Learning from different industries and walks of life is one of the smartest ways of improving any business venture.
Sometimes, this means looking at areas that appear at first sight to be completely unrelated, like retail and bingo. What can anyone in the retail industry learn from the success of online bingo?
People Love Getting Something for Free
One of the offers that catch the eye when looking at this industry is the ability to try services without playing such as free bingo at Paddy Power. These no-cost games are offered at certain times of day and provide the chance to win cash prizes without paying for the bingo cards needed to join in.
The idea of giving discounts in retail is already well-established, but giving something for free is a subject that needs to be carefully considered. This report from Chron points out the possible benefits, such as becoming more memorable and attracting new customers, but also confirms that the potential drawbacks include the strain it could place on the overall marketing budget.
Variety is the Secret to Broadening a Brand’s Appeal
Finding a gap in the market is a crucial step, and this is often one of the keys to successfully launching a retail product. Yet, there’s also the risk of narrowing the focus too much and missing out on potential clients by not offering enough variety. This was a possible risk for online bingo, as one of the key challenges was to broaden the appeal of this game as much as possible.
This has been achieved by putting a variety of games together on bingo sites, and the developers frequently split them across several differently themed rooms to make them more appealing to diverse types of players. In terms of retail strategies, this look by Pimberly at the subject explains that it could increase customer loyalty as well as boost order size.
Make It Easy to Get Started
Perhaps the most crucial aspect of any website is the ease of use, as the first few seconds in which a visitor looks around are vital. In this respect, online bingo has been made incredibly easy for newcomers to try, with a fast signup process and then a large group of games that are divided into rooms to make it easy for players to look around and find one.
This is a valuable lesson in the retail world too, especially in highly competitive areas where customers can choose from many different offers across a lot of rival sites. Getting someone to visit the site is a huge challenge, but then converting that into a sale is even more difficult. A good conversion rate can be anywhere from 2% upward, and having a website that guides people smoothly through the sales process is one of the very best ways of trying to maximise that conversion rate.
All of these points help us to see how bingo has flourished since its move online in the late 1990s. More importantly, they all give us powerful ideas that can be transported across to any retail business fairly easily.
