Step 3: Customer Retention
For our third installment of this blog intended to show the transition of a digital media company into a live sportsbook through the use of digital marketing, I will talk about a major theme: Customer Retention. Before we move forward, let’s first quickly remind ourselves of the previous two topics. First, we set up free-to-play games and analytics for BetChicago, the digital media company used throughout this exercise as an example. Then, we acquired customers by capturing email addresses and phone numbers through skilled promotion on websites and social media. At the end of the last post, I dropped in this image and said I would explain it next time.
This chart shows that most of the traffic directed to the games site comes from email. Therefore…
Step 3: Customer Retention
Now that we have a database, how do we keep these customers coming back again and again. We MUST engage these customers somehow. My bosses have often told me that an email is worth $200-500 each for a sportsbook. Though if nothing is done with this email address, its worth completely vanishes. Thus, it is key to set up a service through a digital marketing firm that allows you to customize and deliver emails to large audiences. If you are very skilled with design and email formatting, you might not even need a service. This first starts with keeping an updated list of valid emails. Each week, we pull all game entries and validate each email through an excel formula. Afterword, we upload these contacts to our running list and remove the duplicates. This allows us to maintain an up to date list so that we capture new users right away each week. A sample email looks like the following picture below:
This is a weekly reminder email that will mainly promote one game each week that is most likely to get people to click on it, AKA the biggest prize. Inside the email are direct links to the games that are responsible for driving all that traffic in the above pie chart. Additionally, though, emails can provide a platform to market other aspects of the company. In the second picture, you can see that BetChicago is advertising their mobile app and articles from their main website. While these players were likely already aware of BetChicago since they are playing BetChicago games, this still allows BetChicago to get more interaction with them.
Outside of weekly emails, we also set up templatized emails to send to the player every time a game is played and resulted. This way, we are driving additional traffic to the page, asking the users to play more games, and notifying them of key information they might need or forget. Emails are extremely essential to retaining customers.
Though we have not enabled this feature yet for BetChicago, our platform allows users to enter their mobile number instead of an email address. This is another option for companies that want to interact with users on a text method as well. The methodology is that everything is increasingly moving mobile and users might be more likely to click on a text than an email. An example of a game confirmation text can be seen below.
So now you might be thinking, OK, we found a way to attract customers, track analytics, and retain these customers, what else do we need to do? In the next post, I will detail an extremely important practice: Review, Refine, and Repeat. This concept will be used to maintain high levels of growth while building deeper relationships with the customers.
*Next edition: Sendgrid stats, analytics, how we get BETTER.