iGaming Daily

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The sporting calendar is full of some monolithic events and this summer Europe is set to host two of them, the UEFA Euro 2024 and the Paris Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. With huge tournaments comes huge interest and as such a large and often multi -dynamic following. For companies like Sportsbooks, this leaves firms in the position of catering to a very large and diverse customer base. Welcome back to iGaming Daily, sponsored by Optimove.

Optimove is the number one CRI marketing solution for the iGaming market. 56 % of EGR Power 50 personalised player experiences with Optimove. And as a special offer, Optimove are offering new clients a free first month when they buy Optimove. For more information and to claim the free month, go to optimove .com slash SBC. Links will also be left in the podcast episode description. So today I'm joined by Jonathan Inbar.

Director of Strategic Services and John Collins, Strategic Services Team Leader at Optimove to discuss customer engagement during the summer of sport. Around this topic, in our first chat, I asked you guys about who you support in the Euros and some of your predictions for that. In this episode, I was just wondering if we could change it up slightly with the Olympics coming up. Could you tell us which Olympic event you're most excited about? Jonathan, I'll start with you.

Previously, I said that I'm more of a basketball person. And I think that this year we're going to have literally the dream team from the US with, I think, top five players participating in the country, in the national team. So, looking forward to see that. Depends on when it's going to be aired.

Of course. And John, how about you? Yeah, I'm old enough now to remember the 2012 Olympics very clearly. I've always really enjoyed the track cycling. So anything on the velodrome will be something I'll be watching. I think the Olympics is always a good one for those sort of, yeah, the track events and the athletic events, because you never know if someone's going to break some records, do you? I think that's always one of the big ones.

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Although Jonathan, like you said, the basketball of this one is the biggest it's ever going to have been at any Olympics. I think we can expect some really entertaining games from that one. And again, moving on to sort of more of the business end of things. With this big summer of sport coming ahead, some huge tournaments, we're going to have a lot of public interest in them. Jonathan, what do you think operators should expect when it comes to player behavior before the Euros commences as the first of these big series of tournaments?

So what we see is that really weeks before these type of tournaments, we see significant engagement spikes and operators basically should expect increased anticipation and interest among their players. So this is really an ideal time to start engaging with both.

new endowment users through maybe different targeted marketing campaigns. And now operators should focus on really creating excitement around any upcoming matches, even weeks before they happen. And they can offer different pre -tournament promotions or just send really good communications beforehand.

and highlight key fixtures. And this early engagement helps in building momentum and ensure a strong start once the tournament begins. So obviously you mentioned the we can expect a spike in engagement. I think, as you said, that's kind of unsurprising really given the massive publicity we get around these. John, I was just wondering if we can build on this with big events like the Euros and...

indeed the Olympics, attracting a huge volume of players. What does this mean for operators? How should they approach these sort of tournaments? Yeah, so I mean, Huuge is right. So our benchmarking shows that the operators could expect maybe a doubling of first -time depositors during a tournament like the Euros. It's a bit up in the air about what happened during the Olympics. That can translate to a 50 % increase in sports betting amount. Sorry, number of sports bettors.

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20 % increase in the overall total bet amount. So maximizing this is going to be really important to your bottom line. The other thing to consider about this is that these are going to be very casual players for the most part. So we'll see a huge upswell of players as the tournament begins. But we also know that about 25 % of these players, just 25 % of these players, are going to still be around two months later. So the way that this is, we need to approach this.

Obviously we need to segment them appropriately. And then our communication needs to account for this as well. So it means we have to be very mindful about the sort of communication frequency that we're going after here. The things that we would maybe naturally want to do with active sport bettors like cross -sell, we have to maybe pair that back to a more sensible place. And then we also really have to think hard about our retention strategy post -tournament as well, because this...

there is a lot of open field for us to operate in here and it's very low risk as well. So being able to just convert a few of these players to be more high value long -term users can be quite considerable in terms of the upside. So I've mentioned a few, some pretty key terms here, I think, that segmentation, retention, conversion. Obviously these can all play a vital role in boosting a company's revenues and securing a strong customer base.

With this tournament coming up, Jonathan, what tips can you offer iGaming operators as they prepare their marketing strategies? So I would give maybe five main recommendations. The first is to start early. Begin engaging with the betters at least four weeks before the tournament. Use different pre -tournament

promotions and communications. Like I said before, to build the excitement, we often use the word the festive kind of feel of this occasion. The second is personalized offers. So really tailor promotions based on player preferences and different behaviors, personalized offers really over and over again.

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just shown to increase engagement and the retention of the bettors. Third is leverage real -time data. So using real -time data to adjust marketing strategies dynamically, for example, you can offer in -play betting, okay? And with that together, live match updates to keep the players

engaged. One before last, focus on mobile. We know that significant portion of the bets will be placed via mobile devices, so really ensure a seamless mobile betting experience. And lastly, start from early to plan for attention. So we know that after the tournament, there is a big drop

in customer retention. So develop in advance kind of a post -tournament retention strategy, such as something related to loyalty program that you might have and try to use cross events promotions. For example, after the Euro, we have the Olympics. So this is something that we can use to try to keep the continuation.

of one event to another. And yeah, that's basically it. Thank you very much, Jonathan. Yeah, very comprehensive breakdown there. I think, yeah, some really important lessons for operators to consider ahead of these tournaments. Now, John, you mentioned earlier the importance of segmentation. I was just wondering if you could expand on this a bit for me. Could you give us a breakdown of how operators can...

segment their customers during this tournament and really how does this benefit the bookmakers involved? Certainly. So I think the main thing to think about here is that we want to be targeting people effectively to allow for where customers are in the life cycle, the customer life cycle, customer journey, whatever you want to call it, and what activities they're already engaging in. So for first time depositors and reactivated users, they probably want to teach.

