If you're an online gambling operator, you have probably experienced an influx of players in 2020. And now that we're sliding into winter, and people will be more tempted to stay indoors over the coming months, the chance of another surge is highly possible.
To make sure that you can capture and retain as many paying customers as possible, it is vitally important that you know your players and provide tailor-made experiences to fully engage them in your games and keep them coming back again and again. This can include a multitude of things, including knowing general profiles of your players, their habits, and what they are looking for in their online games. If you can understand these factors, you will be able to grow your customer base with ease.
The rise of women gamblers across Europe
When you think of who gamblers are, you might think that they are mostly men. However, the number of female gamblers has been rising steadily over the past couple of decades, mainly with the switch to online gambling making exciting gambling experiences much more accessible for people of all genders. In general, women tend to have less free time on their hands, so being able to enjoy games at home or on-the-go rather than in casinos has resulted in a major boost for women players.
According to customer research agency Optimove, Sweden has the highest percentage of female iGamers with 32% of all online gambling players being women. This is followed closely by the United Kingdom with 30% of online gamers being women, Italy with 21%, Germany with 20% and Spain at 18%.
Key factors to knowing your players
Knowing gender differences between your players will help you to formulate a better business strategy and successfully engage more players. Below you will find some of the key areas to understand if you are to leverage key metrics for your gambling customer base:
Age
As gambling becomes more and more digital, the average age of gamblers is becoming lower as online gambling platforms become more accessible to tech-savvy young adults. People aged within the Millennial and Gen Z generations form a big part of the online gambling market, and so your online gambling platforms should cater for increasingly younger audiences. In the UK in 2020, 16.9% of 16-24 year olds gamble, meanwhile 23.5% of 25-34 year olds do, according to statistics provider Statista.
When looking at the difference between men and women, the average age for a man starting gambling is 20 years and 3 months, whereas for women the average age to start gambling is 34 years and 1 month. Clearly, women are starting gambling later on, and so if you want to attract women to your platform as first-time players, your marketing activities will need to cater for a slightly more mature audience in terms of the channels you use and the way you speak to potential customers.
Time spent gambling
Across Europe, customers in countries that are members for the EGBA (European Gambling & Betting Association) place a stake or bet on average every 17 days.
Delving a little deeper, it is clear that the average times that online gamblers spend playing single sessions vary from country to country. In Poland, according to a 2019 survey from Statista, 28.6% of online gambling sessions were 15 minutes or below, meanwhile 34.7% of sessions were between 15 minutes and half an hour. Alternatively, in a 2017 study published in the Irish journal of psychological medicine, participants were found to have spent 2.8 hours on average per gambling session, with female participants spending more time on average - 3.4 hours - than male participants.
Given the variation in session times, for online gambling operators it is essential to conduct thorough, country-specific research in the markets they are targeting, to know what the average session time is in these countries
When looking at the cumulative amount of time spent by men and women on online gambling sites, Live Roulette have suggested that male players spend a total of 14 months throughout their lifetime, meanwhile women spend 21 months - 50% more than men.
Online gambling spend
In Europe, the average deposit amount for women is around €38.76, whereas men deposit about €54.14 according to Optimove. However, even though women tend to deposit less, they also tend to deposit more frequently (approximately 32 times a year, compared to men who deposit about 19 times a year). This means that women actually end up spending more money on online gambling annually on average. The below graph demonstrates these numbers.