It is vital to understand any online casino bonus offer before taking it up

There are many ways in which a business can attract new customers, some of which may be obvious whereas others may require a bit more imagination. The most obvious marketing strategy for manufacturers or retailers surely has to be providing a quality product for the right price, but that must also be true of almost every type of business whatever it is attempting to sell. If we assume that any organisation which expects to become successful accepts that the product or service they are offering needs to be of sufficiently good quality, then it is likely that price will become the next most important factor. This is of course what we now see on our high streets almost every day with sales and heavy discounting almost everywhere, but what about the business sectors in which price is not a factor. The gambling industry is one of those sectors, particularly when it comes to operating an online casino. There is some scope for offering competitive odds when it comes to sports gambling, but price comparisons are totally irrelevant when it comes to the cost of playing casino games at an online casino. Clearly the much smaller minimum table stakes available at an online casino is a powerful weapon in competing with a real casino, but every online casino offers casino games players the same low minimum stakes so they need to find another way to compete with their online rivals. The most common solution chosen by almost every online casino operator is what we now tend to refer to as an online casino bonus. Unfortunately, unlike a cash back or free bet offer from an online sports gambling site, most of these online casino bonus deals are somewhat more complicated and have been known to lead to misunderstandings by some of their customers. The problems associated with many of these online casino bonus offers lies in the terms and conditions attached to them, particularly the one which is generally referred to as the play-through requirement. Almost all of the online casino bonus deals offered by nearly every online casino are very similar and take an almost identical approach to attracting new casino games players, which in itself begs the question as to whether these bonus offers do actually make a competitive difference, but we will come back to that later. The idea is that a new casino games player is offered the chance to double the amount of money they have to bet on their casino games through accepting a welcome bonus. These welcome bonus offers all tend to be the same and promise to match the new customer’s first deposit with a 100% bonus, thereby doubling their available stake money. Many of these welcome bonus deals also offer a reduced level of bonus for the second and even third deposits into a new customer’s online casino account. On the face of it they seem to be an extremely generous offer and certainly not one that you would ever find at a real casino, but here at onlinecasino.ie we think it is very important that any potential new player understands all the associated terms and conditions before deciding to accept a bonus of this sort.

As we have already briefly mentioned the main source of misunderstandings about these welcome bonus offers lies in the play-through requirements contained in the terms and conditions. The play-through requirement defines how much the new player needs to wager on playing casino games before they are entitled to withdraw any potential winnings from their account, and that figure is usually expressed as a multiple of the sum of the initial deposit plus the bonus. That multiple is commonly at least twenty times the calculated total, which means that a relatively modest deposit of 25 euros attracting a bonus of a further 25 euros leads to a required play-through figure of 1,000 euros. Many new online casino customers would have no intention of wagering that amount of money on playing casino games, particularly when there may also be a time limit stipulated in the terms and conditions defining how long they have to satisfy the requirement. Clearly there is a very good reason why an online casino operator would want to impose a play-through requirement as a condition of enabling a customer to play casino games free of charge. They need that customer to keep playing as long as possible to give them a chance to redeem the bonus money, but whilst we fully understand why this condition is necessary we are also very aware that not everyone understands the implications of that condition before deciding to accept the bonus. This leads to unnecessary hassle and can of course also damage the reputation of online casinos simply because some people do not understand what it means.

Not every online casino offers this type of welcome bonus however, and in fact a few of the newer specialist online casinos do not offer an online casino bonus at all. We have of course already commented that there must be some doubt as to whether this form of welcome bonus is an effective way for an online casino operator to compete with an online rival, so perhaps a different approach will prove more successful in the long run. The No Bonus casino is one of the newer online casinos which as the name suggests does not offer an online casino bonus targeted at new customers. What they do offer is an unusual cash back promise which is applicable to all their casino games players, both new and existing customers. Any player who makes a deposit today and then encounters a horrible run of bad luck so that they lose all of that deposit on the same day, will receive a 10% cash back paid into their account the following morning. The best thing about this type of offer is that there are no other conditions and the unlucky player is free to do whatever they like with the money, including taking it out.