Winning big: Boosting revenue up to 30% with targeted email campaigns

Challenge: Envisioning a global business

Right from the start, Lottoland had big plans.

Since first pioneering online lottery betting in 2013, the company has grown from a small startup serving a handful of players to a global leader boasting more than nine million customers.

“Lottoland is a very ambitious company,” says Emilia Helo, Head of CRM. “The vision to become global was there at the beginning.”

Making that vision a reality required reaching out to and continuously engaging with a global audience. Early on, Lottoland recognized the challenges. In addition to communicating in numerous languages, its marketing campaigns and messages needed to adapt to important cultural and geographic differences.

“We’re communicating with customers in multiple countries, across different time zones and with a lot of cultural differences,” explains Helo. “It’s extremely important that our email communications are relevant and that we tailor our offerings and messages to each customer.”

Which is why, from the beginning and while it was building out its infrastructure, Lottoland chose Campaign technology as its digital marketing platform.

“The key reason for choosing Campaign was its ability to support scale,” explains Helo. “Obviously there were several email technology providers to choose from, but our former head of CRM worked with Campaign at her previous company. She wanted to replicate that same success here at Lottoland. So, the level of trust, being familiar with the user interface, and knowing what the platform can do all played a key role in choosing Campaign.”

Solution: Personally engaging millions of players

Lottoland uses Campaign technology to support its email marketing campaigns, segment customers, and hone and personalize customer messages.

“We operate in nearly 20 different markets and each one has different communications and strategies,” says Helo. “We also talk to over nine million customers on a regular basis, especially if they’re active users.

“So we segment customers based on their playing behaviors and other patterns, like purchase histories and spend tiers. For instance, if there’s a draw coming up that certain customers tend to engage with, we’ll send messages to those customers a few days before the drawing time as a reminder. Then later, closer to the drawing time, we might send additional incentives to reactivate customers who haven’t already engaged.”

The company also segments and tracks customers based on their life cycle, or relationship journey with Lottoland. Journeys include key customers, new customer retention, churning customers and reactivation, among others.

“We’re tracking journeys to evaluate the impact of CRM and to understand how we can influence customer behavior from two perspectives: customer value and customer frequency of play,” says Helo. “For example, with new customers, how do we influence their onboarding journey, and how do we ensure these customers remain active and engaged with us?”

She continues: “But we also want to understand the single customer view. So, what’s the average spend for a particular customer segment? Are we increasing it or decreasing it by offering them too much? We need to find the right balance between incentives and natural organic behavior. So we have A, B, and C versions of journeys available to the same group of customers to help us identify which one works best. Then we can optimize accordingly.”

To create messages that are tailored and relevant to various customer groups, Helo takes advantage of the solution’s ability to embed dynamic content. “Say we ran a campaign in a country where there’s a World Cup, like Brazil. If we send an email to our Brazilian customers, we would actually reflect Brazil and the World Cup in that copy. By using dynamic fields and dynamic content, we can add content that resonates and is very specific to a particular country.”

Lottoland also employs country-specific managers who are familiar with the local culture of each of its markets. “As locals or native citizens, the managers sign off on the creative and the copy to make sure that our tone of voice has that local market flavor,” says Helo.

Results: Contributing to the bottom line

The CRM’s contribution to Lottoland’s revenue is impressive: 15% on average. For smaller markets, Helo’s team contributes 30%; for larger markets, just under 15%.

Lottoland’s marketing success stories are many, yet Helo recalls a particular campaign the team ran in the company’s largest market in December 2018. The campaign focused on the national Spanish Christmas Lottery called Lotería de Navidad, or El Gordo.

“The El Gordo campaign was extremely successful because we nurtured and raised awareness about the product before doing any hard selling,” recalls Helo. “We realized our customers wanted to know more about the reasons for betting on products like El Gordo before actually going ahead and betting.

“So, leading up to Christmas, we educated them on what the lottery is about, its history and background, its key selling points and why now. That strategy definitely paid off because nearer to Christmas when we started offering incentives, we got a huge response.”

That response resulted in the CRM team tripling sales for the El Gordo product, based on year-over-year performance.

Using the Campaign platform, Lottoland enjoys a 98% email deliverability rate. And, since giving customers options for their preferred channel of communication, the company has increased open rates by 30%.

But attention to details, like the timing of those emails, also pays off. Helo explains: “We’re communicating with customers across different time zones but we’re also talking to them at the right time. There are lots of cultural differences to consider — some customers open their emails first thing in the morning while in other countries they use their lunch break to read through emails. We look closely at response rates and tweak our timing to get the best response.”

Moving forward, Helo has big plans for Campaign technology. “We’re identifying more things we can do with Campaign, like connecting it with some of our other marketing platforms for interactive content in email, and how we can make the communications and journeys more comprehensive for the customer. With Campaign, we’re only scaling up.”

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