Read time 5 minutes
Summary:
Kaizen Gaming’s CRM team scaled from running two concurrent campaigns for roughly 100,000 customers to 400 concurrent campaigns targeting more than 13 million customers by implementing Optimove’s Customer-Led Marketing Platform. The platform replaced a manual, Excel-heavy segmentation process and gave the team the data, automation, and personalization capabilities needed to support rapid international growth.
Kaizen Gaming was growing fast, but its CRM operation was still working like a team built for a much smaller business. The company had ambitions to expand from 13 markets to 26 by the end of 2026, yet its marketing execution still depended on manual segmentation, spreadsheet analysis, and limited campaign capacity. That made it harder to reach customers with the right message at the right time while entering new markets at speed.
Konstantinos Chelakis, Head of Customer Lifecycle Management at Kaizen Gaming, was helping lead that effort. In the presentation, he describes a core team of 18 CRM professionals within a broader 60-person CRM and operations organization, all working toward the same goal: creating exceptional customer experiences while supporting aggressive expansion.
His team faced three critical bottlenecks.
Before Optimove, the CRM team had to ask the data department for audience segments or raw data exports, then work through Excel files to identify target groups and evaluate campaign performance. As Chelakis put it, the process was “endless Excel sheets,” with teams extracting data and then returning to those same files the next day to understand how customers responded.
Kaizen needed to build many smart segmentations and communicate differently with many types of customers, but the existing environment could not support that level of complexity or scale. “We were limited in the number of campaigns that we could do,” Chelakis said, adding that without Optimove, there was “no way” the team could engage all the segments it needed to reach.
As Kaizen entered more regulated markets, speed became a strategic issue. The same central team had to support launches in new countries while maintaining business-as-usual activity in existing ones. That meant Kaizen needed not only better targeting, but also a faster, more repeatable way to stand up CRM operations for each new market.
“Without Optimove, there was no way we could engage with all the segments that we needed to,” Chelakis said. That gap did not just create extra work. It threatened Kaizen’s ability to scale customer engagement in line with its expansion strategy.
Kaizen implemented Optimove to replace fragmented, manual CRM execution with a unified foundation for segmentation, personalization, and campaign automation.
Optimove’s data science team created a bespoke customer lifecycle model for Kaizen, including value-based segmentations, multiple segmentation layers, and hundreds of customer attributes. That gave the CRM team a much deeper understanding of how to communicate based on customer behavior and individual preferences.
The presentation adds that Kaizen now works with roughly 400 customer attributes and can also create its own attributes and calculations directly in the platform. “It allows us to create the segments that we need,” Chelakis said, “in order to be able to offer to the customers relevant content and communications.”
Once the data foundation was in place, Optimove’s automation capabilities helped Kaizen scale output without dramatically scaling headcount. Recurrent plans, smarter orchestration, and a more efficient operating model let the team cover more lifecycle stages and more customer segments at once.
Chelakis described the effect clearly: “The same team in the headquarters was mainly responsible” for both new market launches and existing markets. Automation helped Kaizen keep up with that pace. Instead of being trapped in manual processes, the team could focus on strategy and execution at scale.
Optimove also enabled Kaizen to deliver more relevant creative and offers. The blog highlights one example: customers who showed a preference for a specific soccer team received emails designed in that team’s colors. In the presentation, Chelakis expanded on that logic, explaining that Kaizen combines implicit and explicit data, such as sportsbook preference, football interest, league affinity, and favorite team, to personalize communications more precisely.
He called the approach “fairly simple yet very effective.” The same personalization engine also helped Kaizen tailor bonus amounts, match content to behavior, and build a more consistent customer experience as the company expanded across markets.
Kaizen’s personalized email templates generated a 10% increase in open rates and a 40% increase in click-through rates. According to Chelakis, customers who received communications in their favorite team’s template consistently delivered stronger engagement.
Before Optimove, Kaizen could run two campaigns at the same time for about 100,000 customers. Today, the company runs 400 campaigns concurrently, reaching over 13 million customers with relevant content and communications. “And all this without any additional resources,” Chelakis said.
Kaizen also improved its launch readiness as it expanded internationally. In the presentation, Chelakis said that, with Optimove’s strategic services and platform migration work, the company cut the time required to create a new instance for a new market by half. That matters for a business operating in 16 markets today and aiming for 26 by the end of 2026.
The result was not just faster execution. It was a CRM operation built to support growth, with stronger segmentation, broader campaign coverage, and less manual effort across the board.
See how Optimove helps fast-growing brands scale personalization, automation, and campaign performance. Contact Optimove to schedule a demo.
