Thursday, April 23, 2009

Rakeback deals with 68k in promos

Check out our rakeback page with the best offers at each room and if you need to get rakeback on your current account email me at beanie@alwaysbluff.com. Also check out our promos page where we give away 750k yearly to our members. This is a video I did for the sign up process for one of our rakeback offers. Current offers are 30% at both UltimateBet and Absolute Poker with $24,000 in rake races and freerolls. 27% at Full Tilt Poker with $21,000 in rake races. 33% at Cake Poker with $18,000 in rake races and freerolls.

What the hell is Rakeback?

Rakeback is a comp, much like you would get in a casino to give you incentive to play more. I use to run two companies RakeRecovery and UltimatePals, between the two we serviced over 20,000 customers, the people that run the day to day now are customer service experts. What rakeback providers do is provide you a person or a team of people that help you get benefits from online poker rooms.

That's all cool but I don't get this benefit (at least I think I don't)

What Bill forgot to put in his article was a big oversight, it is the rooms advertisements that are stopping you from getting your benefits. The ad spend for a companies like PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker dwarf whatever it is they might be spending with yetanotherpokerbonusdomain.com. Simply put if you are not getting these benefits it is because they already have you and do not need to give you any more benefit to keep you (or so they think).

I already have an account, am I screwed?

Absolutely not, this might be the biggest benefit rakeback providers present to both the customers and the rooms. When I designed our customer service model my main point of emphasis was for the customer to talk to a real person and they could sort out their best course of action. Virtually every rakeback site has a form that will allow you to request for your current account to be switched to rakeback.

The answer is actually simple and it just so happens to be the best option.

There was a quote that changed my life from Zig Ziglar (I will paraphrase) "If you look out for the customer your needs will always be met". To have a portion of your customer base recieving benefits that the rest do not is eventually going to get out. Especially in the ultra viral world of the internet. The "Tipping Point" for customer retention happened in October of 2006. The marketing end of the online poker spectrum wants to feel important and if you spend 500 million dollars with advertisements they want to be able to recoup that money. Kind of silly if you think about it, marketing should get them in the door and customer service and retention should keep them there. Whether casual, semi-casual or pro every poker player is in a constant struggle to keep their bankroll at playing levels. So all the marketing glitz, WSOP seats and Ipods are great, to sit down and play though most people need cold hard cash.

Why not just do what PokerStars does or Party Poker did?

"I served with Jack Kennedy: I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." Senator Lloyd Bensten in response to Senator Dan Quayle during the Vice Presidential debate from 1988. Frankly there is no card room comparable to PokerStars or Party Poker pre October 2006. PokerStars gets away with not giving rakeback because they had the momentum, had the best customer service and they charge a premium for doing so. PokerStars is Neiman Marcus, so that niche is taken. If you think you can create a VIP program (something Stars did years ago) and that will be an answer for not giving your players rakeback watch ESPN just one day and ask yourself if you are willing to spend that kind of money. When Party Poker was thriving their ad spend dwarfed everyone.

The first one to jump off the cliff wins

Open up rakeback priviledges to your whole customer base sure it will cost Phil Ivey or Phil Hellmuth some jet fuel but it is the right thing to do and ultimately is the right thing for you as a company. Sure it will cost you 25% - 30% of your profits to the player, but those players will keep coming back because they have a daily, weekly or monthly reason for doing so. Let's stop pretending Chris Moneymaker just won the WSOP, this industry needs to become customer focused and the first one to make this leap will be the big beneficiary.
Tags: Rakeback Articles poker comps poker deals

6 responses to Rakeback deals with 68k in promos

MJ
Friday, April 24, 2009

The big rakeback players (you excluded) killed this business themselves. Greed and a false breed of protectionism has done it - it's funny to hear the big players on forums talk about "caps" being necassary when they break them all the time themselves, and anyone can see it. They break caps all the time, any player knows this and has been offered it if they are doing $x,xxx in mgr. They open skins on non rakeback networks just to backdoor rakeback where it isn't allowed - and now the "landing pages" have just become a two click way for a player to get higher than cap by subbing under himself.

Beanie
Friday, April 24, 2009

Affiliates are such a small part of this problem it is laughable. It matters on merge because no site is currently doing a "cold hard cash" VIP program. What you are saying is for insiders, certainly insiders know about rakeback but why not just make cash incentives the norm and quit dancing around the fact that players need a bankroll to survive? I agree with you however, I would rather see the rooms dishing out the comps as well. I was in the rooms when caps were decided and such and at the time I explained to people that they were their own worst enemy. Everyone laughed me off, then along came the monster rake races which are basically just a way to circumvent the caps. Most of these programs have gotten more sophisticated but IMO if the rooms were to administer the comps it would allow some of that nonsense to go away. If any one particular room wanted to be more competitive on comps they obviously could do that instead of the way it works now. We had to add rake races (at the time and both rakerecovery and UP still offer) but I am not really sure it adds appreciably to customer acquisition.

MJ
Friday, April 24, 2009

Don't see why it matters on Merge when there is already several skins and a rakeback friendly network account policy, players at Carbon without a rakeback deal can certainly get one at Aced. In general I think the problem is now the affiliates are the ones dictating the rules that should be followed and the ones that are ok to be broken. When we end up (players) in a situation where an affiliate controls our comps, I'd rather see the poker room in control of that in the future - let them compete with each other on service and value.

Beanie
Thursday, April 23, 2009

Nice blog btw, check him out http://pokerwits.blogspot.com/

Beanie
Thursday, April 23, 2009

his blog is the nuts fo sho. I think it would make sense for networks like say Merge. I like their new software a lot.

Zemalf
Thursday, April 23, 2009

Nice article, would be interesting to see if some of the smaller competitors would consider something like this, but I don't think that's gonna happen.. p.s. thanks for mentioning Bill's Poker Blog, hadn't been there before.