Seven Feathers Casino Resort is located just off I-5 in rural Southern Oregon. We’re owned and operated by the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indian tribe. Seven Feathers opened as a bingo hall in 1992, and we have since grown into a full-service destination resort that employs 1,000 people. Due to our remote location, we have to use creative promotions to attract guests. The success of these promotions is critical to the viability and future growth of the resort, which in turn sustains the local community. Not only is the resort a major employer, our foundation has donated $14 million to local charities and funds a full-service medical clinic for Tribal members, resort employees and their families.
Seven Feathers Casino Resort, and the casino industry as a whole, has traditionally communicated with local guests through direct mail. A critical issue that we must tackle in the coming years is transitioning guests to become accustomed to receiving more affordable digital communications.
This challenge is twofold.
First, our guests are not used to receiving offers digitally. Many people in our local market lack internet access and smartphones. They’re not used to getting email offers. They tend to be older and of a lower socioeconomic class.
The second challenge: our internal staff is not used to handling digital offers. Online redemption, digital portals and QR codes can be intimidating to employees who have spent more than two decades printing, stamping, and mailing promotions. Transitioning to digital offers requires a major readjustment for our staff and patrons alike.
We turned to OfferCraft, an innovative gamification platform, to help us get a jump on this digital transformation.
OfferCraft blends software and science to make digital incentives more fun and more effective. They infuse game dynamics into everyday communication pieces — adding gamification to emails, events social media, digital signage, and elsewhere. We have used the platform to translate our direct mail promotions into bite-sized games with personalized, interactive rewards.
OfferCraft is helping us get our guests excited to receive digital offers on their devices. In just a few short months we’ve taught our patrons to not only expect digital offers, but to look forward to them.
We have done a variety of different experiments with OfferCraft, trying out games with different populations, in different contexts, and with different mixes of prizes.
One of our most successful implementations so far, both in terms of audience reaction and ROI, has been on Facebook. Our reach quintuples when we replace a typical post on social media about a special with a free game guaranteed to give a reward. And this is organic reach; we don’t pay to boost these posts.
In July, we did three Facebook campaigns to promote the River Rock Spa, offering flash 24-hour promotions in honor of the spa’s seventh anniversary. It drove an immediate surge of foot traffic.
We also send a regular email to our inactive customers—those who have not been on property in 12 months or more. This OfferCraft game is a last-ditch attempt to draw them back on the property, and it has been remarkably successful at reengaging customers we thought we had lost.
In addition, we’ve launched a number of employee games to motivate and engage staff. For instance, we did a game themed to the TV show Diesel Sellers where employees could play the game in honor of their hard work and dedication and receive swag as a thank you gift. We ran out of merchandise after giving away more than 300 pieces.
We also used the game to entice staff members to take a survey about what additional amenities they would like to see on property, and it drove far higher participation than past survey efforts.
Seven Feathers proudly utilizes completely organic social content—meaning we do not pay to boost posts. Our reach on a daily Facebook post typically hovers around 3,800 customers, however, that all changes when we post an OfferCraft game. OfferCraft games help us get our brand in front of so many more eyes in a fun and exciting way and our reach dramatically increases to around an average of 15,000 for the first 24 hours. After three days, that number usually rockets to more than 40,000 customers reached.
We see the highest return on investment when we post on our main Seven Feathers page, and then share that post among multiple pages operated under our brand. We are encouraged every time we see these numbers and continue to explore the OfferCraft suite of games, wondering which one will become the Seven Feathers Facebook-fan-favorite.
OfferCraft delivers motivation through gamification. Their clients use OfferCraft to infuse game dynamics into their marketing offers and HR incentives--more effectively motivating their target audiences to do the things they want them to do.
This is one of the world’s most sophisticated gamification engines. OfferCraft extracted insights from behavioral science, cognitive psychology, and game theory, and distilled those insights into a powerful gamification and dynamic reward platform.
Companies spend so much time and effort on optimizing what offer to make, but our research has shown that it’s just as important to figure out how to give out an offer. For example, let’s say you wanted to give customers $20 off a mid-week hotel stay. That coupon will have drastically different redemption rates depending on how you distribute it. Imagine two scenarios:
In the first, a bored front desk employee hands the player a receipt and mumbles something about a $20 coupon at the bottom of the room folio receipt for their next stay. Some people will use it, but most will throw it away or shove it in their purse only to forget about it later.
In the second scenario, the customer gets to play a short chance-based or skill-based game on an iPad when checking in. The game might be a fishing game, or a basketball game or a wheel spin that rewards the customer with that same $20 coupon. The research has repeatedly found that people respond much better to things they earn rather than things that are given for free. They’re more likely to remember it, more likely to value it, and more likely to come back and redeem it. We’ll see far higher redemption rates and ROI from this $20 offer versus the one from the bored cashier.
Instead of shoving coupons into a customer’s hand, OfferCraft distributes offers via games, enabling companies to give offers in a more exciting, memorable way that patrons are far more likely to actually redeem.
My moment is when I see 200 defectors come back to the property for the first time in a year within just a month. Or when I wake up and a post has reached 15,000 people in 16 hours. Or when I see a long-time employee use an online redemption portal with ease and confidence. Or when a local guest comes in showing the QR code on her smartphone from an email offer right after I send it. The digital transformation of our community is underway, and I am proud to be leading that effort.
