You can really tell a lot about what’s going on behind the scenes at an online poker site by examining the kinds of promotions they’re running. I thought it might be fun to sort of deconstruct Full Tilt’s recent Take 2 promotion and try to make some guesses about what’s going on over there.
Here is the text of the promotional email:
Earn up to $25 AND double the Full Tilt Points that you’d normally receive when you play at least two standard ring-game tables at the same time or any Rush Poker* ring game during Take 2.
From Friday, October 15th to Sunday, October 24th, earn at least five Take 2 bonus points on any five days and get $5 in cash. Do so on nine of the ten days to get an additional $20, for a total of $25.
To participate in Take 2, go to the My Promotions section of the Cashier.
Promotions take on all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some are designed to drive new signups. Another might try to reactivate players who haven’t been on the site for awhile. Yet another, like this one, aims to alter player behavior by giving players an incentive to do something they might not normally do.
Full Tilt seems to realize that most of their higher raking players already play multiple tables or have already tried Rush Poker as they’re offering a rather paltry $25. That’s enough to lure in players with smaller bankrolls.
I’m not quite sure how sophisticated Full Tilt has gotten but it would be smart for them to do some statistical analysis on previous campaigns to figure out what dollar amount they have to offer to get the optimal response rate.
What Full Tilt will probably be looking at is how many new players they get onto their Rush Poker tables or how many people who previously didn’t multi-table began multi-tabling. They would obviously like to make a profit by the increased play during the promotion (and they may well do so) but the long-term objective is to get people to increase their play.
My guess is that Full Tilt is trying to increase the player yield per player. We’ve seen in public companies earnings reports that the cost of acquiring each player is increasing while the average time they are an active player decreases. If Full Tilt is seeing the same sort of trend they may be acting to increase the amount of raked hands they get out of each player by introducing them to games that play faster.
Of course, that could backfire as players may end up playing the same total number of raked hands but burn out in less time. Instead of staying an active player for 30 days and depositing $50 they could end up playing for 15 days on the same $50. That’s the worst case scenario but it is a possibility.
Anyway, I like this promotion. I think it’s smart and influences player behavior in a way that could have some major upside for Full Tilt.
What do you think?
Well, part of it is that most marketing guys are too lazy to think of promotions that involve cash games. I love hearing someone say “Okay, so if they play in cash games and earn X number of points we’ll give them an entry into a freeroll.” Uh, you realize they’re cash game players, right? Why would they want to have to earn an entry into something that they may not be good at (playing in tournaments)?
I’d insist the target is the small bankroll player. This kind of player may be playing too occasionally, more willingly $5 or $10 SnG or satellites and a couple of low limit ring games from time to time.
So the promotion would clearly incentivise them to become more compulsive, errr… less cautious – ok, let’s go marketing – to discover the double-pleasure of double-tabling and the delightful blood-rush you get playing rush poker.
It’s interesting since little has been done over the years to have little players play more ring games. It’s as if this “no marketing innovation” market was stuck with the vision that little players were content with lots of little tourneys and satellites and that wasn’t worth working. Exactly the lazy mindset you described about playmoney accounts marketing nothingness.