SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Today’s online gaming market is ever-competitive, both for punters and for providers. This level of competition is the same for the onboarding of players, the implementation of retention measures and then maximising engagement throughout the player journey.
Marketing automation platforms more than play their part, as they give betting and gaming companies the chance to offer the most relevant, exciting and captivating user experience, consistently and at the most appropriate touchpoints, for each and every player.
Tomer Baumel, CEO and founder of Solitics, discusses seven key considerations that companies should take into account when picking an automated marketing platform.
Check your data infrastructure
Firstly it’s important to ask, what does your infrastructure look like? And how many data sources do you have?
Different brands have different systems and data infrastructure. For the most part, the data is distributed. It is key to have all your data available in order to successfully automate and personalise.
Make sure you choose an automation platform that can work with all your distributed data sources so that the data is available in real-time, allowing for greater scope of your infrastructure.
Finding the correct data for punters
In order to target players with the most relevant, personalised offers at the right times and on the right channels, it’s necessary to utilise all the data that you have on your customers. This includes their current and historical actions, their preferences, bets, deposits etc. This data also needs to be taken into account in real-time.
Since most automation platforms today work mostly on aggregated data, it substantially limits the level of automation and personalisation that you can do.
Finding a platform that can work with the raw data, including all the historical data as well from all the data sources, is critical for relevant personalisation and reaching those KPIs that your organisation has set.
The complication of integrations
Integrations are necessary but can take up many months or more, involve multiple departments and cost more money than originally planned. In today’s competitive world, all companies have to choose wisely how to spend resources.
If you are a B2C brand, such as an igaming operator, the majority of your resources should go towards your core business and not towards the development of 3rd party systems or integrations.
It’s wise to choose an automation platform that will take the load off you, connect to all data sources and perform the necessary customisations. The platform should free up your time and resources for other core activities, such as curating the most compelling content that will communicate your marketing messages.
When choosing real-time marketing automation platforms, integrations are key to the selection process. It is best to ensure that the platform meets certain requirements to maximise its capabilities. These include:
- Having multiple and flexible data connection methods
- The ability to work with your raw data
- Mapping your data automatically, performing the relevant aggregations on their side
- Integrating all your relevant data sources, not limited to one or two sources
- Finally, being able to integrate fast and commit to a time frame. A good time frame should be up to 45 days.
Flexible data management
Businesses aren’t static, the industry is constantly changing and growing and so are the business requirements. New data and new data types are constantly being added and, in some cases, new data sources.
It’s important that the gambling sector doesn’t find itself in a constant integration status, where it spends more time and resources on something that has already been spent on.
Make sure you work with a platform that is flexible and can easily add all that new data and data sources without having to rebuild everything and take months to do so. It should be fast and seamless.
Providing actual real-time data based responses
Whether a player is about to end their session and leave, has just registered but hasn’t made a deposit yet, or is online and just lost half their deposit, you need to be able to respond live based on culled data and provide them with the most personalised and contextual response, such as an offer or incentive to keep them engaged.
Real-time marketing automation and personalisation means that you can do all that based on all the data curated, including historical data, current behaviours and actions.
It’s crucial to choose the most scalable platform that will enable your business to achieve the most, even if there’s a learning curve involved. Some platforms can even go beyond the scope of just marketing automation and can be used to enable other functionalities such as sales, support, VIP management and more.
Ensuring the system is actually automated
Most marketing automation tools aren’t fully automated and the actual delivery is somewhere between limited to non-existent. To truly enhance your conversion and retention efforts, finding a real-time marketing automation system capable of doing as it claims is key.
You should also ensure that the platform can automatically perform key actions such as granting bonuses, moving players from one touchpoint to the next, automatically updating segments and matching content dynamically.
A customer journey-focused tool
Real-time marketing automation system’s should be customer-focused. It should be able to manage customers’ journeys in real-time, using a combination of segmentation and customer actions as a means to achieve this goal. However, it’s important to note that every player is different.
To conclude, it is important to work with a real-time data management and automation platform such as Solitics, that enables B2C brands to harness the power of all their data seamlessly, fully personalise their customers experience in real-time and whose services are designed to maximise the business it is connected to.
