You’ve probably seen a photo like this on the home page of many a casino: A man and woman with blindingly white teeth are seated at a slot machine, their heads thrown back in what looks to be a spontaneous burst of uproarious laughter.

You won’t find that photo on the home page of the Mohican North Star Casino & Bingo in Bowler, Wis. Occupying the primo piece of real estate in the middle of the casino’s home page is a graphic that links to an online game built by Green Bay, Wis.-based Greatest Games on Earth. The game changes seasonally. In the summer it’s golf, hunting takes over in autumn, followed by a snow theme in winter.

Any Internet user can play the game in exchange for a name and an e-mail address. Everybody wins, at the very least a coupon for a free ice cream cone, redeemable at Mohican North Star’s players club counter. Luckier players might win $5 or $10 in free play, and the luckier yet a champagne brunch, 18 holes of golf or a night at a hotel.

The goal of the game is to drive new and repeat business to the casino, which is going to need all the warm bodies it can get. Mohican North Star, owned by the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribe of Mohican Indians, is in the midst of a huge expansion. When construction is complete in 2010, the property will have 1,400 slots and 32 table games, a 150-room hotel, three new restaurants and new spaces for entertainment and conventions.

So far, the game is not bringing in new players in the numbers that Mohican North Star had hoped. But it is proving to be a powerful tool to establish loyalty among existing players, says David Shubinski, the casino’s manager of player development.

“People especially love the $5 and $10 in free play,” he said.

Moreover, return on investment for the online game is beating the pants off direct mail. ROI for June was nearly 1,000 percent, about twice that for direct mail, Shubinski says.

Those numbers are hard to argue with. Which makes you wonder why more casinos are not getting hip to Internet marketing.

For the most part, casino Web sites are “primarily brochure sites,” says John Taylor, president and CEO of GameLogic, a Waltham, Mass.-based provider of Internet-based marketing products for the casino industry.

“Casinos have been relatively slow to embrace technology,” agreed Dennis Conrad, president and chief strategist for Raving Consulting Company in Reno, Nev. “There are a lot of people who did not come up in the age of the Internet who are entrenched in management at casinos. If the industry was run by 20- and 30-somethings, this would be huge.”

Conrad hands kudos to two companies he says are out front in embracing Internet marketing: Harrah’s Entertainment and Barona Valley Ranch Resort and Casino in Southern California.

More and more casinos are getting with the program, if slowly.

The Santa Ana Star Casino on the Santa Ana Pueblo north of Albuquerque, N.M., has had a lot of success using online games to get more feet through the door, says Conrad Granito, the casino’s general manager. The ways in which Santa Ana Star drives customers to the online game is limited only by the imagination, he says. One of its first big campaigns involved sending 40,000 direct-mail pieces to area residents inviting them to visit the casino Web site to play a GameLogic product. The response was impressive. Fifteen thousand recipients clicked and played. Everybody won a prize, anything from a game of bowling at the casino’s own bowling alley to $10 in slot play.

“It was a very good investment,” Granito said.

The members package that players receive when they sign up for a players club card contains a code that can be used toward play on an online game in which a prize is awarded. Codes good for online play are also distributed at various events, such as bowling tournaments, as well as in the members package handed out at the players club desk. Lapsed and declining players also receive a code as an inducement to return to the casino. “It’s a bounce-back program,” Granito explained.

The winnings can be adjusted in any way the casino chooses. For example, the casino can reward high-tier players with bigger prizes, say $20 or $50 in free play, and lower-end players with smaller prizes, say $10 or $15. “I have a very forward-thinking marketing department, and I let them push the envelope as far as they want,” he said.

Taylor says that once existing casino members become familiar with a casino’s online game they’ll return to play regularly without being prompted. In that way the game becomes a delivery mechanism to get coupons in the hands of valued customers, he says.

Given that as many as 40 million Americans are playing casino-style games on the Internet every month they might as well be accessing the game through a casino Web site, he says. “Why would you want them to be good customers of yours on property and then go home and play AOL games or Pogo?”

GameLogic sells modules in which customers play only for fun and others that reward players with coupons. The typical customer spends 50 minutes playing and visits more than 10 times a month. “We’ve seen 50 to 60 percent increases in traffic to the casino’s Web site,” as a result of GameLogic products, Taylor said.

Added Dow Hardy, senior vice president of technology at GameLogic: “I think we’re fishing in a better pond. People who come to the Web site to play the game have self-selected themselves to be a pretty good prospect for the casino.”

While the games are hosted on GameLogic’s server, the site is branded so that it appears to be that of the casino. And there’s plenty of space on the site for a casino to advertise anything it chooses.

One of the cleverest aspects of these online games is that they can be used to drive traffic to the casino during a specific period of time. Say a casino has 1,000 unsold tickets to a concert. Or the weather forecast is calling for snow on Saturday night. By setting the prize coupons to expire on the date of the show or the snowstorm, the casino can drive traffic when it needs it the most.

Online games also are a good way to capture e-mail addresses. But those addresses should be used wisely, says Nicole Barker, president of Barker Enterprises, a marketing consultancy in Las Vegas.

“There’s a responsibility in managing your e-mail data base so it continues to grow and is based on a strong ethic of not overusing it and pummeling people with information they did not commit to,” she said.

The trend is for casinos to ask customers to opt in to e-mail not once but twice, she says. Bombarding people with e-mails they have not asked for and do not want can do more harm than good.

But an opt-in should not be reason alone to include a customer in an e-mail blast. Barker says casinos should categorize customers according to their interests. “Some people want to know about hotel deals, some about your casino. Some just want to know when the next concert is,” she said. “Even if you’re a small casino, you can [categorize].”

It’s also good to set limits on e-mails, no matter how urgent the message may seem. “What happens is that everybody on property considers themselves a marketer. If something comes up, e-mail tends to be the last-minute broadcast method because you can’t drop a postcard fast enough. That means everyone on property is standing in line to quickly send out an e-mail. You need a gatekeeper who will say, ‘We as a property will only send out X number of e-mails a month,’” she said.

Moreover, there must be a compelling reason to send an e-mail. A recipient needs “to know that either I’m getting advance notice, or I’m getting a special offer, or I’m getting exclusive access,” Barker said. “It has to be one of those three things.”

In the same vein, casinos need to be savvy about their Web sites. “You can put up a Web site very quickly,” she said. “The only problem is that you can either give yourself instant credibility or rob yourself of any respect the reader may already have for you.”

All too often Barker sees casino Web sites that are sloppily put together. White space is not used correctly, there’s too much content, and the reader has to scroll down too far to find important information.

She suggests that casinos not rush into putting up a good Web site but rather first put together a plan for how the information will be presented and organized.

"It’s a very difficult thing to fix after the fact,” she said. “It’s harder to remodel a house than build a house, or fix a recipe once it’s on the stove.”