Online casino affiliate marketing is a booming giant. Brands and operators with online casinos are investing in affiliate marketing as an efficient source to get traffic on their casino offerings – slot games, live dealer games, table games and specialty games. If you haven’t started with affiliate marketing for online casinos or are looking to scale your existing strategy as per new developments and trends in iGaming affiliate marketing in 2024.
Before getting into the nitty gritty of casino affiliate marketing, let’s understand how affiliate marketing can help you scale your online casino brands(s).
Affiliate Marketing for Online Casino – The Benefits
From branding to sales, businesses have been using affiliate marketing for decades to achieve their respective goals. For online casinos, the scenario is no different. Regardless of the size, online casinos can leverage affiliate marketing or CPA marketing to impact their bottom line – be it for driving sales, building brand awareness, improving player retention or boosting user acquisition.
- Driving Deposits & Wagers (Sales): Through partnership, online casino brands and operators can attract relevant traffic of interested players to their products. Through the CPA model, brands/operators can incentivize affiliates on completing desired actions like First Time Deposit or Wagers.
- Player Acquisition & Retention: Develop unique promotions and offers to incentivize players to sign up and start wagering on your casino. Leverage the established audience of your affiliates to drive your target audience away from your competitors and to your platform. Run special offers for inactive or dormant players giving them special discounts on bets to bring them back to betting.
- Branding: Affiliate marketing is not just an action-driven marketing strategy. It also helps you establish your brand among the audience that is interested in online casinos. Consistent exposure through online casino affiliate marketing gives you brand familiarity and builds trusts among players.
- Soft Launch in New Geographies: Affiliates can help you acquire users from new geographies. While your brand might be new, affiliates already enjoy an audience in the uncharted territory. By leveraging affiliate marketing for online casinos, you can acquire users from geographies where you don’t have any reach yet.
What You Can Do For Your Online Casino Affiliate Marketing?
Have an affiliate program in place? Or new to the world of online casino affiliate marketing? To give you an edge over your competitors, here’s what you can drive better ROI with your affiliate marketing strategy.
Personalized, Cohort-Based Targeting
Serving the same type of ads or content to everyone? This one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work in 2024. Consumers crave for content that speaks directly to them. When it comes to online casinos, the players have even higher affinity towards personalized content. To make sure that your affiliate marketing strategy is tailored to different audiences, here’s what you can do.
Building Cohorts Based On Player Parameters
Segregate your player data on the basis of following parameters:
Here’s how you can expand on creating user cohorts based on engagement and product choices for personalized affiliate marketing in online casinos:
- Demographics: Group your player data on the basis of their age, location, and gender. Tailor your affiliate marketing creatives and copies based on this.
- Frequency: Create audiences based on the times they open your online casino app or website. Build custom offers for players who show a decline in betting activities to maintain their engagement on your platform. Target them based on the gameplays they prefer.
- Value: Segment your audience on the amount of bets they’ve placed on your casino. Create custom campaigns and offer additional offers to high-value players to retain them.
- Acquisition Source: Segment players on the basis of how they found your online casino. This will help your affiliates to understand which traffic source is working and which isn’t.
Hyper-Targeting Each Cohort Through Personalized Approach
Player data and cohorts is an important currency for any online casino affiliate marketers or brand. With a clear understanding of how your user is interacting with your online casino games. Here’s how you can target them with personalized approach:
- Personalized Creative & Copy: After building cohorts of your audiences based on their preferences, behavior and demographics, the next step is to build affiliate marketing campaigns based on their interests. Customize creatives and copies as per their taste and see your conversion rate soar. For effective creative management, you need an iGaming affiliate marketing platform that helps you manage creative and track their performance on a single dashboard.
- Coupon Code Marketing in iGaming: Assigning unique coupon codes to your cohorts is also a great way to incentivize your users based on their value and even track your affiliate marketing campaigns. You can track your coupon code performance to track how your cohorts are responding to your iGaming affiliate marketing campaigns.
Diversify Your Online Casino Affiliates
Putting all eggs in one basket has never boded well for anyone, especially in business. Therefore, we strongly recommend iGaming brands and operators to diversify their affiliate cohort by building a strategic network of affiliates. This will allow you to target different geographies, interests, and traffic sources.
Here’s how to diversify your affiliate network:
- Target Relevant Niches: Identify partners who specialize in their respective niches, for example, blackjack, roulette, baccarat, slot machines, holdem, poker and others. Create custom campaigns for each type of niche and onboard partners who are experts in their trade. These partners can include bloggers, streamers, content creators, influencers, etc.This allows you to target a wider audience with a tailored approach.
- Set Aside A Budget For Up & Coming Affiliates: While the tried and tested partners are a great way to ensure a consistent stream of revenue, your online casino affiliate marketing should also set aside a budget for experimental or up and coming affiliates. These can include podcasts, Discord communities, AR/VR experiences, etc.
Know When To Start An Affiliate Program
While jumping straightaway to starting your own affiliate program seems like the only way to go about affiliate marketing for online casinos, it might not be a good idea for new iGaming businesses with limited resources and budget. If you’re confused about whether to start and affiliate program or onboard an affiliate network, let’s help you make the informed decision:
- When to start an affiliate program? If you’ve been into online casino affiliate marketing for long, have figured out what works for you, understand regulatory environments of your target geographies, and have relevant in-house expertise to manage an affiliate program, you can go ahead and launch your own online casino affiliate program.
- When to partner with an existing affiliate network? The online casino industry is crowded and competitive. Hence, if your affiliate marketing strategy for online casinos is not hyper-targeted and effective, it’s hard to find high-value customers. That’s it’s always beneficial to join an existing affiliate network that understands the market, have an extensive cohort of affiliates expert in their own niches, have flexible payment plans, and have expertise in online casino affiliate marketing.
Before taking any decision, it is important to carefully evaluate your online casino business resources, budget, and market position. For beginners, joining an existing affiliate network can be a good starting point to boost player acquisition and retention.
Go Beyond Affiliate Marketing for Online Casino
While online casino affiliate marketing is a great way to bring your iGaming brand in front of your target audience, putting all your budget on one type of marketing isn’t a sustainable way to grow your business. As an iGaming marketer, you can also explore the power of App Store Optimization (if you have an online casino mobile app), SEO/Voice Search Optimization, and Localized Content/Interactive Content to attract and engage new players.
In 2024, when marketing is changing for the better, it’s only wise to try different approaches to drive revenue to your iGaming business. Carefully diversify your budget into online casino affiliate marketing, paid advertising, ASO, SEO, and SEM based on data on what works the best for your business.
