Making the most of the new NFL season

For operators to provide a compelling NFL betting service, it’s important that they first differentiate themselves from the competition. Creating a first-class user experience for customers is vital to help you stand out from the crowd — and that includes more than just customer onboarding and your initial offering.

You need to create a personalized experience by providing tailored promotions, as this is what improves your relationship with bettors, builds loyalty, and reduces acquisition costs. Things like users’ location, favorite team, and recent wagers can all be important data points for improving this overall customer experience.

By using them efficiently and effectively, sportsbooks can assign free bets to customers based on where they’ve registered or what teams they’ve wagered on. They can also harness this information to recommend future bets that the player might be interested in. To use an NFL example, if a customer bets on the next touchdown scorer, the moment the bet is settled, the operator could offer it again at updated odds.

Another key differentiator is building up your own unique functionalities, such as gamification programs that offer points based on NFL betting activity. Betting sites will find it easier to keep their customers engaged if they’re able to create a new program each week without having to wait months for their IT department to deliver it. This, combined with the aforementioned personalization, can open up a multitude of possibilities as you’re able to monitor users’ betting habits and profile them more effectively.

Having this betting data available can also help you to identify and address potential bonus abusers. This is one of the most critical points for operators and is currently the greatest challenge across the industry due to a lack of real-time data. In most cases, risk staff are working with information that’s at least 24 hours old, meaning that by the time they’ve received it, it’s already too late to action.

High alert

However, by having access to real-time data on demand, responsible gaming teams are able to respond to events such as bonus abuse as they happen and create alerts to address the issue almost instantly. For example, a player tries to place a wager on an NFL game happening in 10-14 days’ time immediately after registering an account and making a deposit. This is really suspicious activity and were an operator able to access this data in real time, a message could be fired off to the risk management team suggesting they check their odds. Currently, I really do not see many platforms having these kinds of alerts in place, unfortunately.

Of course, from a responsible gaming point of view, this data can also be used to safeguard customers who are most at risk. Given the legislative make-up of the US, complying with responsible gaming protocol can be quite a difficult task for a business as the rules basically change from state to state.

This means it’s more important than ever for sports betting sites to be agile in their approach to responsible gaming and have the flexibility to enable and disable the different functionalities of their offering based on the laws in the state each user is logging in from. Being able to display multiple versions of one website that each cater to local regulations will enable sportsbooks to create a fully controlled and fully compliant experience while tracking and saving the information the regulators require.

By keeping a close eye on all of this important data and knowing how it can be used effectively, online gambling businesses should be able to find a number of ways they can improve their current NFL betting offering and provide a safer, more enjoyable experience to customers, regardless of the state they’re playing from.

Domenico Mazzola is the director of sales at Flows, the innovation platform that allows businesses to build workflows without code, enabling them to accelerate delivery and supercharge innovation. Mazzola is a forward-thinking decision maker with a background in software development. He has over 15 years’ experience in sales, commercial strategy and business development.