Virgin Games rolls out new customer management tools

Virgin's online gaming arm has chosen to implement new communications management software to improve customer marketing and management.

The Virgin Games portfolio is made up of Virgin Casino, Virgin Bingo and Virgin Poker and has purchased the new software to increase the volume, value and conversion rates of visitors across the sites by a target of 10 per cent per annum.

It will use a full suite of software from provider smartFOCUS, including analysis, campaign management and reporting, deployed on a centralised view of customers.

The software will enable Virgin Games to profile and segment players by lifestyle, value, most recent visits and frequency of play, as well as take advantage of more granular customer activity data to help develop and execute more targeted marketing campaigns.

Simon Burridge, Virgin Games chief executive said the company's existing marketing tools could not cope with the numerous ways it already uses to reach existing customers.

"There was no ability to target CRM [customer relationship management] campaigns to specific audience groups and to analyse results to reach out to our users with relevant information," he said.

"With smartFOCUS we have found a solution that will be able to keep up with the complexity of our marketing demands."

The suite was selected for the performance, scalability and usability of its software and integrated data approach.

And Virgin Games will benefit from the in-house software by enabling its marketers to compare and analyse different player segments by the types of games they are playing.

Virgin Games is also hoping to use its increased customer insight to improve targeting of cross-sell and reactivation marketing, as well as understand the lifetime value of affiliate partners and improve the profitability of their gaming products.

As such, the software will also underpin Virgin Games' strategic shift to customer retention and relationship management in its bid to improve customer management and significantly increase marketing performance.