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The Challenge:
The Benefits:
Funstage, Novomatic Interactive’s online arm, is a multi-platform game service provider offering more than 150 card, board, sports and casino games that are available in more than 20 languages. The company’s flagship product, GameTwist, is one of the largest online gaming communities, attracting more than 4 million players per month, worldwide.
Despite their relatively small player retention workforce, Funstage wanted to be able to create, manage and deliver highly personalized player communications to hundreds of distinct player personas, via a number of different channels.
Before starting to use Optimove in 2015, the company’s player retention team was manually extracting player lists based on certain criteria, re-uploading the lists into email tools and manually compiling basic email campaign metrics. This process was very time consuming and error prone, and the team knew they could be doing exponentially more with the right technology.
Furthermore, the company’s marketers understood the great value in being able to deliver personalized communications to individual players, in realtime, in response to player behavior and scenarios. Yet, they did not have the facilities to be able to implement such immediate, event-triggered campaigns.
Finally, the company’s marketers were seeking more efficient and reliable ways to comply with all relevant regulatory requirements (and internal policy requirements) regarding which players they could contact and with which types of messages.
Funstage originally selected Optimove due to its powerful player modeling and granular segmentation, combined with automated, end-to-end campaign execution and measurement. Within weeks, Funstage’s savvy marketers had already defined dozens of individual player personas and were sending each one highly relevant offers and incentives, via multiple channels, such as email, push messaging and in-platform (website, iOS and Android). Rapid upticks in most KPIs were soon evident.
While using Optimove to segment players and automate the delivery of personalized messaging, the marketers also started taking advantage of Optimove’s customer model exploration tools. For the first time, the marketing team was able to quickly explore and understand their complete customer base and begin making strategic decisions based on the customer intelligence they were getting out of Optimove.
“Optimove enables us to really look into what our customers’ behavior is, in ways that we were never able to experience before,” relates Alan James Mansfield, Head of Casino Operations, Real Money Gaming at Funstage. “Beyond improving segmentation and retention messaging, we started using these insights to change direction in some of the products and features that we were developing.”
When a user suffers a big loss in a casino game, doesn’t manage to complete a deposit transaction, or experiences various other types of negative incidents, Funstage uses Optimove to mitigate the bad experience within moments. By delivering helpful, supporting or encouraging messages that are highly personalized to the individual player and the particular scenario, Funstage minimizes the impact of the bad experience, engenders player loyalty and dramatically improves player retention.
“Optimove makes it practical for us to immediately respond to very specific customer experiences, in different ways, for a variety of different types of players,” says Mansfield. “When you're playing, you can go from a really good experience to a really bad experience really fast. With Optimove’s segmentation and realtime scenario-triggered messaging capabilities, we are really able to negate most negativity that players feel and to reinforce positive associations that they have with our platforms.”
Furthermore, Funstage uses the realtime user activity data collected by Optimove along with Optimove’s predictive modeling to personalize player communications in scheduled campaigns. Mansfield explains: “For example, we can see where new players are gravitating during their earliest time with us, and can customize their onboarding journey accordingly, so that they are receiving the most relevant information and incentives. This has significantly increased conversion rates for us.”
“Optimove’s player modeling, segmentation and analysis combined with its personalized, multichannel and realtime communication automation provides us with the strategic intelligence and tactical execution capabilities that we need to build and retain player loyalty.” —
Alan James Mansfield, Head of Casino Operations, Real Money Gaming at Funstage
As mentioned earlier, Funstage’s marketers needed a better way to ensure that they are complying with regulations around player communications and providing secure and safe entertainment for their players.
Optimove’s granular targeting criteria makes it easy for Funstage to mark individual players, based on their preferences and requests. Furthermore, a built-in ability to ensure that certain players are never contacted allows marketers to work freely, without worry that they may somehow contact a user in violation of regulations.
Funstage also uses these features to ensure that identified problem players of various varieties never receive certain types of promotions or incentives.
Mansfield comments: “Managing player communication exclusions sounds like a simple thing, but it's vital to make sure that we adhere to all the rules and regulations that are placed on us. Optimove makes this very easy for us to do.”
Funstage credits its use of Optimove’s player intelli-gence and retention automation capabilities with the following year-over-year KPI improvements:
