"The heart of marketing is behaviour modification."
Behaviour is an important factor in Direct Mail campaigns, affecting not only the way the customer reacts to the campaign, but also how you need to approach them. Every consumer is an individual, so you're never going to please everyone all of the time, but you can engage a much higher percentage of your target list if you analyse and predict behaviour correctly.
Defining behaviour of players is never simple, but the University of San Francisco gave it a good try in 2010 with the publication of Customers: A New Segmentation Model for the North American Gaming Industry. This study sought to define the behaviour of different types of gamblers and place them into sub-groups such as Mr High Roller, Mr Happy-Go-Lucky and Accidental Travellers. These can be hugely helpful in identifying and successfully engaging the target audience for your campaign.
Another study, more consumer-driven and less overtly academic, was conducted by the Innovation Group in 2014. Consumer Behaviour in the Gaming Industry was based on a survey of 1,260 active gamblers and it focused heavily on four age groups – Milennials, GenX, Baby Boomers and Matures. Not surprisingly, this showed a higher takeup of online play and social media engagement among younger people, but also a growing trend among older generations to play online.
Both studies are interesting, but the truth is that you need to look at a combination of factors in order to correctly predict the behaviour of your target customer. Age, playing style and demographics can all help, but the most useful information that you can gather is from their playing patterns on your own sites, although I do appreciate this will usually only apply to upsell or reactivation, not to new customers.
Put simply, the more information you can gather on your customers the better. Insight is like gold dust, and the more you dig for it, the more returns you will generate from each customer.
If you are looking to do some research on your players behaviours make sure choose the right research partner, qualified to help you in achieving your goals.