Harel Falk, VP Sales & Business Development at Solitics, says that marketers are often the last to receive development resources, but this prevents them from being able to deploy the personalised communications required to acquire and retain players at scale.
Marketers reading this will be all too familiar with the power struggle that can take place in large online gambling organisations when it comes to securing development resources. Development resources are finite, and many departments are looking to access them.
Most of the time, resources will be prioritised for product development, platform maintenance or upgrades. But merely launching a gaming platform that lets users play roulette or place a bet on tonight’s game isn’t nearly enough to capture and retain the attention and loyalty of consumers in such an increasingly competitive marketplace. The gaming product, while essential, is only the beginning.
The overall player experience is what takes centre stage after they’ve registered to the brand. What happens if the experience doesn’t meet expectations, feels generic, or fails to stand out? The player drops off and looks for a more entertaining experience elsewhere.
Today, every interaction and touchpoint between a brand and its customers needs to be timely, contextual, and engaging – from the very first visit to registration and all the way to retention. In order to excel in delivering an exceptional experience in every life stage and touchpoint, it requires strategic CRM marketing solutions.
Extensive and expensive data projects discourage CTOs from MarTech Projects
In this day and age, marketing is all about hyper-personalised strategies and communications driven by data. This is what all brands are aiming for, and ultimately those that apply personalisation more precisely will come out on top.
Data is the fuel that drives personalised marketing and communications. The good news for marketers at online sportsbooks and casinos? They sit on vast volumes of player data captured from a myriad of resources. KYC, payments, games, betting activity, and bonuses are just some of the data sources operators can use to gain a granular understanding of each player. The main challenge comes in being able to process and leverage this data to marketers in real time, so that it can be used to more intelligently manage player experiences and help make more informed strategic decisions.
For many operators, this often demands undertaking extensive and expensive data projects —projects the CTO function is highly unlikely to dedicate development resources towards, especially if the only benefit is access to more and better data quality for the marketing team. Instead, they’d rather suggest partial, limited solutions to avoid long and costly data projects.
This puts marketing teams in an unenviable position: They need to be able to acquire and retain players at scale, but without access to the tools required to get these jobs done. So where do marketers go from here, and how can they get their CTOs on side?
CTO-free solutions: Expediting ROI through seamless data projects
The first thing to remember? Not everything has to be done in-house. Third-party providers can offer the best solution to the problem at hand.
There is no shortage of marketing platforms in this industry. Operators just need to make sure that the solution they’re using can provide the depth of data needed to be able to truly personalise marketing activity and communications with their players. Equally if not more importantly, it needs to be easy and efficient to integrate—this is key to getting buy-in from the CTO.
With most CRM marketing solutions, the brand must first prepare the data for integration, which can evolve into a complex internal data project. And if that project requires real-time data, it becomes tens times more complex and burdensome on time and resources.
However, not all marketing automation solutions require investing internal development and data resources. Solitics offers a CTO-free solution because it doesn’t require the brand to undertake the data preparation. Instead, Solitics connects to all company back-office data sources, CRM, website, mobile app, BI tools, and third-party providers (e.g. sports feed, gaming platforms, bonus engines, trading platforms, email, messaging apps, SMS, push etc.). It collects both historical and real-time data from all these sources, including visitor profiles and attributes, interactions, and live raw events (e.g. registration, deposits, withdrawals, login, page changes). It then processes them in real time, and unifies them into a single interface (UI) for marketers to access and work with.
It is the use of live data that enables marketers to execute the most contextual, personalised and timely user journeys.
For example, a sportsbook operator can send automated updates as the football game between Team A and Team B plays out and the odds change during the game. Updates will be sent only to players with open bets on this match, with different messages, odds and bonuses tailored to fans of each team, triggered by any change in the game itself. Many operators are unable to reach this level of granularity combining both the player’s betting patterns and sports events data in real-time. They are likely to promote the game by sending push notifications to all those who bet on football, but not able to take a deeper or more granular approach.
So, back to the title of this piece. How do you convince your CTO to invest in the MarTech you need? The golden rule: Identify a solution that best fits your marketing and wider business needs but takes minimal effort from your IT and development teams to integrate and deploy.
Using Solitics requires minimal input from tech and IT teams, but it is truly transformational in the way it allows the marketing team to leverage the power of live data for creating personalised experiences and communication. Completing the entire integration in under 45 days is another important factor that enables operators to generate growth and forge a competitive advantage, minus the lengthy data project.
Ultimately, it comes down to presenting a solution that can change the game for the marketing team and deliver powerful ROI for the business, while requiring next to no development resources to deploy.
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