This year’s Southern Gaming Summit, held in Biloxi, Mississippi has seen a new focus panel take flight. The “Steal This Promotion” panel session led by Ryan Meister, a casino marketing director, together with other successful industry leaders, such as Julia Carcamo, Linda Gordon, and Bobby Thornton touched on the topic of increasing revenue brought in by successful casino promotions.

The panel first discussed the best way to estimate this type of increasing revenue, and Carcamo affirmed that a good database marketing team and a stellar team of analysts is paramount in order to acquire the best results. He added, “I know in the past we’ve developed a layering report, so it was very important to always analyze our direct marketing, as much as how many offers people are using and when they’re coming in and how they’re layering offers.”

In regards to this subject, the panel also concluded that it is important to compare previous years result to current promotions campaigns offered through the database program. This would provide casino operators with a clear picture of how much change the particular promotion has caused and whether this year’s offer is more successful than last year’s and so on.

The second and possibly most important topic was the issue of taking active steps in order to drive revenue in the current market. The topic related to the previous one in that it is important to look at the promotion’s history and see what has worked well in the past. This would be an excellent starting point but the idea needs to move past what has been done and offer players a more interactive way of earning these promotions.

The discussion also brought up the issues of direct mail marketing and whether it should be integrated, whether it still works. One major step marketers need to take is actively asking their customers about their needs and preferences so as to compile the most efficient, inexpensive, and attractive offers. Always keeping the entertainment factor at the back of their heads casino marketers need to stretch across digital media, efficiently predict incremental revenue, know their customers, and of course learn from past experience.