Casinos and Conversion

Last week, Matt from 37signals wrote "The casino experience" that analyzes a casino from a design perspective. Matt hits on points such as the fact that casinos have no windows, no clocks, and they are hard to navigate, which are all great ways to keep people gambling. From a marketing perspective you can actually take many of these principles that casinos use to help improve your conversion rate.

  1. Casinos have no windows because they don't want gamblers getting distracted. Just like casinos, you want to remove the cool features and unnecessary links on your website so visitors don't get distracted and start wondering off.
  2. Free booze and rooms is a great way casinos attract people. Offering some sort of freebie on your website is a great way to attract and retain visitors. Once you have them on your website then you can try to convince them to purchase something.
  3. When you first walk into a casino slot machines and tables are in your face. Make sure your call to action such as a "buy it now" button is visible and in your visitors' face.
  4. Casinos have a specific atmosphere that causes people to be energetic and gamble. The gambler is usually making decisions based on emotion instead of logic. With your website you want to create the same effect through design, color, and content. Make these elements play on the visitor's emotions so that he or she spends their money without thinking about shopping around.

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Reader Comments (2)

Gambler of the West, October 16, 2006

I was trying to post this comment on Matt's post, but there was a problem with the comments system, so I'll post it here:
It was an interesting aricle, and so is this one. Some of the points made weren't known to me, and I actually was in Vegas and didn't notice things (like the cashier window being so far inside the place).
I wonder how it is with online casinos - how do they get their customers to stay online and keep on playing? I mean, all the user has to do is click the X and close the window when he gets tired of it, right? Online casinos have a harder time with users retention, and they really need it, especially now with the new anti-gambling law in the U.S.

Zulema, October 16, 2006

Excellent, a simple example to help everybody, specially for small hotels chains that are starting with their websites, in europe