Gala Bingo to capitalise on market upheaval

Gala Bingo is ready to capitalise on the state of flux among market rivals as well as the withdrawal of a number of smaller UK players, Gala director of brand Alison Digges (pictured) has said.

Speaking to eGaming Review after Gala Coral this week announced GalaBingo.com had grown net revenues by 30% to £40.9m during H1 FY15, Digges said the operator had been “watching with interest” current movement taking place within the UK bingo market.

Recent months have seen Canadian operator Intertain acquire leading Gamesys bingo brand Jackpotjoy, Rank Group announce a change of platform to Bede Gaming and Stride Gaming raise £11.2m from a London IPO.

In addition, major UK brand Foxy Bingo could well be under new ownership within a matter of weeks with current operator bwin.party in the process of weighing up a number of takeover bids.

“These are interesting times for the bingo market and there is a lot of big ambition in some of our competitors and I am sure there will be further market consolidation,” Digges said.

“Our focus is and will continue to be on delivering market leading growth and winning market share from the competition as we have done over the last three years.

“Mergers and acquisitions or platform changes amongst our competitors can actually create more opportunity for a brand like Gala Bingo and we aim to capitalise [on that],” she added.

And according to Digges, the firm has also seen an uplift following recent changes to the taxation and regulation frameworks in the UK which have resulted in a reduction of competitor numbers.

“Point of Consumption has removed some of the smaller bingo players in the market and year-on-year bingo TV spends are down as the smaller operators struggle to compete and adapt to their margin erosion, so this has certainly helped the bigger operators,” Digges said.

More crucially, Gala Bingo has benefitted from a period of investment in mobile, CRM and above the line marketing, all of which have led to significant increases in KPIs.

The first six months of the year saw mobile stakes grow 114%, accounting for 49% of all turnover, while its multi-platform ‘Play Happy’ marketing campaign produced “record levels of acquisition and reactivation”.

Digges said the brand has also been enjoying the fruits of its two-year long CRM strategy, which has seen Gala Bingo step-up its player segmentation processes and improve its VIP programme.

“Over the past 24 months we have focused heavily on delivering a highly-segmented, very personalised CRM strategy, focused on driving up player days, multi-platform play and tailored anti-churn programmes, all contributing to driving up pend per head by more than 30% and reducing churn by just under 10 percentage points year-on-year,” Digges said.

Meanwhile, Gala Bingo’s female-focused sportsbook Flutter, which launched almost 12 months ago, was said to have performed in line with expectations and would soon be boosted by a launch on mobile.

Earlier this year Gala hired Victoria Reed as its new head of bingo.