Honoré Gaming Retention begins long before the Final Whistle
As major sporting events deliver record waves of new players, long-term success depends on what happens after the final whistle. Valentin Raigue, Chief Product Officer at Honoré
Gaming, explains why behavioural segmentation, always-on CRM, intelligent middleware and habit-forming player journeys are becoming the foundations of sustainable operator growth.
Vadim, what separates operators that have retained World Cup players from those that have watched them disappear?
Proactivity, and knowing your audience before it arrives. A World Cup is an acquisition event, not a revenue windfall, its real value comes in the months following the final whistle, or not at all. Te operators who retain those players prepared for them: they knew the traffic was coming and had already done the analytical work of understanding who they are and how to analyse them quickly.
Retention isn’t a post-match rescue operation. It starts with the ability to look at a first-time depositor in week one and understand what kind of player you’re dealing with, what they came for, what rhythm they play at, what would make them stay, and then personalise the experience accordingly. Operators who watch players disappear are the ones who saw a million registrations as one undifferentiated mass. Te winners saw a million individuals to be understood. Te tournament opens up the same traffic. What separates them is how early they started learning who was inside it.
How important is behavioural segmentation, and what early signals tell you whether a player is likely to become a long-term customer?
It’s the whole game. Treating post-tournament players as a single segment is the single most expensive mistake we see, because the two dominant cohorts need different approaches. A first-time depositor who came for one match and a reactivated VIP can look identical on an active/inactive flag, but the intervention that retains one will annoy the other.
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Te early signals we watch aren’t complicated: does the player return within the first few days without a bonus prompt, do they bet on a non- tournament fixture, and, the strongest predictor, do they engage with a second product at all. A player who only ever bets football during a football tournament is telling you they came for the event, not the operator. Someone who wanders into a lottery draw or a casino game in week one is showing genuine platform intent. We build player states around funding behaviour, product mix and recency rather than a single status field, and route each state into its own track.
Te industry has traditionally relied on promotional campaigns after major sporting events. Is that approach becoming outdated, and why is always-on, automated CRM proving more effective for long-term retention?
Te campaign model isn’t dead, but the ambition behind it is usually set too low. Te question shouldn’t be “how do I run a good win-back campaign”, it should be “how do I turn a one-match visitor into a champion of my brand.” Tose are different goals that require different tools. A scheduled promotional blast can retain a player for another week; an always-on system can build the relationship that makes them long-lasting.
Te wider industry is moving the same way, from calendar-based sends toward always-on, trigger-driven journeys. Te reason it works for creating champions rather than just slowing churn is that it meets the player continuously, in context, at the moments that actually shape a habit, not on a marketing calendar’s schedule. A campaign treats the player as a target to hit. An always-on journey treats them as a
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