Poker Affiliates - Building Your Player Database

by mitchell posted Aug 14th 2006 at 22:00PM

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The Importance of Building a Player Database

I want to write about a topic that is extremely powerful, yet often times overlooked by even some of the most successful poker affiliates. And actually this principal can be applied in both poker affiliate marketing, or general affiliate marketing. The topic at hand is the importance of building a database with your customers contact information. In our case this would be our players email addresses.

Some of the most successful internet marketers are the ones that have “lists” or databases that they can tap into whenever they have a new product or promotion they want to bring to the market. Building your database is actually not as hard as it may seem. I began building mine when I sold poker related things on Ebay. If I was contacted by a poker player with a question, I would immediately dump that contact into my database. Likewise if I receive an email that is poker related, it goes right into my players database. If you sign up in one of my forums, or for one of my newsletters………..guess what, you’re in my database.

I am not harvesting email addresses or acquiring contact information by some rogue system. I am simply taking advantage of all my resources and organizing years of contacts. Every one in my database is someone that I have been in contact with at one point in time. Likewise, at any point if someone request to not receive emails from me anymore, they are immediately removed from my DB. Keep in mind also, I am not dropping support@ email addresses, and similar contacts into the database. This is simple organization though and should be self explanatory.

Whether you like it or not, email marketing continues to be one of the most cost effective forms of advertising out there. To use an example from our industry of a website that utilizes their database effectively, look no further than AbsolutePoker. If you have an account at Absolute, then you probably receive the same emails every week that I do. They are constantly leveraging their database and keeping their name and special offers in front of their players. Out of all the rooms I promote, I have found the AbsolutePoker.com Affiliate Program to be amongst the best for player retention. I contribute this to several factors, but most importantly, the way they market to their existing database.

The two major takeaways from this article should be, #1 building your database and #2, working your database. Even if you don’t have a forum or community, you can still begin building a database. You just have to be creative and think outside the box. As I always say, “You have to give players a reason to sign up at a room”, you have to give them a reason to give you their email. Maybe it entails giving a away a free report, maybe it is selling something on Ebay, perhaps it is hosting a freeroll and driving members to your site form the poker lobby to receive the password. There are several ways, and as a poker affiliate you just have to test out what works best for you.

Of course I could publish all my secrets on how I have built my database over the years, but to be honest, it’s not that big of a secret. It primarily comes down to the fact that I have several websites and have done hundreds of promotions throughout the years. I am guilty too, I don’t work my databases as hard as I used to, but believe me, if I am going to be hosting a freeroll at a new site, I will certainly tap into a few databases from other sites that I know consist of primarily freerollers. If I am going to send an email out to poker affiliates, I will hit the PAW database as well as my other poker affiliate database. The keyword here is LEVERAGE. I am leveraging all my contacts in a fashion that is smart and isn’t spamming. I am not going to send poker affiliates a freeroll email and vice versa.

If nothing else, I hope this article gets you thinking about how deep your contacts are, and if you are utilizing all your resources. As always I look forward to any comments you may have below. One of the best ways to begin building your poker player database is by starting your own poker forum. In reality what you need to do is give people a reason to either sign up for your newsletter, contact you, join your forum, or come back to your site. Some of our poker affiliate tools can help you do this!

Jeremy