How Sky Vegas is reinventing customer loyalty

Player loyalty is a crucial part of providing a player journey, and in an industry as saturated as this can also be a bit of a head scratcher in the ongoing battle between brands’ loyalty programmes.

It is said that sports bettors are typically not particularly loyal customers and in the UK many flit between any number of offerings to satiate their needs for favourable odds, varied markets and, of course, the overall product experience.

But online casino presents an opposing case as the majority of brands largely offer the same selection of games. In which case it has become increasingly more important to shift the focus to user experience, small innovations in gamification and loyalty programmes.

However, it is not in Sky Betting & Gaming’s (SBG) nature to take the well trodden path in solving any hurdle put in front of them, and the tricky nature of increasing player loyalty has been no exception. The Leeds-headquartered firm has long been leveraging its capacity to generate real-time player data.

Indeed, back in December 2017 the operator’s now CTO Rik Barker told EGR Technology a huge investment in its data platform in the last few years had meant it was able to use real-time customer data to generate customised experiences.

While it is now common practice among many operators, like many instances before, SBG was among the first (if not the first) to really start using its player behaviours to its advantage.

“We’re working on being able to take customer data and within the window of a spin, work out whether you’re on a losing streak, whether you as a customer are someone we want to try and address that with, and then decide how much we’d like to bonus you for and notify you at the end of your spin,” Barker said at the time.

Bonus Time

Sure enough, a year and a half later the firm has further invested in its capacity to offer unique promotions via its Sky Vegas site, the latest being Bonus Time. Every night between 9pm and 11pm, Sky Vegas players were randomly selected to participate in an in-house built bonus game offering them the chance to win additional cash and free spins on top of their usual gameplay.

The feature won the Sky Vegas team the coveted Innovation of the Year Award at the 2019 EGR Marketing and Innovation Awards in London, an accolade rewarding ingenuity, creativity and fresh concepts.

The Sky Vegas team won the Innovation of the Year Award at the 2019 EGR Marketing and Innovation Awards in London

At the time of the win, the judges said the function showed impressive metrics in terms of uplift in traffic, game launches and active customers. “Surprise prizes is not a new concept but this is an old concept applied in a new and quite interesting way,” their comments said.

“Instead of jumping straight to a common points-based scheme that you see in both this industry and others, we began defining what loyalty meant for the Sky Vegas brand. To us, it was rewarding customers but in an exciting and unexpected way – and with this came Bonus Time,” SBG head of marketing and media Daniele Phillips explains.

Bonus Time was born out of a trip to Las Vegas’ premier gaming conference G2E, which draws industry stakeholders from the world over to the gambling mecca in the middle of the Nevada desert.

“As a team [we] hunted for innovative ways of driving customer engagement, as we’ve known for a while through our customer research that loyalty was one of the key areas of importance for Sky Vegas customers,” Phillips continues.

The feature utilises a fully in-house built mechanic and supports in-game notifications across all platforms to enable players to engage further and uniquely. Due to the in-house nature of the feature, it is available via any game provided within the Sky Vegas site, regardless of its developer.

The Bonus Time promotion reaped a number of successes, not least a record uplift in site traffic during the time the promotion ran, and a similar level of increase in active players and retention.

“Bonus Time and our range of other real-time promotions are a great starting point, and we will continue to look at game-changing ways we can use our data and technology to create innovative promotions and increase our customer proposition,” Phillips adds.

The Bonus Time promotion reaped a number of successes, not least a record uplift in site traffic

Forward thinking

The brand continues to explore ways to “unleash the technical capabilities” of its real-time data platform to afford mobile users the same experience currently available to desktop players. “We also want to reimagine how we curate our content, ensuring customers always feel there is a reason to play at Sky Vegas,” SBG head of product for gaming Andrew Gradwell explains.

One such movement is displaying tailored content to customers in real-time, as many others in the industry are trying to do in this age of personalisation.

The main hurdle with such a product is catering to a wide array of players with very different behaviours and desires. “We have a very large customer base so realistically there is no one size fits all answer but we see this as an opportunity rather than a challenge,” Phillips says.

“We all know that technical differentiation is hard to sustain, but we continue to apply focus in this area. But the area in which we continue to stand out is our culture of thinking differently combined with a customer-centric mindset,” she adds.

The Sky Vegas team, comprised of multiple tribes, departments and squads, operates an objectives and key results framework, which defines and tracks objectives and their outcomes. “We focus on breaking down siloed thinking to ensure we’re maximising the efficiency to which we achieve our goals,” says Gradwell.

SBG continues to push the boundaries, even with something as technically uncomplicated as Bonus Time. Some industry stakeholders might argue it is SBG’s ability to drive simplicity and leverage straight-forward engagement tools (like the free-to-play Super 6 model) that has facilitated its continued growth.