With Super Bowl LVII heading to our screens on February 12^th, we sat down with Flows Director of Sales, Domenico Mazzola, to talk about how smart data collection and the use of no-code innovation platforms can enable sportsbooks to enhance their customer experience for the Big Game and beyond

The Super Bowl is the USA’s biggest sporting event and will invariably provide masses of opportunities for sportsbook operators to enhance their customer offering if they’re able to think outside the box.

As ever, the main driver here is always data – and with the NFL consisting of 17 games over an 18-week period in the run-up to the Super Bowl, there should be ample time to gather plenty of useful information on bettors. The trick is to then combine the key findings you have on player behavior with technology that will help you to create promotions and better inform your overall marketing strategy.

While at the time of writing the Super Bowl LVII finalists are yet to be announced, we already know that the majority of sportsbooks are placing the Kansas City Chiefs as their red hot favorites. So what can we do with this information? A good place to start would be to look at the betting activity of VIP customers and identify those who have actively bet on the Chiefs over the preceding 18-week period.

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Once we’ve done that, we can work out where they’re based. If, for example, they’re located on the other side of the country or abroad, there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to make it to the main event – so why not offer them a special promotion to make up for that fact? Alternatively, if you’ve seen them winning specific bets, why not offer these markets to them on the Super Bowl too?

Of course, the real value in data collection stretches far beyond the Super Bowl, so the event is also a great time to start drilling down into the behavior you’re witnessing. Were your customers backing a certain team or were they betting on both sides? Did they prefer to bet on the overall points outcome or the individual actions of players? This is all valuable information that can help you develop automated workflows which trigger on specific events or when certain wagers are placed in future.

The first thing you should probably be looking at post-Super Bowl is whether there are any friendly matches being played in the run-up to the new season and if there are, how can you use the data that you’ve gathered up to this point to target them? Is there an opportunity to offer your customers an early promotion based on the last first touchdown bet they placed at Super Bowl LVII, for example?

When the season starts proper, you can further focus on bettors’ location to find out whether they’re situated within a set distance of a particular stadium. If they are and have previously placed a bet on the team that plays there, you could target them with a location-based promotion. This could be anything from providing them with early odds on their team to a special bet if they don’t have tickets.

Using a no-code innovation platform like Flows allows you to automate this kind of promotion without the need for manual targeting. You simply funnel in all the necessary data and set up a flow that will trigger based on certain parameters. This way, you’re able to quickly and easily offer tailored promotions to customers based on their previous activity that they’re far more likely to engage with.

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Given that many sportsbook in the USA have partnerships with in-state teams, there’s also the opportunity to take this a step further by offering competitions for tickets and other behind-the-scenes incentives. Should a sportsbook have such an arrangement in place, you could use Flows to automate the awarding of matchday tickets as a prize for winning a certain bet or leaderboard event.

You could also use it to manage and distribute exclusive content that relates to a customer’s favorite team such as locker room footage and interviews with players or coaches. This way, bettors can enjoy a personalized content library that’s exclusive to them the minute they log in, meaning no two user experiences will ever be the same and that your sportsbook is able to provide something truly unique.

As a final suggestion on the topic, you could also use Flows to set up automated deals and discounts on NFL tickets and merchandise. You could, for example, create special offers that are automatically applied to a customer’s account whenever they bet on a certain team or outcome. This can help you further engage with the activity of individual bettors and create an even broader cross-market appeal.

Of course, tools like Flows can also help you adhere to state regulations by allowing you to set up automated audits and compliance checks. Our platform features a very flexible regulatory control panel in several areas that allows sportsbooks to configure many of their business regulatory requirements directly through Flows, rather than having to develop them after each and every update.

As regulatory authorities tend not to give much notice when changes are made to the current industry guidance, many organizations may find that their planned road map becomes interrupted. This can be significantly alleviated through Flows as it can allow certain regulatory directives and checks to be implemented on demand, cutting out the need for extensive and often time-consuming manual work.

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Overall, using a no-code innovation platform like Flows can help you remain compliant while leveraging the data you’ve collected and any partnerships you might have with local in-state teams in a more efficient way. This in turn provides added value to the customer both during the NFL season and in the event their teams makes the next Super Bowl, ensuring a continual cycle of engagement.