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treat them relatively similarly during this tournament because they're probably just bigger VEMMET players. We want to give them priority columns around national team games, maybe a little low frequency, not early card on cross sell, that kind of thing. Then we want to draw our active users slightly different. So for active sport users, we're pretty much just really skidding the normal marketing plan with the Euros content because it's the Euros and there's nothing else to bet on anyway.

Active casino users, where we would normally try to cross sell them to sport. Now that we might increase that slightly, but we're actually going to be focusing on the euros and try to take advantage of what Jonathan was talking about. This atmosphere of FOMO, this atmosphere of fun that hopefully will be created in a run up to the tournament. We'll treat our risk of churn customers, we have content appropriate to that, hopefully still maximizing on the euros.

We're still trying to reactivate challenges as well during this period. I know we've mentioned that something we can do with run -up to tournaments, but we've got to keep doing this throughout as well because as you probably be aware, the highest number of bettors can quite easily be the final of the tournament. So we need to make sure we're milking this to the last drop. The other thing to consider here is that we can layer in some stuff which is going to...

incentivize activity that we know is more valuable. So for example, mobile bettors tend to be more valuable than people who don't bet on mobile. And we can get our generosity behind activities that play into that activity. For example, instead of a bet five, get five, it might be bet five on mobile, get five, for example. Very easy to do that.

And the benefits to doing this for your operators are quite simply that they're going to be driving the most valuable outcome for them, whether that's in terms of increased retention of players or driving direct revenue. ASL console has a kind of a nice subsidiary benefit of allowing a greater control over bonus optimization because you can lean on that segmentation as part of your bonus attribution process. Now, I think you've already touched on this, but you've mentioned about

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sort of, I guess you could say the timing of engaging with different segments. What would you say are the main advantages to operators of targeting these different segments of customers before the tournament, during it and then after it? Yeah, yeah. So I think a key part of our approach to a tournament like the Euros is going to be that focus before the Euros, during the Euros and after the Euros and just treating them appropriately to your goals. So before the tournament begins,

Our goal is really to gain a bigger piece of the casual, better pie as we possibly can. So that just really means focusing on new and reactivated players and trying to obviously retain active players, increase activity rates amongst those players, especially our VIPs, because these are the people we have a four week window pretty much in the run up to the tournament where there is very little else that they've probably been betting on.

and we can use that period of time to try and get them to kind of put money in early. So we can give preferential rates to people who are making those early investment tournaments. During the tournament, obviously, this is our period to try to maximize our revenue. So this is the point where we're going to be relying on that personalized messaging, gamification campaigns.

really playing up to the national team games that we were talking about in order to anchor our marketing plan and the player -based proclivity. And then that will basically take care of itself for the most part. When it comes to after the Euros, obviously we only have one real challenge at this point, and that's going to be retention. So retention...

can look a couple of different ways to me. Obviously you have cross -cell at the casino, which would be lovely, but as we all know for a casual audience, maybe not that realistic. Much easier is going to be tying the Euro -suit to the next big event. We mentioned the Olympics. This is a great opportunity to try and carry that goodwill, that good feeling over from one tournament to effectively to another one.

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In some countries as well, particularly Southern Europe, there's tennis. The Wimbledon is not that long after the Euros concludes as well. That's another opportunity for us to start tying things together. And for everybody else, the resumption of National League football begins sort of four to six weeks in most cases after the wrap up of that tournament. So that really means that we're able to start to tie some of our generosity to the resumption of that. And again,

try to drive as much money into the platform before those leagues resume as we possibly can. Brilliant. Thanks so much, John. So obviously from our conversation here, it's clear the segmentation is a really important factor for operators to consider ahead of this tournament. Now, Jonathan, if I can just come back to you on this one, one of your tips, I believe it was your second tip, was around personalization. So...

How significant should personalisation be as part of operators marketing approach during this tournament? So personalisation should be really like a cornerstone of operators marketing strategies during the tournament. We talked before about the gamification. So if gamification is like our car, personalisation will be the fuel that makes it move forward. We know that personalised

offers and content and customized experiences, these are what makes the customers feel valued and significantly boosting engagement and loyalty. So for example, operators who used personalized templates, email templates that are dynamically changing based on the national team in the last World Cup.

they saw an increase in open rates of around 10 % and a big increase in the click rate inside the email templates of around 40%, which is huge. So leveraging these data insights to create marketing messages that resonate with an individual customer

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really enhance the overall betting experience and increase the likelihood of a repeat engagement. Okay, fantastic. Thanks so much, Jonathan. Yeah, a very thorough breakdown of the importance of that. Obviously, we've covered a huge amount of topics today, personalisation, segmentation, gamification, and everything else in between. Yeah, just a great breakdown of all the different factors operators should consider ahead of what is set to be a massive summer of sport and

I can imagine a very busy period for trading teams and marketing teams. Jonathan and John, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me again. And yeah, I hope you both enjoy the Euros and the Olympics.