How Coral is defining multi-channel success

In releasing its Q3 numbers on Thusday, Gala Coral showed Ladbrokes and the rest of the land-based bookmaking industry what can be achieved by adopting an effective multi-channel strategy.

Results don’t lie and it’s no exaggeration to say the operator’s Coral Connect card, which provides customers with a single wallet across its large UK retail estate and Coral.co.uk site, has been a big success.

The number of Connect Card users has more than doubled in the space of 12 months to 260,000, with these players contributing approximately 40% of Coral gross win in Q3 and Gala Coral chief executive Carl Leaver said card users spent twice as much as non-card holders.

These figures, together with greater customer spend, helped Coral.co.uk sportsbook revenues increase 102% year-on-year, or 152% if excluding the impact of last summer’s World Cup, while revenues across the whole site were up 69%.

Impact assessment

And this is no one-off quarterly spike, with revenues for the year-to-date up 67% and the firm partly attributing a 19% increase in acquisition rates to its multi-channel strategy.

Further still, online marketing spend was down 18% across the first three quarters, and while it’s difficult to know exactly how much of that has come from a reduction in spend on the Coral brand specifically, the acquisition of customers through Coral shops will no doubt prove cheaper than through other means.

Once acquired, Coral can then gather more data on customers’ betting habits, using its CRM technology to push out more focused marketing material and, with a responsible gambling hat on, collect more information to help detect any early signs of problem gambling.

It’s worth remembering that Coral Connect, which leverages both the OpenBet and Playtech technology, is barely 18 months old so there’s still plenty of scope to grow customer engagement and increase impact.

Leading the way

With all this in mind it’s no wonder Ladbrokes chief executive Jim Mullen recently said he would implement the Connect Card technology throughout the Ladbrokes’ estate should its proposed merger with Gala Coral receive regulatory go-ahead.

In its recent Ladbrokes H1 results, Mullen said just 11% of retail customers were using its online products and placed a ‘One Ladbrokes’ multi-channel strategy central to boosting flagging revenues, including extending the functionality of it’s The Grid card.

Ladbrokes isn’t alone in producing a relatively low cross-over from retail to online with William Hill chief executive James Henderson recently estimating that 12% of its regular retail customers log on to the William Hill site and, like Ladbrokes, has set about increasing this number.

Part of his plan is the release of William Hill’s Priority Access card which arguably goes one step further than Connect by enabling customers to use their betting balances not just in betting shops, but also in any stores and websites that accept Mastercard as a form of payment.

However, for now Coral leads the way and Ladbrokes will be hoping it will soon be able to plug into what continues to look like a winning multi-channel formula.