Raising the Stakes

Of the five million people in Foxwoods Resort and Casino's data warehouse, four million hold the property's Dream Card. A new data initiative will help Foxwoods' marketers more effectively market to them — and identify the missing million.

Foxwoods already has a sense of who these million are. They're non-gamers, mostly. People who gamble at the Foxwoods casino likely use the Dream Card, which replaced its Wampum Card when the company partnered with MGM Mirage in mid-2008. Their behavior is easy for Foxwoods to track.

But non-gamers have value as well. They spend money on the organization's lodging, spa and golf offerings, and Foxwoods is investing in capturing their behavior, as well as making sure they are treated according to their total value to the resort.

Traditionally, gaming has been the revenue generator, while the other offerings were amenities the casino offered, says Michael Kutia, Foxwoods' director of hospitality systems and information services. But this is changing: Of late, more visitors are going to the amenities and throwing in a trip to the casino as one facet of their stay, if they play at all.

In the Cards

So how do these patrons make it into the Foxwoods database without holding a Dream Card? Through giving their contact information when booking a session at a spa, or ordering tickets to one of its performance venues. Foxwoods assigns people who don't hold its card a unique identification number and attempts to match their names when they register for, say, a spa treatment or a show with their ID code.

This method, however, is open to hygiene glitches, especially as the resort hasn't had a fully integrated data-capture infrastructure throughout its ancillary offerings. A system Foxwoods is rolling out will accurately record non-cardholder behavior. This data will be rolled into a repository designed by data warehousing firm Netezza.

Kutia is using the new system to achieve five marketing goals. In addition to tracking and analyzing non-player spending and behavior, in mid-2009 Foxwoods began running defection analysis reports. When a patron's visit frequency or spending wanes, Foxwoods reacts more quickly than it had in the past.

“Keeping clients from leaving is one of Foxwoods' primary focuses,” says Larry Mosmian, product marketing manager for customer intelligence at SAS, which provided the analytic software behind the entire infrastructure revamping. “When someone steps away from a table, [Foxwoods has] about 10 minutes before they lose him for the day, or whatever. They need to get a spa coupon into his hand, or send him to a store with his wife. They are in the process of getting that foundation built.”

The third goal is the ability to better track promotion redemption. Previously, says Kutia, Foxwoods wouldn't have counts until a given promotion had been over for several weeks, and couldn't adjust its marketing mix in mid-campaign. But the new system allows for on-the-fly adjustment, meaning that if a given piece of creative pulls female customers better, subsequent mailings can target this audience.

The fourth goal dovetails with the third: Kutia wants the new system to offer insight into the right mix of patrons to target — not just adjusting within a campaign, but with better long-term insight for Foxwoods' marketing efforts.

Long-Term Goals

Finally, the new system will allow staff across Foxwoods to calculate the value of a given patron across Foxwoods' entire business — not just the casino.

“This is where we are now,” Kutia says. “We are looking to predict what they like, what we can market to them. Right now, we have all the gaming data and all the hotel data. We have all their Web transaction data. We are looking at importing all their ticketing data, in order to get a better handle on how to market to them.”

The system is already paying dividends. “We used to get requests for customized reports,” Kutia says. “That has disappeared now that we have the warehouse.” Analytics software from SAS means that custom runs that used to take eight hours now take eight seconds, according to Kutia.