There once was a casual sports bettor who loved baseball but was so confounded by betting on it that he would not open his sportsbook app in weeks — except to check what Hard Rock was offering to cash out the Yankees-no-playoffs prop from April. (Update: Not enough!)
Wait, that bettor is me. It’s also a lot of you.
But with the opportunity-rich NFL preseason season underway, regular-season games beginning on Sept. 4, and Week Zero of the college football season in 17 days, the seasonal dabblers will soon begin limbering up those deposit thumbs. Sportsbooks are waiting with open AI-generated arms.
InGame spoke with Tomer Imber, the senior sales director at Optimove — a business-to-consumer marketing technology firm — about how sportsbooks plan to lure back and retain customers come those blissful weekends of autumn.
Q: How do sportsbooks plan to lure back and retain customers come those blissful weekends of autumn?
TI: I like to think about it as more of a journey versus one campaign that does it all.
It seems to me that a lot of times operators tend to think that the most valued bettors, the most valued players are the high rollers, the high value players, and then they would send crazy promotions to bring them back, whereas the world is a bit more diverse and there’s a lot of opportunities out there and a lot of information and data we as operators get about our customers to get them interested.
The name of the game is personalizing the conversation and personalizing the communication to you.
What’s interesting to you? What kind of team are you normally betting on? What time of the day, of the week? What time of day are you mostly receptive to receiving those kind of messages? And then it’s tailoring it into a journey versus one-off messages.
Q: Do casual bettors only turn out for football and basketball?
TI: It’s pretty much common knowledge that the summer is the worst time of the year in terms of sports betting in the U.S.
Most of the operators would spend their time preparing for the NFL season, which is also, for me, a very interesting point as well. Everybody expects the same kind of behavior from their players, from their customer base. And I think that that brings a very interesting question, which is: How do you differentiate as an operator? How do you kind of stand out from the crowd with your campaigns with the way that you understand your customer base better than your competitors?
What’s also interesting is someone could be a casual bettor or an average bettor for one operator and a VIP of a competitor. Why is that?
“An operator’s got a lot of information just from the activity of their customers.”
Why are they not betting with you the way they’re betting with the competition? Why are they betting this season more than they’ve been betting last season?
Maybe they are more bullish about their team this year and so on and so forth. It’s connecting those dots together, what we know about the customer, what we see about their behavior, and their data and the stats we have on them.
An operator’s got a lot of information just from the activity of their customers. And then it’s matching that into the world out there, what we know about just the ecosystem, the teams, the players themselves, and trying to tie it all together into a very personalized communication.
Q: How do sportsbook keep encouraging bettors to play once games begin?
TI: Parlays are obviously where most of the value comes from for the operator. They definitely want to get bettors to parlay more and more bets together. They see more and more value out of that and in-game betting and things like that.
So real-time is another layer that we need to consider when we think about these things. How do we tie together the action that’s happening right now, whether it’s me just going into the site, logging in, opening the app? I’m just browsing around, maybe starting to place my bet or making a deposit or whatnot, or maybe I place a bet on a certain game. And then something happens in that game. It went into overtime, [sportsbooks will] use those stats, that information to talk to me and to offer me maybe my next bet, my next leg in my parlay to make it more attractive for me.
The day after or a few hours after I’ve won my bet [or] I’ve lost my bet, what are you going to recommend to me? But how do you think you should go about it? If maybe I had a big loss, maybe it’s time for a promotion. Maybe you should try to offer me something to recover some of my losses through a promotion. Maybe if I won, maybe you want to suggest another bet.
There’s a lot of considerations there, but definitely real-time is another very important layer that would help us or help the operators streamline those conversations.
Q: Do returning NFL bettors go back to the apps they were using when the Super Bowl ended?
“The notion of being loyal to just one app is almost by definition doesn’t exist.”
TI: I think the question is: What did we do as operators to communicate with these bettors in the off-season? Were we able to get some activity out of them? Were we able to stay top-of-mind? Were we able to get them to even read our emails and consume some of the content from us?
If there was nothing happening, then the loyalty isn’t there. And those kinds of bettors will definitely be more open to jumping around between different apps. And in general, most of the regular bettors in the NFL wouldn’t have just one app installed on their phone. They’ll probably have three or four.
So the notion of being loyal to just one app is almost by definition doesn’t exist.
I definitely don’t think that there’s hope in terms of this notion of communicating preseason, communicating postseason to try to make sure that when they’re ready to come back, they’re coming back to us and not to anyone else, and that they’re doing that not just because we gave them the best promotion, which everybody’s going to give anyways in the beginning of the season.
