Who is Marnell Gaming?
Marnell Gaming began with the ownership of properties in Laughlin, Nevada. There were two casinos there, one was in Edgewater and the other was in Colorado Bell. The founder and chairman, Anthony Marnell, acquired these in 2007. He began developing the company over the years and grew those two properties with a number of different enhancements. The major enhancement was building an outdoor venue that held about 11,000 people. The space became a real driver in terms of the business that they could bring to their two hotels down there. Marnell Gaming ended up transferring ownership of the two casinos over to Penn Gaming and acquired the Nugget Casino Resort in Sparks, Nevada in 2016. Everything in the resorts has been remodeled from the hotel rooms to the casino floor. An outdoor venue was once again built and this one held about 8,500 people. Marnell Gaming today operates the Nugget Casino Resort and do some consulting for other properties.
What was the problem?
When it came time to look for a Customer Experience Automation platform, Marnell ran into a lot of vendors who promised a lot of things but they couldn’t follow through. The team at Marnell started off with Mailchimp. They had to make sure that their campaigns were being sent out everyday without issue. Another issue was transitioning from their old casino to the new one. Mailchimp didn’t want to maintain their database and campaigns. They required Marnell to increase their subscription and ultimately the pricing. The goal for Marnell was to have the flexibility in their processes and have the ability to dig into their segmented audiences deeper.
The CXA Solution
With ActiveCampaign the customer journey has become more personalized and automated. One of the main types of customers that would go through different channels at Marnell Gaming would be their casino customer. All of their customers use something called a rating card, it basically tells Marnell what the player’s worth. Many customers do not understand that by using this card they can receive more benefits. For example, a customer signs up and plays one time and another at the end of the month. That person will no go into Marnell Gaming’s new member campaign. It’s a series of welcome messages and offers that can be used at another time. The offer will suggest a date for a hotel, some money for freeplay, and some credits for dinning. Now the customer will come back and start to experience more perks. This encourages the customer to come back more and more. They are then dropped into another campaign, which is the local or nonlocal campaign. This campaign drives even further offers by basing off activities that the customer has already done at the casino. The customer will also receive the core mailer and entertainment calendar for the lineup for the rest of the year. Additionally customers will receive promotions for hotel rooms when there’s no convention business. These emails could be a spring getaway promotion or a staycation email for local customers. However, Marnell Gaming understands that life changes and customers could quit gambling or move. After a couple of months inactive customers are put into a reactivation campaign. These messages send a message that says “Looks like you’re not coming around but we’d like to let you know that you’re a loyal customers” with an offer attached for them to come back. Now customers transition to different campaigns automatically and sometimes simultaneously. Even when customers drop off in terms of activity they are still being sent relevant information. ActiveCampaign makes this easy for Marnell Gaming, they no longer have to continually reload and pull out data and match everything up manually.
When it comes to personalization and segmenting Marnell’s customer base there are four main groups; Gaming, Entertainment, Hotel, and Retail. Now with ActiveCampaign Marnell can even segment within these groups of customers to get even more detailed. For example, there is a rib cookoff every year at the end of August. For five days 500K people come to the casino and it’s basically turned into a Rib Village. There are also 28 cookers that have been coming for over 30 years. Email is the greatest ways for Marnell to communicate with this group. The cookers will receive an email with the details of the event and that they qualify for a free table at the rib village where somebody else who is newer will get a different email with the details but an option to purchase a table. Marnell Gaming uses data from ActiveCampaign to know their customers better and give them offers that match that. They want to make sure segments are drilled down and personal.
With ActiveCampaign the marketing team no longer has to rely on the IT department. Marketing is now self-sufficient. In addition to this the hotel sales team comes to the marketing team now to drive business. Lists of convention business in the last 24 months are created and then emails with promo codes are sent out through ActiveCampaign.
