sizes and an extended player lifetime.

Increased Customer Acquisitions

A study conducted by Forrester Consulting revealed that 64 percent of marketers believe that they need better data for prospecting, and 67 percent agreed that customer acquisition is more challenging than retention.

Companies recognize that acquiring a new customer can cost a major percentage of their marketing budget. Therefore, to optimize their marketing spend, data integration helps marketing teams create broader and deeper customer insights. We can now intentionally track a prospect’s spending pattern, interests, and social media behavior. Accordingly will roll out free betting vouchers and enhanced odds to woo the new players, thereby boosting customer acquisition.

Understanding your customers’ needs and desires opens new doors to personalizing marketing outreach and games offerings to stay abreast of the competition

Real-time Access to Actionable Information

Business intelligence applications can make use of a comprehensive set of information provided through data integration combining various data types and provides real-time access to actionable information, to derive important business insights from a company’s historic and current data. By providing gaming operators with an in-depth understanding of the company’s current operational strengths, as well as the opportunities and overlaying risks.

Reducing Licensing Cost

Gaming companies have to rationalize their application and data background to determine which systems add value proposition to the new business entity to that which should be decommissioned to eliminate redundancy. Archiving infrequently accessed data to the highly accessible and compressed database is the need of the hour to optimize the performance and minimizes maintenance and downtime.

Moreover, decommissioned legacy systems will help businesses drastically reduce hardware, software, storage, and maintenance costs by archiving the legacy data thereby reducing the software licensing cost.