Hitting the jackpot

Jackpots have long been one of the most meaningful tools in an operator’s armoury, tapping into players’ imaginations with wishful thinking in a way that few other mechanics at their disposal can. There will always be a seat for them at the casino table because, quite simply, there is an audience which will invariably be attracted to any big-money prize that’s on show, and as such, jackpots remain a significant selling point for operators when looking to promote the latest games and applications.

Jackpots are a great acquisition and retention tool in a game where people are inclined to remember the hits and disregard the misses. Which is why the sky-high dreams of a life-changing multi-million-pound win will always outstrip the gritty reality that for every big winner celebrated by the media, millions of losers tear up their tickets in obscurity.

Just take the National Lottery, for example. When there is a must-win multi-million-pound jackpot up for grabs, you can be sure there will be a surge of people heading to the corner shop or the website to buy their tickets for the draw. It’s no different for online slots. When there is a truly transformative amount of money up on offer, customers are always going to be more inclined to have a wager.

Of course, the issue for state-run lotteries is that they are limited to one or two draws a week and even those don’t guarantee a jackpot winner, while online slots have far more options available to them. It’s why we’ve started to see jackpots adapt to modern demands, and we’re seeing ever more effective ways of running them from operators.

Scalable jackpots have a proven and unique ability to deliver new customers, build loyalty, enhance retention, and expedite expansion into new markets. Against the backdrop GDPR, which is introduced next year and will force operators to more stringently control their acquisitions-based activities, these jackpots will prove a powerful and sought-after tool.

Let’s get progressive 

Progressive jackpots have proved highly successful in the past by enticing players to join in with a specific game, as they can see the prize money ticking up in front of their eyes. Back in April this year, a Sky Vegas player won a massive £3.1m off just a 20p stake on Jackpot King, the biggest ever jackpot scooped on the online casino.

Jackpots and slots will always go hand-in-hand and stay for the foreseeable future of igaming, but the way in which operators promote them to players needs to change in the near future. After all, popular culture constantly reminds us that we live in a quick-fix society, with thousands of channels available at the touch of a button or a screen, and the short attention spans of capricious millennials on the rise. Instant gratification, it seems, never counted for so much among the next generation of players.

A natural habitat is provided by jackpots which have evolved to capture the attention of those wandering eyes among any operator’s client-base. “Dwell” time and recurring visits remain the most prized of player behaviours for online operators. So the challenge is to convert tech distraction into dependability.

Progressive jackpots can turn a quick online snorkel into a deep dive for user engagement. Ultimately, though, jackpot size remains the key driver for keeping everyone’s eyes on the life-altering prize, harnessing players’ dare-to-dream philosophies to take them smoothly through the clickthrough-deposit-play cycle. The benefits for reliable, repeating traffic are obvious, securing client acquisition and retention along the way.

In short, an innovative scalable gaming ecosystem which keeps eyeballs trained on your interface is the wave of the future. No matter the lowly-if-hopeful stamp of our mental faculties in recognising true probability.