Harel Falk, VP Sales and Business Development at Solitics, says that access to data in real time is mission-critical to tailoring player experiences, but the fact that most operators find themselves drowning in the sheer volume of data at hand doesn’t ensure personalisation will be applied.
Personalisation is a hot topic right now with online sportsbooks and casinos doing all they can to offer more tailored experiences to their players.
But the industry has trailed behind other entertainment options such as social media giants and streaming platforms like Netflix, who have been providing deeply personalised experiences for several years now.
Why has it been so challenging for iGaming brands to catch up with this evolution?
The combination of data challenges, high costs, and reliance on external partners makes it difficult for iGaming brands to keep pace with the rapid evolution of personalisation in user engagement. Here are four main factors currently limiting operators:
Lack of data availability in real time: Data is the foundation of personalisation, and true, effective personalisation requires real-time access to user data. However, many iGaming brands struggle with fragmented or delayed data systems. The multi-brand or multi-offering structure of big operators adds further complexity to the data structure, its access and processing. For example, a player who engages with two different offerings (casino and sports betting) of the same brand is likely to experience entirely separate marketing offers from each vertical, as if he is two different people. Offers would often be generic, and as a result the player engagement would be limited. The inability to access and utilise data in real time hampers operators’ ability to offer relevant, personalised experiences, such as timely offers or in-game suggestions. Without this immediacy, personalisation loses its impact and can never reach its full potential.
A patchwork of legacy infrastructure and new systems: A major roadblock to personalisation is the challenge of integrating legacy infrastructure with modern systems. Many iGaming brands operate on older, outdated technology that wasn’t built with personalisation in mind. When new systems are layered on top, it can create friction and inefficiencies, making it difficult to streamline processes and ensure the seamless flow of data required for real-time personalisation. This combination of old and new technology often leads to integration challenges, slowing down the implementation of personalised engagement strategies.
High development costs and IT complexity: Implementing real-time personalisation is not only technically complex but also resource intensive. It requires significant investment in infrastructure, advanced analytics, and custom development. Many brands find the cost and time associated with these upgrades prohibitive, leading to slower adoption of advanced personalisation strategies.
Dependence on third-party providers: iGaming operators often rely on third-party content and game providers for user experience data. This dependency creates a bottleneck, which delays personalisation efforts. The lack of direct control over the flow of information further complicates the ability to deliver seamless, real-time engagement with users.
What’s standing in the way of true personalisation? Data processing and its lack of accessibility for marketing teams.
Achieving true personalisation in iGaming requires more than just data collection—it hinges on real-time data processing and seamless access to this data by marketing teams.
However, two major technological and operational barriers stand in the way.
Technological complexity of real-time data processing: Real-time personalisation depends on the ability to gather, process, and act on data as events happen. This demands a sophisticated infrastructure capable of handling vast amounts of user and game data across multiple touchpoints, all within milliseconds. The complexity increases exponentially when you add live calculations, such as adjusting bonus offers based on a player’s recent activity. For example, offering a deposit bonus when a player loses 80% of their last deposit may sound straightforward, but it requires live data processing and immediate response triggers. This level of precision is difficult to achieve without advanced systems and real-time integration across all platforms.
Limited marketing automation tools: Many marketing automation platforms available to iGaming brands are not designed to leverage real-time data effectively. They may lack the ability to access live user data or trigger actions based on up-to-the-minute behaviour. This limits the agility of marketers to run dynamic retention strategies. For personalisation to be truly effective, marketers need tools that allow them to set up highly targeted segments and user journeys with multi-channel communication. The platforms should enable contextualised, automated bonuses, rewards, and incentives triggered by real-time player activity. Without this, marketing campaigns can feel static and less relevant.
Ultimately, for iGaming marketers to execute successful retention strategies, they need powerful tools that harness data, allowing them to create highly personalised, fully automated, and timely campaigns across channels. True personalisation can only be achieved when data processing and marketing tools work in unison to deliver relevant experiences in real time.
With data limits gone, the possibilities for player-centric experiences are limitless.
While some operators will opt to invest in lengthy and costly internal data projects to build out the infrastructure access and process all their player data, they can alternatively turn to MarTech innovations to do this for them.
Based on advanced AI technologies for data processing, Solitics is a leading marketing automation platform for iGaming, offering a powerful data and automation solution to marketers.
Solitics’ pioneering AI data aggregation and processing capabilities consolidate all relevant raw data sources and communication channels and make it available in real-time. Freed from limitations on how they can leverage the data, iGaming marketing departments can respond to any customer action in fractions of a second, and deliver an individualised, contextualised, message or incentive precisely when it’s most relevant.
The possibilities with Solitics and personalised marketing are almost endless. Take for example a live correlation between a sportsbook event and user betting behaviour, i.e. pushing an in-game odds update to a player with an open betslip on that game as the action unfolds on the pitch – “What a goal! Manchester United are now 3/1 to beat Leeds United”.
Or it can be a more complex journey within the online casino, such as when a player is in his early-life stage, just after their first deposit, and the operator’s KPI is to onboard the player to a fully ‘active’ status. This onboarding plan may include 4 logins in a week, 4 different slot bets, and a minimum wager amount. Using Solitics, the casino operator can set up a personalised mission board for the player. These missions “reward” each completed action with a “star” and reflect progress as the player goes through the onboarding stage.
Contextualised, dynamic, retention journeys like these not only enhance engagement and retention, they also let marketers give their players memorable experiences without over-offering unnecessarily high bonuses. And these are just some quick examples. With access to the right data and marketing platform, marketers can be incredibly creative with their campaigns and actually deliver the personalised experiences that players now demand.
In doing so, they can not only catch up with other entertainment options out there but set a new standard for personalised experiences and stand out from their rivals.
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