How to capitalise on the strengths of mobile marketing automation

James Harkin, co-founder and CTO, Element Wave

How fast can you type? 40 words per minute?

How quickly can you speak? 150 words per minute?

How fast can you communicate with 20,000 people? Mass email or bulk SMS?

How fast can you have a personalised conversation with 20,000 different people? The answer is just one second.

Such is the evolution of mobile marketing automation that the tried and trusted pillar of mass communication has been surpassed. It’s easy to send a bulk push notification to 20,000 people, it’s easy to send a mass email to 20,000 email addresses. This has become a commodity. However, with its commoditisation has come its lacklustre reception. Players are virtually immune to generic messaging, desensitised to special offers, and tired of “come back and play”.

The modern mobile sportsbook or casino player expects and demands a user experience that is tailored and intelligent. And why shouldn’t they be demanding? If an app is boring, they are seconds away from installing a more exciting one from the millions of apps to choose from.

How do betting and gaming brands stay current? How do you ensure that your app is responding to the individual needs of 20,000 different users? The answer, of course, is mobile marketing automation.

With modern technology and dedicated third party platforms, it is perfectly feasible that your app can track every tap and navigation event from every single user and respond with either messaging or subtle tweaks to the user journey to react individually. Good systems can conduct tens of thousands of these automated conversations per second. You can easily move from a model where you have one static app that always looks the same, to having 20,000 different app experiences each one optimised for the individual player.

How do players respond to these personalised event-triggered experiences? Let’s look at some figures. We ran a series of exploratory mobile marketing campaigns in partnership with our innovation-hungry betting and gaming customers. We designed experiences where push notifications and in-app messages were setup to trigger based on particular audience segments and individual in-app behaviours.

We were not satisfied with vanity metrics like message views or page views, so we delved deeper and captured betting figures from the target group and compared these to a control group, who received nothing.

The result: 10 times more bets placed due to event-triggered, real-time, personalised messaging.

Many betting and gaming operators, especially across Europe, rely heavily on manual push campaigns set up by teams of marketers. This approach certainly has benefits but can only ever cater to a small subset of the vast array of customer behaviours that exist.

In a detailed study conducted by Element Wave of mobile marketing across 14 European sports betting apps spanning two years, the findings are unequivocal. Mobile marketers sent on average 150 individual campaigns per week, made up of push and in-app messaging.

The majority of these campaigns were designed to encourage players to place a bet on a particular sporting event. If we look at all of those different sporting events across the 24-month period that were promoted through marketing and compare it to the number of unique sporting events that players actually placed bets on over the same period, the coverage is less than 1%.

So, even with dedicated teams producing impressive volumes of 150 unique campaigns per week, you are still only catering to the exact needs and desires of your players 1% of the time, at best.

This is where mobile marketing automation comes in. Dedicated personnel is still a key part of the solution but their time should be spent creating automated behaviours not manual campaigns.

Most players exhibit strong and regular betting patterns. With event-triggering and campaign automation, a player who always places low-odds tennis bets can receive automated low odds bet suggestions on a tennis game. A player who only ever bets on football and predominantly goes for multi-leg bets can be setup to always receive pre-match kick off alerts, bet suggestions containing the most popular 3-leg multi bets, and score updates.

Move away from setting up campaigns and start setting up behaviours. Campaigns are one-off. Behaviours are tailored, automated, scalable, and lucrative.

James Harkin is co-founder and CTO of Element Wave, the real-time marketing automation platform for sports betting. With a background in physics and high-performance computing, James has a unique flair for architecting sub-millisecond products for handling extreme scale and performance. His expertise has enabled the Element Wave platform to be at the forefront of high-speed marketing automation.