Kai Botha, Commercial Director at Kalamba Games, chats to iGaming Expert about the launch of its next Kash Drops promotion campaign and highlights how it can help operators with player retention with little cost.
Botha also talks about the necessity of promotional tools and gamification mechanics in online casino gaming in 2025 for those operators who wish to see a positive return on investment.
iGaming Expert: Tell us about the Kash Drops promotion – what is it and what is Kalamba Games trying to achieve through this campaign?
Kai Botha: Kash Drops is a random cash prize mechanic that awards cash to players. The tool is designed to allocate ‘drops’ randomly to give players a sense of excitement. Everybody loves a surprise gift out of nowhere!
Our Kash Drops tool has four unique selling propositions to online casino operators:
- They are self-funded, meaning no marketing spend is required.
- The tool operates ‘in-game’, meaning no API integration or dev work is required to run Kash Drops.
- Prizes are automatically and seamlessly credited to players wallets, meaning no manual payouts or invoicing woes.
- Kash Drops Campaigns are fully-customisable to the operators’ needs. Campaign length, the number of prizes awarded and the total campaign payout can all be customised.
The objective of Kash Drops is to leverage excitement and anticipation to better drive player engagement. Once a player wins a random Kash Drop, they’re more inclined to keep playing in-game to win more random prizes.
iGX: What benefits can operators get from joining the Kash Drops Network Promotion?
KB: Firstly, there is the appeal of the large prize pool itself. Our next Kash Drops Network Promotion starts in June 2025 and offers players the chance to win their share of €8 million in guaranteed cash prizes; which just in itself is a great call to action for players. Again, this isn’t costing the operator anything, so it’s a win-win situation.
Secondly, we’re offering a large number of self-funded prizes which don’t require any work from the operators’ side. We plan, launch, optimise and report on all of our network campaigns so that the operator has to do as little work as possible. We even provide creative assets for those clients that want them, saving them time in marketing planning. We share bi-weekly reports directly with the operator to give them peace of mind and transparency when it comes to campaign performance.
iGX: With over 200 brands joining the latest Kash Drop, how can each of them customise the solution for each of their audiences?
KB: We offer both local/exclusive and Network Level Kash Drops Promotions. Local campaigns are customised and configured to the individual Operator/Casino needs whereas Network level promotions are standardised for all participating brands.
In terms of customising campaigns, everything from the duration of the campaign, to the number of prizes and total payout to players can be customised. We do not take a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Instead, we configure our campaigns based on the brand’s wants/needs.
iGX: How important are promotional tools in the modern igaming industry when player acquisition and retention are so important to success?
KB: Promotional tools should be a central part of any gaming company’s product and commercial strategies.
Today, the gaming industry has an unprecedented surplus of content. Now, players have more games than they could ever possibly play and casinos have more games than they could ever launch – so – as a supplier, how do you differentiate yourself from everyone else?
Well, one way to do that is gamification.
The main objective of every supplier is first and foremost to ‘entertain’. And the question we as suppliers should always be asking is, how do we make this experience as entertaining as possible for the player?
If your promotional tools are entertaining, then acquisition and retention are natural byproducts.
iGX: What other promotional tools does Kalamba have outside of Kash Drops and what impact do these tools have on your partners’ metrics?
KB: In Q3 2024, we debuted our newest promotional tool – Progressive Tournaments.
A key strategic driver for Kalamba Games has always been innovation. Kash Drops has been a fantastic driver of growth for us as a company but we realised that it was missing an important component.
Nothing drives engagement more than the prospect of winning something in a competition with others. The natural conduit to drive this competition between players is the tournament or ‘leaderboard’ tool.
However, rather than just replicate the conventional leaderboard tournament, we wanted to re-invent the idea of player v player competition. Enter Progressive Tournaments.
A progressive tournament will look very familiar to most players. It has a standard leaderboard, it has the same kinds of ranking criteria as standard tournaments (for example: highest win multiplier, bets and wins, highest number of spins etc etc) but with one catch.
Our Tournament prizes are ‘progressive’, meaning they increase in size day by day.
We do this by allocating multipliers to each of the tournament prizes in the leaderboard. What this means is that hypothetically, a player might enter the tournament on day one and see that the total prize pool, for example, is €5,000.
But as the tournament ‘progresses’ and as multipliers are allocated to the prizes in the leaderboard, the prize pool grows; so that by the time we reach day 4 of the tournament, that prize pool is now not €5,000 but €15,000!
What’s more, players can see the prizes progressing/growing hour by hour, day by day in the leaderboard. This ‘progressing’ of prizes incentivizes players to stay engaged with the tournament throughout the entire duration of the campaign.
Phase One: It’s day one of the tournament and the Prize pool is €3,500. No multipliers have been applied as of yet to the prizes in the leaderboard.
Phase Two: It’s day 2 of the tournament and as players and bets accumulate multipliers are activated and the prizes in the leaderboard begin to double.
Phase Three: The total prize pool has now increased from €3,500 to €6,350 in just the first two days of the campaign.
iGX: What can readers expect to see from Kalamba Games in terms of promotions throughout the remainder of this year?
KB: We do indeed have a couple more tricks up our sleeve in 2025 but sadly, those projects are classified as top secret. I can say that we have some very exciting engagement technology in the pipeline that will be completely new to the industry.
Aside from new product development, we are expecting to give away over €10 million in Kash Drops Network prizes for the remainder of 2025, bringing our total Kash Drops payout in 2025 to €14 million.
In addition to our network campaigns, we have plenty of local campaigns (both Kash Drops and Progressive Tournaments) scheduled for the remainder of the year.
If you’d like to schedule a campaign just for your brand, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.
