Startup 2UP Goes Live in Under 3 Weeks and Earns 23x Return with Optimove

The Challenge: Building Player Marketing from Zero

At launch, 2UP had no marketing platform. Every welcome message, promotion, and reminder would have had to be built and sent by hand. That was a serious problem for a startup whose CRM marketing operation is, in practice, one person: Tomasz Sikora, Senior CRM Manager, runs Optimove day to day. Without a platform, the team had no way to greet new players the moment they registered, react to live sporting events while they still mattered, or test and learn without drowning in manual work. 

The Solution: Three-Week Onboarding and a True Partnership

2UP chose Optimove to build player engagement into the business from day one. The onboarding was fast and hands-on. Optimove's team provided practical CRM guidance suited to a young iGaming operator, and 2UP's first campaign went live in less than three weeks. That gave a brand-new startup the structure and best practices normally reserved for much larger operators. 

Tomasz came in with experience, having worked with Optimove across other brands since 2016. Even so, he says the level of support stood out: 

“I've worked with Customer Success Managers before, but no one was as helpful as our CSM at Optimove. The difference is that she doesn't just support us, she guides us on what we should focus on and what actions to take. That's exactly what I was expecting. It feels like a real team effort, where we're working together toward the same goals. I appreciate our partnership with Optimove.” 

— Tomasz Sikora, Senior CRM Manager, 2UP 

Tomasz has become truly Positionless, with a new level of marketing power: 

Automation keeps a one-person team focused on strategy. 93.4% of all campaign sends run as part of recurring, automated series, from the new-player welcome funnel to an always-on registration bonus. That frees up about four hours of an eight-hour day for planning and optimization instead of manual sends. 

Lifecycle journeys move players from onboarding to engagement. New depositors start on a structured onboarding path and move into ongoing engagement and reactivation streams as their behavior changes. Most campaigns are measured against a control group, so the team knows what’s actually driving incremental results. 

Timely campaigns meet players in the moment. A Day Zero welcome bonus fires the instant a player registers, and email campaigns tied to live sporting events let 2UP engage players while the action is still happening. 

Results: Measurable Returns in Year One

• $23 in value returned for every $1 invested in Optimove
• The account’s top-performing campaign was a single automated welcome email sent the day after registration
• The second-best performer was a Champions League match alert sent to engaged players
• 75.3% of campaign series are measured against a control group to prove incremental impact

The Bottom Line

In its first year, 2UP went from having no marketing platform to running a largely automated, lifecycle-driven CRM program with a one-person team, returning $23 for every $1 invested. For Tomasz, the difference was having a partner, not just a vendor: a team that guided the strategy, set 2UP up quickly, and helped it see value almost immediately.