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Few threads here at the moment that relate to customer retention and paysite members areas etc that got me thinking ...
There is 2 ways of thinking, both of which work ...
There's Nick's way of playing the numbers game and making money off the old 'forget to cancel' theory ...
and there's the 'give the customer everything he/she wants and treat them like a customer' theory ...
I've always done both, depending on the niche or genre of site ... but since working with casino's, i'm learning the extent that customer relations can benefit your bottom line. So much so that we have just hired a person who has the job title 'player retention' who will be working on promotions, support, and 'stuff' to keep our players in our casino.
I've gone from an industry where there are so many customers that we just don't need to look after them, to an industry where 1 player can potentially be worth several thousand porn members ...
To give you an idea how different it is, instead of ignoring every email from a member, we literally jump on them in live chat as soon as they enter with 'how can i help you' kinda messages. When a customer has a deposit decline, we call them on the phone to help them with alternate processing options instead of just throwing them into a dialler. just 2 examples ...
To get this all working properly i've been looking a lot into customer retention programs of big corporations, especially airlines and credit cards which all offer rewards points programs of some kind - all designed to guarantee if a customer is spending money, they are spending it with you.
If customer retention wasn't important, how come every single mega corporation with millions of customers has an area of budget dedicated to keeping the customers they get through their marketing? That old saying 'its cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one' started in mainstream, but is it every going to get this way in porn or will the numbers game keep working?
I'm curious about the different areas everyone is working and how much effort you put into customer retention in each one? ... do you apply mainstream techniques to your adult sites? has anyone run any kind of rewards program for an adult site? or non adult for that matter?
interested in everyone's different perspective ...
The casino world is MARKEDLY different than the adult world. Casinos are ALL ABOUT making sure your customer has an enjoyable experience so they will come back and drop more money at your casino. Casino customers that are loyal are like getting permission to print your own money. A beautifuyl revenue stream that will keep going and going and going....
Originally posted by TheEnforcer@Mar 23 2005, 10:51 PM The casino world is MARKEDLY different than the adult world.
so the casino folk keep telling me .... ones who don't know a thing about adult mind you
in the area of customer retention, yes, the 2 are completely opposite .... but in every other way, its exactly the same (but implemented poorly). the more I learn, the less differences I see ...
I thought it was going to take me years to learn enough to implement anything successful, but so far i'm following my blue print for launching a porn program and its actually working
Originally posted by TheEnforcer@Mar 23 2005, 10:51 PM The casino world is MARKEDLY different than the adult world. Casinos are ALL ABOUT making sure your customer has an enjoyable experience so they will come back and drop more money at your casino. Casino customers that are loyal are like getting permission to print your own money. A beautifuyl revenue stream that will keep going and going and going....
The online casinos are drawing two types of customers as I see it. One is the curious, these guys are the casino equivalent of the guy who just signs up for a trial, cancels and goes on his way after getting his fill. The other is the hardcore gambler, the guy who is excited by, and in some cases NEEDS, the action.
Myself, I like to gamble, but I want my free drinks and a good buffet. Haven't found that online yet.
Originally posted by cj@Mar 23 2005, 10:21 PM Few threads here at the moment that relate to customer retention and paysite members areas etc that got me thinking ...
There is 2 ways of thinking, both of which work ...
There's Nick's way of playing the numbers game and making money off the old 'forget to cancel' theory ...
and there's the 'give the customer everything he/she wants and treat them like a customer' theory ...
For good or bad, Oprano is largely "old school". Fleece the flock, fuck the details, just pump volume volume and more volume. This worked great in the late 90's, you cant argue with the results.
One thing I'd really like to see in the gumbo is more program operators who have came along and made it in the last 2-3 years. The game has changed. IMO you now need to both generate your own traffic any way you can AND have affiliates. And yes, the modern affiliate is a pain in the ass, he's used to being given everything. I'd love to see more discussion on how you deal with it....ideally how can you retrain them. Again, I dont mind spending time to teach someone to fish, especially if they'll share their catch with me.
All due respect and all, I dont think the old methods work as well today. First off, mass traffic is hard to gather without paying for it. The free traffic that is out there has really been saturated with free porn for the most part. Either that or it comes with a helluva lot of heat. What this adds up to is it is much more difficult and expensive to acquire a customer....especially a customer that recurs.
It's cheaper and easier to take care of the customer who legitimately WANTS to be a member of your site and likes your content than it is to go acquire another one. In certain niches, if you take care of them, you can literally keep them for years. I have the recurring bases to prove it.
And yeah, a large percentage of recurring is still simply the guy who forgot to cancel after he finished and pulled his pants up. Visa will likely squash that noise sooner or later. If you're planning on being around for a while, it's best to NOT count on that as part of your business plan.
Originally posted by Hell Puppy@Mar 24 2005, 12:13 AM The online casinos are drawing two types of customers as I see it. One is the curious, these guys are the casino equivalent of the guy who just signs up for a trial, cancels and goes on his way after getting his fill. The other is the hardcore gambler, the guy who is excited by, and in some cases NEEDS, the action.
