Sisal Rebuilt the Team Before It Rebuilt the Stack

The Problem: A Regulated, Multi-Vertical Market Built for Silos 

Sisal is one of Italy's largest gaming and payment services groups and part of Flutter International. Founded in 1946, it was the first Italian company licensed to operate in the gaming sector, and it now serves more than 14 million customers. Sisal built its expertise across lottery, sports betting, and casino over 20 years in retail, starting in its shops before moving online. 

That retail heritage left the online gaming unit with a fragmented structure: data, process, and technology sat in separate silos across marketing, IT, and analytics, with no shared ownership of the stack. Italy's regulatory environment added further complexity, with strict rules on advertising layered on top of intense market competition and the ongoing challenge of managing retail and online together. 

The real cost showed up at the player level. Lottery, betting, and casino players have entirely different behaviors, different attitudes, and different lifetime values, but the business had no holistic view of the individual player. A customer could be marked as churned from Lottery after three months of inactivity while actively betting on sports elsewhere in the same week, and no one would know. 

The Solution: Define the Experience Before the Technology 

Rather than starting with a platform selection, Sisal's leadership first defined the experience it wanted to create.  They call it an "epic player experience" built on trust and long-term relationships rather than one-off transactions, delivered through content that is engaging, relevant, and easy to use. 

Those three principles became the filter for everything that followed. An engaging experience meant content built for each segment rather than each product. A relevant one meant personalization in real time across casino, lottery, and gaming. Easy to use meant something as concrete as a search engine that could surface the right game or service directly from the app's search bar. 

The epic player experience drove Sisal's business model, its operating model, and its execution. Execution proved the hardest part. Data, process, and technology had been split across silos, so before scaling a single campaign Sisal restructured its online marketing organization into three dedicated teams: data and analytics, platform and technology, and demand. Each was built to answer a question the old structure could not: who sees the player, who owns the stack, and who decides what gets built next. 

Own the Platform Inside Marketing, Not Inside IT 

Before the reorganization, the people who understood the technology sat in IT, while the people who understood the player sat in marketing. Campaigns suffered in the gap between them. 

Sisal moved people out of IT and into the online marketing organization, giving them real accountability for the marketing platform: Optimove, the player account manager, and the promotion engine. That team now owns the roadmap, the supplier partnerships behind it, the infrastructure, and the annual investment required to deliver it. 

The result: platform decisions became marketing decisions instead of IT tickets. 

Segment by Customer, Not by Product 

Lottery, sports betting, and casino players do not behave alike. They have different attitudes, different journeys, and different lifetime values, so a single segmentation model would flatten those differences and misread player behavior. 

Sisal's data and analytics team, given direct access to production data, built segmentation at the customer level rather than the product level. Personas are defined by how a player actually behaves across the business, not by which product first acquired them. A player inactive in one vertical but active in another is read correctly instead of being marked as churned. 

That customer-level view is what lets Sisal acquire a lottery player or a betting player on their own terms, then cross-sell and up-sell from there. 

Prove the Use Case Small, Then Scale the Building Block 

Rather than committing to a large-scale rollout, Sisal and Optimove agreed to start narrow: pick a specific use case, define the KPI before launching it, test it, and only then invest in scaling. 

The clearest example was the shift from classic batch orchestration to streaming orchestration. Sisal could now respond to a player at the moment they acted, rather than waiting for the next scheduled campaign cycle, and could collect new data on how players respond to move them forward, from a depositing customer to a repeat depositor. Most of Sisal's campaigns have since moved across. 

The second lesson followed from the first. A push notification triggered by a deposit is not a campaign; it is a capability. Once built and proven, it can be redeployed in any other scenario that turns on a deposit. Sisal now treats each of these as a building block, independent and reusable; that scales, both the player experience, and the internal process behind it. 

Built for Continuous Evolution 

Each new building block, once proven, joins the shared 12-month roadmap the demand team maintains, rather than closing as a finished project. That is what lets the model compound instead of resetting with every new initiative. Sisal and Optimove now identify the next set of use cases together, in workshops that alternate between Sisal's offices in Italy and Optimove's in London. 
 

“The major phase in our partnership with Optimove was setting up a team that worked together with Optimove to define the use cases we wanted to achieve, define the technology to get there, and plan the roadmap together, starting from small results and then scaling to a full solution.”  

 Francesco Lietti, Online Innovation & Consumer Data Director, Sisal 
 

In Summary 

None of this came from a platform decision. It came from sequencing: define the experience first, organize the team around it second, and let technology scale only what has already been proven in miniature. 

The order is what travels. A marketing organization that owns its own stack can commission the tools it needs. A segmentation model built around the player rather than the product can see a customer who leaves one game for another. And a capability proven once, in a single use case, can be redeployed anywhere it fits. 

For any marketing leader running a multi-product business inside a tight regulatory perimeter, the sequence is what's worth copying. Not the tools. 

See how Optimove can help your marketing team unify player data, orchestrate real-time campaigns, and build reusable CRM capabilities at scale. Request a demo.