SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
In a market which is becoming more saturated by the day, Yael Shatzky – VP Marketing at Solitics – explains why she believes that personalisation is the key to attracting and retaining customers.
Customers demand personalisation in the digital hyper-communicative era. Data has shown that 68% of consumers believe it’s important for businesses to tailor experiences based on their tastes and preferences, while 33% of consumers have ended a relationship with a business due to a lack of personalisation.
No brand, regardless of vertical or industry, can ignore the overwhelming customer demand to personalise every engagement.
You might say “what’s new? We have been talking about personalisation for years”. Very true, yet it is still as big a problem as ever.
But why is this still an issue? Because the only way to personalise the customer experience is to base every interaction on real, specific customer data and preferences. This also means responding in a matter of seconds – ‘real’ real-time.
A ‘right message, wrong time’ approach isn’t good enough
Let’s take an example scenario. A potential player has entered your platform but didn’t make a deposit. They have got lost on your website, and are most likely not going to wait around for a reaction for very long. Once they leave, a late response, even if 20 minutes later, not to say hours – often results in a negative reaction from a potential player, even if it’s personalised.
Sophisticated gaming operators are looking for a set of capabilities to help improve conversion, retention, and LTV. These usually include real-time pop-ups and personalised content offers, smart bonusing strategies, easy segmentation, automated interactions based on a player’s interest, and the ability to understand marketing impact on player behavior and optimise every engagement – making every interaction count. In other words, personalising everything.
Personalisation means interacting with players at the right time, with the right contextual message, and on the right channel. All are tightly coupled with utilising data in real time. As it turns out, it’s a huge challenge, both marketing and technology-wise. With distributed data sources producing only fragmented customer journeys, players are simply not getting what they want.
Gaming operators are often held back by their legacy stack, but more frustrating is the fact that even operators that are completely aware of the need and are fully prepared to tackle it head on, usually find themselves entangled in a painful data integration project.
Data integration can be painless
Up until now, data integration projects were long and expensive. Integrating data requires connecting all distributed data sources, moving all data to a single location, cleaning the data, and conveying it to the BI and marketing automation tools, so that creative marketers can finally use it to engage with their customers. Such projects also entail engaging with multiple vendors, and significant efforts and time need to be invested by the IT and R&D departments.
Even then, the outcome is often a limited number of business and marketing use cases. What is even more challenging is the rigid data structure that doesn’t enable real-time communication, simply because of the way the data was handled – a “waterfall-like” process.
Moving data from its original source to final, trustable fact-tables, is the most complex, time-consuming part of the personalisation process, but only then can the data be production-ready and usable. This process in and of itself takes a long time.
In his piece “Looking ahead to the future of computing and data infrastructure”, Bucky Moore (Kleiner Perkins) said: “Now that all critical business data is centralized and readily accessible via SQL, the logical next step is to use this foundation to build full-featured applications that both read and write to the warehouse.
“We will also see more start-ups attempting to reinvent existing categories like marketing automation, user event analytics, and customer support by building directly on top of the warehouse.” This is exactly what Solitics does.
Solitics’ technology changes the way companies communicate with their customers and enables easy integration with all data sources, in under 30 days, at a fraction of the cost.
To learn more, please visit solitics.com.
As part of the SBC Webinar series, Tomer Baumel – CEO & Founder of Solitics – and Emiliano Sanchez – Chief Commercial Officer of Mancala Gaming – take an in-depth look at the role of personalisation in driving player conversion. Watch the webinar below.
