Nurturing customer loyalty that drives repeat business is a lot like a successful playbook. Successful play calling requires building off what drives wins — repeatedly. Driving customer loyalty takes a similar approach, but with a few key pieces in your end-game strategy: Encouraging more spend, more often from repeat customers.
With the global gaming market hitting an estimated net value of $167.8 billion — poised to grow to $287.1 billion by 2025[1] — it’s clear to see how integrating a brand deeper into the gaming experience can help capture a greater share of this growing market.
The key to tying your game plan together is delivering an invisible payment experience. Across the gaming and gambling industries, the race is on to attract loyal customers through differentiated, unique digital experiences to make a purchase, add funds, or place a bet and get on with their desired experience. Enter embedded payments technology.
Embedded payments in gaming and gambling presents a particularly impactful use case for how to remove the complexity around payments logistics. By integrating a payment account into a mobile app itself — instead of sending users to a third-party payment page or forcing them to continually enter payment credentials — customers can easily continue through their gaming experience without disruption. This can create new avenues to boost loyalty and spend. Below we explore how businesses can leverage embedded payments as a brand differentiator.
Embedded payments’ impact on better money management
Part of providing a positive payment experience — whether it's across a gaming app, or sports betting site — comes down to funds management. Consumers want a fast, easy way to purchase a game or place a bet, but many also want to find a way to integrate these experiences into their everyday financial lives. Setting customers up for success that encourages them to re-engage consistently means giving them tools to support positive financial money management.
For instance, offering gamers the ability to earn rewards by reloading funds onto a card or payment account to spend more time on the game is one use case for embedded payments. This not only keeps gaming funds separate from their other financial accounts, but it can also help achieve a seamless payment experience and simple way to transfer funds. The end-user experience in this instance also has the potential to boost brand loyalty, which ultimately leads to repeat businesses and higher spend over time.
Embracing embedded digital payments technology can also lead to gaming and gambling innovation — including moving money, and mobile app features — can be used to create a unique customer experience. Similarly, brands can control what types of payment options users can have. This includes a flexible payment option that allows gamers and people who gamble the chance to control how, when and where they spend, which is another key component of enhancing the overall user experience that boosts customer loyalty and engagement. Offering these additional features also present brands with opportunities to create new and recurring revenue streams.
It’s important companies align their offerings with consumer lifestyle decisions to enable payment choice that aligns with how consumers are already engaging with brands. Doing so also means leveraging the expertise of an embedded account provider.
How embedded payments partnerships create new revenue streams
Payments is the needle that threads the customer experience together to ensure the entire interaction is good for the end-user. Of course, behind every seamless payment experience is a partnership that ensures consumers get exactly what they want from the transaction — for it to be fast and frictionless. Embracing partnerships that enable simpler, smoother embedded payments experiences create the type of digital gaming and gambling experiences consumers expect today.
Embedding payments into the end-user’s experience also presents new revenue opportunities for operators as this technology allows operators the ability to gain data and learn more about consumer behavior. In today’s digitally-driven market, data provides real-time insights on how consumers are engaging across various platforms.
This data-driven intel provides actionable details which can be used to target future opportunities that align with your consumers’ interest. In these instances, embedded payments experience can be leveraged as a rewards model to offer exclusive deals and create a personalized experience.
Those personalized experiences become key revenue drivers when businesses can pinpoint how to harness customer loyalty through positive, repeatable interactions. Data offers a treasure trove of customer behavior that helps businesses fully understand where the most value exists across their platform. Deepening a customer connection can be done by using that data to offer personalized rewards programs to continually build loyalty.
As market value grows, the online gaming and gambling space is getting crowded, which is why it’s critical businesses find ways to create differentiated experiences that are frictionless and fast. Embedded payments are the piece of that puzzle that creates a win-win in any playbook to meaningfully boost customer engagement through interactions that encourage repeat spend and ultimately drives loyalty.
About the Author: Walt Granville serves as Netspend’s Senior Vice President, Business Development. Walt leads a team of experts that are responsible for working with partners to unlock growth through payments and digital banking innovation. His Netspend partnership team has developed card programs, employer payment solutions and Embedded Finance offerings across multiple industries including; Technology, Gaming, Ecommerce, Lending, Fintech, Healthcare, Retail and Alternative Financial Services. An industry veteran with over 20 years of experience in the US and European financial services and payment industry, Walt has held roles managing strategic partnerships and product innovation teams for payment networks, processors, issuers and technology innovators. Prior to joining Netspend, Walt held various roles with Visa, First Data, Affinion Loyalty Group, and Monitise.
1. Research and Markets, Global Gaming Market (2021 to 2026) - Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecasts, March 2021, https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/03/01/2184028/0/en/Global-Gaming-Market-2021-to-2026-Industry-Trends-Share-Size-Growth-Opportunity-and-Forecasts.html