Myself, I like to gamble, but I want my free drinks and a good buffet. Haven't found that online yet.
This is where I've been focusing my attention ... understanding gambler habits in brick and mortar casino's to try to replicate them online.
Interesting you mentioned the food LOL
We have a high roller who we've been trying to offer ipods and all sorts of stuff, but he wasn't interested. eventually, we gave him a voucher for a steak house in his local area (which happened to be atlanta) and he was very happy with that ...
There's 2 things land based casino's have going for them that online doesn't - sound and smell ... if only there was a scratch and sniff monitor LOL
hmmm ... what about a krispy creme casino - donuts delivered with every deposit
Originally posted by TheEnforcer@Mar 24 2005, 12:28 AM Even the casinos online I see don't "think outside the box" in terms of what they offer as incentives for customers. Online casinos aren't like brick and mortar casinos. While there certainly is differences in themes, graphics, etc that type of stuff won't be nearly the factor as brick and mortar casinos.
definately ... sound and smell
Quote:
Listen, money bonuses are obviously a very nice pull but they are also a very standard type of incentive that everybody and their brother and mother offer. you come up with a comp system that's different from the rest of the casinos on top of the money bonuses and you'll clean house and loyalty will shoot through the roof. Right now you have the money incentives that appeal to both groups BUT that will have a limited appeal to the small and medium players because they are casual players. They are of a different mind-set than more regular, professional, and hard-ore gamblers. You know who the perks work BEST on retaining as a customer? the small and medium sized gamblers that come in and get their comped meal and small things. They LOVE it. These types of gamblers psychologically value those different types of comps more than they do the money they get back from gambling.
I'm glad to see that thought reinforced by someone else - i've been working on the theory that its best to give away 100 x $10 prizes than giving away 1 x $1000 prize, because the result is psychological ... I WON ... if a player leaves a casino (or any customer leaves any business) feeling like they've won, they'll come back ...
Originally posted by Hell Puppy@Mar 24 2005, 12:33 AM One thing I'd really like to see in the gumbo is more program operators who have came along and made it in the last 2-3 years. The game has changed. IMO you now need to both generate your own traffic any way you can AND have affiliates. And yes, the modern affiliate is a pain in the ass, he's used to being given everything. I'd love to see more discussion on how you deal with it....ideally how can you retrain them. Again, I dont mind spending time to teach someone to fish, especially if they'll share their catch with me.
i'm saving this for another thread ... i think 'retraining affiliates' is the key to the next 12 months of affiliate program survival.
Ditto everything The Enforcer said re: casinos.
CJ your idea of 100 X $10 is right-on. Your small to medium sized players will play more with that money and actually deposit with you if they've already got some money there, versus another casino where they have no money (yet). Sure the whales are important, but spending all of your effort on one guy who deposits a thousand versus 100 guys who'll deposit 100 every couple of weeks..? Silly.
Ever since the big poker craze came through here I've been playing, and I've settled on two sites mainly - UltimateBet because they give you points for time played (that you can trade in for stuff or tourney seats) and AbsolutePoker because they have a wider array of single-table tourneys you can hop in on at any time. Been thinking of going back over to PartyPoker because I know they have a shitload of single-table tourneys as well. Make it fast and easy for me to play (not lots of pop-ups when I enter the casino or when I click on a table), and give me lots of options to play (I can use my money, my points, or both, and can spend anywhere from $2 to $40 on a single-table tourney). For all of the fancy stuff most of these casinos have, a lot of them are missing the basics.
re: retraining the affiliate... god how I wish. One thing I think the midbie webmasters need are pre-made graphics - things cut out of the site tour that they can use on their galleries and sites. The header graphic, for example. Takes 5 extra seconds for the sponsor's graphic guy to save it as a .psd file that the affiliates can use. For an affiliate it takes a lot of time to chop that out of the tour and clean it up. Save them that time and they'll use it to pump out more pages promoting your sites with their own unique flair. Or a animated/flash video clip on the tour - give that to the affiliates (put the site name on it of course) to plop into their sites. Stuff like that. Screw this whole pre-made gallery and site stuff that they go spam the TGPs (and customers) with.
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Things have definitely changed. While I focus on keeping affiliates happy, TheDoc handles our members and makes sure they are happy. We can actually offer upsells to other paysites to our members and they happily buy with almost no complaints and a negligiable cancel rate (because we're so tightly niched on the big boob site, we can easily upsell to sites thing we don't offer in our members areas).
We've done things like adding a voting system and little interactive things as well as some new things we'll be rolling out soon. So what if it only adds 10% to the bottom line, that's 10% we don't feel like pissing off to someone else.
There also aren't as many whales these days as there were then. The signup and forget types? They're becoming fewer and farrer between. I'm sure they'll publicly call bullshit, but there are some bigger companies struggling with keeping those types of members ignorant. The mailer used to be the whales, now it's turning towards the TGP guys. While they will never be like the whales of old, but neither are the whales of old.
