These tips weren’t only lip service; they were actually put to work when Optimove’s Professional Services team partnered with Central European betting operator, Fortuna Entertainment Group.
The joint effort led Fortuna Entertainment Group to mitigate the impact that COVID-19 had on its sports betting players and to more than double the likelihood of sports bettors to play casino during H1 2020.
How did they do it?
With sports being a significant portion of its business in key markets, Fortuna Entertainment Group turned to Optimove’s Strategic Services team to help grow customer engagement and activity following the closing of many leagues around the world due to the pandemic.
Over a period of three months more than 280,000 players were targeted with over 150 campaigns, specifically created and orchestrated to keep customers engaged during the sport stoppage. The targeted player set consisted of players that had not been recently active on the platform, making the challenge of engaging them with something other than sports, even more daunting.
Optimove’s multichannel orchestration and testing capabilities allowed Fortuna Entertainment Group to implement the Optimove Strategic Services team’s data-centric marketing plan and reap impressive results.
As Petr Royce, Group Head of Acquisition, CRM & Marketing Innovation at Fortuna Entertainment Group says “With Optimove and its Strategic Services team, we’ve been able to manage hundreds of multichannel marketing campaigns that have significantly impacted our business. Their industry expertise and smart orchestration capabilities coupled with our team’s data-centric approach, provided Fortuna Entertainment Group customers with a formidable experience during hard times.”
What were the results?
The most impressive result was increasing sports bettors’ response rate to casino campaigns by more than 2X. But it wasn’t the only one.
To measure the plan’s success, the teams used control groups to measure the impact of their campaigns on sports bettors’ casino activity. The results of the marketing plan that was rolled out on key markets can be seen in the table below.
A main challenge of targeting and turning players who prefer a single product into multi-product players is that they might erode the average value of the existing pool of multi-product players. The marketing plan devised by Optimove’s Strategic Services put those worries to rest, as it kept multi-product player value impressively high, despite the influx of new, multi-players.
Additionally, when introducing 150 new campaigns to an existing marketing plan, the risk of “campaign crossfire” and marketing over-exposure grows considerably. However, Optimove’s orchestration mechanisms allowed Fortuna Entertainment Group to increase their number of ad-hoc campaigns by 75% without incurring a single campaign misfires scenario.
The pandemic is far from over, and with it, unprecedented times for operators, players, and everyone else involved in the gaming industry will continue. That’s why making sure operators have the right tools to succeed is a must.
For further reference on the impact of COVID-19 on the gaming industry, and best practices on how to adjust to the new normal, here are a few resources:
As Director of Strategic Services at Optimove, Sam Resnicow helps CRM executives leverage data-driven methods to optimize their marketing strategy. Sam holds a B.Sc in Applied Economics from the University of Vermont and has over 9 years of experience driving evidence-based decision making with Fortune 500 companies. He might also be playing the violin right now. He might also not. It's basically Schrodinger's violin.
