May 3rd, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Events & Conferences | No Comments »
We are a bit behind on our World Telemedia Conference reporting, but we surely kept the best for last. On day two of this event, we spend some time to get to know the mobile gambling sector which seems to steam ahead in the UK.
At their session, 777mobile.com explained the conversion rate for mobile is behind on online casino gaming. Mobile currently has a 20% conversion rate. After three months, 50% of the new visitors leave the mobile gambling portal, but 2 to 3% stays. Their top spending customer has spent 15K in UK Pounds. To keep players satisfied, they are treated like in a real casino. A good example is sending top players bottles of Champaign.
777mobile.com is also spending a lot of time on data mining. They track consumer behaviour like favourite games and numbers to adapt the portal to that. Also they notice peek times during lunch and evening hours. Mobile gambling sessions on average take between 12 and 15 minutes. Top players spend up to three hours though.
Mobile gambling games are a nightmare to deploy though. Both for the mobile casino owner as well as the local governments. Every country has it’s own set of rules. In some cases, 777mobile.com can skip country regulations by sending for example a UK sim to a german consumer.
Mobival went more into the details of maintaining a mobile gambling portal. They see off deck as the market of the future, but admit to get 80/85% of their traffic from actual deck placement. One of the biggest pains in the consumer experience they see is registration. Though it is easy to fill in all your details via a PC, the mobile slows down the process a lot. The consumer must be protected from spending to much time on repeating data in forms. The mobile platform also has some big benefits. MSISDN recognition for example can be a great assistant to identify players and rack their age as well as handle a CRM. Also important for hosting a good mobile gambling platform is to make sure the games remain fun. Consumers should not be able to loose to much.
In order to promote their portal on carriers, Mobival takes a close look at what else is on the portal. They try to exchange banners and links with partners that could be of interest. For example a sports portal could link to horse betting games. The PR machine of Mobival is not only about exchanging links and themes on the games, but also events are important. These can be big sports events of annual holidays. Next to providing incentives, offering a wide variety of games and changing their themes benefits to build up both new and returning visitors. Another way to keep traffic inside is to provide fun content. These can be poker lessons or gambling related news.
To run mobile gambling operations, the credit card is still the cheapest method of billing. All mobile gambling companies offer billing methods like premium SMS or IVR, but they are more expensive. Still 90% of the consumers prefer billing via SMS.