Something we've done as well that's been a little more successful is only offering partial access to our members area for trial members. They have to upgrade to a full membership to see everything (they'll still automatically renew/upgrade after their trial period though). Maybe this has cost us a couple "join and forgets" but we also have a low enough chargeback ratio that we'll soon be using our own merchant account.
It's also amazing how many accounts we've saved by simply answering emails where users had simple video player issues and other things that had they not gotten an answer, would have lead them to cancel (they sure as hell won't voluntarily stick around a video site where they can't see the videos). Even if that saves 5% of members, who would turn down 5%, especially with today's margins?
Would we have the kind of successfull numbers we'd have with retention if we had 20 generic sites with the same backends and a couple 100-150 per day join mailers? Hard to say, but look at how many bigger companies are cutting staff, going out of business altogether, leaving to pursue "other ventures", etc. It's getting harder to find that magic surfer who just got his first computer, a new credit card and hasn't been burned by someone in the past. We see surfers that are so paranoid about being fucked, they click the cancel link the first time they log into the trial area (we actually get them emailing us sometimes asking if they can go ahead of upgrade when they see no funny business going on).
Maybe some are even relieved that we have clearly marked cancel and customer service links in our members area.
It's hard for me to comprehend members' areas with no clearly marked cancel link nowadays. Before Epoch would even turn on our *trial* processing we had to have that cancel link on the page where the customer went after logging in, as well as on the login page itself.
Are some processors not requiring this, are the sites taking the links down after the sites are approved by the processor, or are the ones without cancel links just using their own merchant accounts?
Loved the post, Sykk. Perfect examples of how you were leaving money on the table and picked it up easily with a few simple changes and a little more attention. "Found money" is so nice.
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Originally posted by SykkBoy@Mar 24 2005, 03:20 AM We've done things like adding a voting system and little interactive things as well as some new things we'll be rolling out soon. So what if it only adds 10% to the bottom line, that's 10% we don't feel like pissing off to someone else.
Something we've done as well that's been a little more successful is only offering partial access to our members area for trial members. They have to upgrade to a full membership to see everything (they'll still automatically renew/upgrade after their trial period though). Maybe this has cost us a couple "join and forgets" but we also have a low enough chargeback ratio that we'll soon be using our own merchant account.
It's also amazing how many accounts we've saved by simply answering emails where users had simple video player issues and other things that had they not gotten an answer, would have lead them to cancel (they sure as hell won't voluntarily stick around a video site where they can't see the videos). Even if that saves 5% of members, who would turn down 5%, especially with today's margins?
3 really good points ..... all of which are used by mainstream in the most basic of business plans.
interactivity with the customer
holding back the gold
education/support
its an awful lot of work though for 10% .... there's at least several weeks of programming, support staff needed more than a few hours a day and a commitment to updating content ...
it seems profit margins in this biz have finally got so low that we are all having to add a lot more thought and effort to our sites to scrape together every % of profit possible.
i've been wondering for at least 2 years if its even worth it anymore ... on some of the sites I have not touched in a while, the profit margins became so low that my family's restaurant in its worst period was making more profit.
is there a point at which we will be trying too hard to keep a customer beyond where the margins make it worth it because we are determined to make this porn paysite business model work for a little longer?
Originally posted by cj@Mar 24 2005, 06:43 PM its an awful lot of work though for 10%
Considering the loss in exit consoles would think that's needed to compensate.
And yes, mostly every program has "the code" to get around blockers, but there's still a good deal of loss there compared to yesteryear just with surfers clicking on them less when they do see them.
That said, would like to hear other opinions on the state of exit consoles today compared to in the past.
good point ... consoles used to be 30% of sales ... which is a huge portion to make up. my numbers off exits now are less than 10%, which is why I give the exit back to the affliate in my adult sites ;-)
Most of us picked the adult industry originally for its huge profit margins and how easy it was to make money .... being that this is no longer the case and that running porn sites is now more difficult and often less profitable than running a corner store, why are we still here?
Originally posted by cj@Mar 24 2005, 09:24 PM Most of us picked the adult industry originally for its huge profit margins and how easy it was to make money .... being that this is no longer the case and that running porn sites is now more difficult and often less profitable than running a corner store, why are we still here?
Probably why some of us are straddling both worlds.
Originally posted by cj@Mar 24 2005, 09:24 PM good point ... consoles used to be 30% of sales ... which is a huge portion to make up. my numbers off exits now are less than 10%, which is why I give the exit back to the affliate in my adult sites ;-)
Most of us picked the adult industry originally for its huge profit margins and how easy it was to make money .... being that this is no longer the case and that running porn sites is now more difficult and often less profitable than running a corner store, why are we still here?
Because there is a great core of people around that still make doing business in adult profitable and enjoyable enough to still do it.
03-23-2005
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