With major corporations spending big to corner the US online gaming market, smaller operators need to be smarter than ever to compete. But technology that can increase efficiency and help get the marketing right means everyone’s got a shot, says Flows.

For operators looking to enter the US market, how important is it to get the tech right?

It’s probably the most important consideration. Entering the US market has proved to be very challenging for many operators. Major corporations, from Caesars, to MGM Resorts, to Fox, are splashing huge amounts of money on acquiring players. Last year, Caesars vowed to spend $1 billion marketing its sport betting app in the ensuing 24 to 30 months. It’s very difficult to compete with that.

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Meanwhile, the US landscape is a hodgepodge of different regulations with several individual requirements for each state. Adapting costs resources and time.

Faced with these hurdles, its crucial operators adopt technologies that can help them with personalised customer engagement, while streamlining roadmaps and offering regulatory agility.

How should operators approach acquisition and retention in the face of such competition?

For operators entering the US market that don’t have a spare $1 billion to splash, differentiation is key, not only in the look and feel they present and content they offer, but also in how they introduce themselves to the market.

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It’s also important to think about the way you engage with customers and the type of customer you want to target. Creating a first-class user experience is vital in helping you to stand out and places you ahead of the competition. That experience is about much more than just the onboarding process or the initial content offering you present to your customers.

Creating a personalised experience is vital in the US, where brands are competing fiercely for a share of the market, and it’s important that your technology supports that.

Bettors’ playing habits and needs are ever-changing. Offering personalised, localised and tailored promotions helps to improve the relationship you have with your bettors, increases loyalty and reduces acquisition cost.

Once you build trust, it’s much easier for you to build a loyal customer base. To do this, it’s important to think about the initial experience and journey you are creating for every new customer and continuing to create for every existing loyal customer.

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How should we use technology to build personalization?

Creating a personalised marketing strategy requires a level of creativity to ensure that you can offer something remarkable.

Consider tailoring your acquisition and retention campaigns by offering registration bets on demand, for example, or personalised birthday promotions for your VIP customers. You could offer a ‘weather bonus’, based on a player’s location, to cheer them up when it’s raining, or tailored free bets based on a bettor’s team/sports preference. Ultimately there are unlimited options in what you can do, providing you have the right tools in place.

Consumers are demanding, and recent studies suggest consumers in general are becoming less brand loyal. Personalization is the antidote to this. Some 80% of US consumers said they were more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provided personalized experiences, according to Epsilon. Meanwhile, 90 percent said the find marketing personalization very or somewhat appealing, per a Statista study.

The bottom line is, if your new US customers don’t feel they’re getting the right kind of love, they will go elsewhere, and it’s unlikely they will come back.

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How can operators better equip themselves to negotiate the US regulatory landscape?

You need to have a control panel that allows for a flexible regulatory approach in several regions. Software that allows you to configure disparate regulatory requirements, rather than having to develop them individually each time, is a must-have.

Regulatory authorities don’t tend to give much notice, which can disrupt an organisation’s road map. This can be alleviated with the right tech, as certain regulatory directives and checks can be implemented directly on demand. It’s about agility and efficiency.

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Smaller operators may lack resources of the big corporations, but can they make up for that by being more agile and efficient?

To a degree, yes. Most businesses today struggle with roadmaps that tend to end up with an ever-growing backlog of development requests coming in from several different business departments. As a backlog grows, it’s typical to also see that several trivial tasks end up taking months to complete since they are blocked in a queue behind bigger tasks.

But now, technology exists that can automate digital processes, build digital features, and produce applications without the need for coding.

With Flows, we can bring many items off the development backlog by allowing business units to implement those features and tasks directly through a no-code interface that everyone can work with.

This spreads the control of a business roadmap across more departments and relieves the pressure from development teams who will in turn gain more time to focus and execute properly on bigger development tasks.

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You’ve previously said that the gambling industry should be more willing to share things like API’s and open-source technology. Why is this important?

The gambling industry, more than most other industries, is one that is made up of a large number of providers: payments, games, KYC, platforms, etc. Through more open APIs, innovation can come from 3rd parties that create middleware software that leverages APIs from multiple providers all at once. Ultimately, making this more accessible makes it much easier for the industry to streamline work processes and become more innovative and efficient.