Promoted feature: The show must go on – how to retain and re-engage your audience after key events

As with many major sporting events in recent months, Cheltenham looked quite different this year. But despite fans not being present at the event itself, high volumes of first-time deposits meant it remained a key moment for customer acquisition. And with additional, equally-important sporting events on the horizon, now is a crucial time to plan how to attract and build longer-term relationships with these new audiences.

Strong client relationship management (CRM) and customer loyalty can be key factors in this. We know that:

• The average bettor holds three online betting accounts[1]
• Customers who play more are more valuable for many companies
• It’s more efficient for most companies to reach existing customers than find new ones

Given these points, we believe it would be beneficial to move away from over-reliance on a small number of high-value customers.

With only one in five emails from gambling companies being opened[2], personalisation is important for effective CRM, but can be hard to scale when working with incomplete data and a large, diverse customer base. That’s why social media is a powerful way to connect.

On Facebook specifically, you can build audiences based on app or web activity, or from your CRM platform to reach and engage all our services. Outlined below, you will find a number of steps that can help you build an effective CRM strategy using Facebook.

Segmentation

There are many ways to segment users, but the most common in the real-money gaming industry are sports versus casino players, active versus dormant players, value tiers and behavioural tiers. Each with its own goals, media plan messaging, creative, offers, optimisation, bid, budget and KPIs. It helps to have a strong understanding of your customers, so lean on business intelligence (BI) and CRM capabilities to uncover the best segments to target responsibly.

Once you have created these segments, decide how you will target these customers. Based on an activeness segmentation, a targeting strategy could look like this:

Ad technology

Once segmentation is in place, it’s time to decide what your technical requirements are. You can rely on a Facebook pixel or SDK to build audiences based on who has visited your site or app, but also have an API integration to connect your CRM database with your Ads platforms. But there are other considerations:

• Will Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) and Facebook pixel audiences suffice, or do you need deeper capabilities?
• Do you need to integrate the Facebook audience API tool with existing CRM databases?
• Do you have the capabilities to drive users to deep links within your app?

It may also help to learn more about building audiences using Customer Files or Dynamic Audiences on Facebook.

Campaign setup

While acquisition is focused on registrations and first-time deposits, CRM is about what comes after. Different activities should have different objectives, goals and KPIs. We recommend defining and testing different objectives across different segments, setting objectives based on audience size, audience confidence and estimated conversion rates.

The most common objectives are:

Reach: Maximising this against a high-intent audience

Page views: To balance reach with conversion rates

Deposits/bets: Optimising delivery to those most likely to make a bet or deposit

It makes sense for some campaigns to be always-on, while others, such as key one-off sporting events should be spike campaigns. Audience size should be the biggest factor when determining how valuable an audience can be.

Creative

Creative is key for CRM success, as players value personalised experiences. It helps to keep your audience in mind as you’re developing creatives and ask yourself: who am I speaking to? And what am I trying to achieve? Then design your creative and messaging according to your audience and objective.

We would also recommend following Facebook’s best practices when building creative on our platforms.

Learn and adapt

The final and perhaps the most crucial step is to learn and adapt. Each business and each campaign is unique, so it’s all about what works for you as you explore two key areas, comparing different optimisations, objectives, creatives and more:

Incrementality: How much impact are your ads having on your business and on your campaign objectives?

Split testing: Which campaign generated the most or the fewest conversions?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to CRM, so measurement and adaptation will show you what’s best as you build a learning and measurement agenda.

With the steps described above, you can utilise your learnings from Cheltenham to cross-sell products to interested consumers. The sporting calendar is extremely busy with the European football season reaching its climax and the rescheduled European Championships, delivering a packed few months of football. It’s a great opportunity to test messaging and find what works for your players and what works for you.

Shane Bennett (left) has been at Facebook for the past eight years, working on the ad operations side of the business before moving into a sales role working on the tech vertical and now real-money gaming. Bennett has a huge passion for the industry and brings that passion to his accounts, which include some of the industry’s largest operators.

Rafael Rodrigues (right) is a client solutions manager on Facebook’s real-money gaming team. With more than 10 years of experience in digital marketing, he worked for global media agencies as a digital manager, partnering with global brands across different channels and verticals.

[1]  Gambling Participation in 2019, UK Gambling Commission, February 2020

[2]  Email Marketing Benchmarks and Statistics by Industry, Mailchimp