Email marketing is one of the best ways to advertise online gambling services. It outperforms other marketing mediums like social media and search engine ads. However, you must ensure to follow the required laws and regulations.
This article will explain the benefits of gambling and online casino email marketing, strategies, and tips to do it effectively.
What is gambling and casino email marketing?
A casino refers to a public room where gambling games are played. Online casinos are virtual versions of these public rooms that enable people to wager on casino games via the web. The casinos are either web-based or downloadable.
Email marketing fosters customer engagement, retention, and growth in the online casino industry. Most online casino platforms reach out to customers via email, generating considerable revenue from such campaigns.
Online casino email marketing involves using player data and analytics to create targeted campaigns. The marketing emails are tailored to player preferences and characteristics for effective results. Gambling platforms use this medium to advertise new games, announce upcoming events, and give important news and updates about their services.
Benefits of casino email marketing
Increased player engagement
It helps keep players engaged on the online platform. When you email players and personalize the messages, they’re more likely to return for more games. It can go a long way in converting newbies into loyal players.
Higher revenue
The owner will generate more revenue when customers remain engaged and keep playing games in an online casino. By applying data analytics to measure and understand player behavior, casinos can create personalized offers and incentivize them to keep playing.
Brand awareness
Email marketing can spread the word about your online platform and set it apart from other competitors. Casino operators can increase their brand appeal by creating engaging content and emailing it.
Customer retention
Customer retention refers to a platform's ability to retain customers over a specific period. Higher customer retention means more repeat business for an online casino; email marketing is a great way to achieve this.
Source: SmartInsights
Online casino email marketing strategy
A successful email marketing strategy for a gambling platform includes some important practices listed below.
1. Legal issues
First and foremost, you need to determine the legal requirements for online gambling. In many countries, online gambling is restricted or banned altogether. Others may require certain types of licensing to operate or advertise services.
Overall, there are a great number of laws and regulations regarding online gambling. Failing to adhere to those may result in heavy fines or even a prison term. Be sure to get legal advice well before you even start planning your campaigns.
It’s also worth noting that email providers tend to have stricter policies for such emails. You must strongly adhere to the industry’s best practices, with emphasis on having explicit permission from every person you send emails to. Likewise, you must adhere to data privacy laws and avoid losing user data to malicious parties.
2. Data analytics and segmentation
Analytics is key to every advertising campaign. If you do not understand your users’ behavior, you’ll find it difficult to target them with the right content.
Segmentation is a practice where you group your users according to different characteristics and behaviors. Then, you target each group with customized campaigns that work best.
For example, you can segment customers according to spending habits;
- People who spent less than $100 on your platform within one month
- People who spent between $100 to $1,000 within one month.
The latter group is more likely to have repeat customers, so you send them updates about new tournaments and events. The former is less likely to spend, so you target them with bonuses and rewards to encourage more activity.
Source: Moosend
3. Creative content
Engaging content is needed if you want people to open and respond to your emails. You should start with the subject line because it’s the first thing that the recipient sees. An ideal subject line should use words that indicate a sense of urgency, such as “A surprise for you”, “You don’t want to miss this,” “This offer is about to expire,” etc.
Don’t beat around the bush and bore the reader with unnecessary content. Emails should go straight to the point and tell the reader what value you have to offer them. Online casinos that put effort into creating engaging content will get better results than those that don’t.
4. Personalization
Personalization refers to creating unique emails for each subscriber according to the data you have on them. Have you ever received an email that begins with “Dear [Your Name]”? That’s a good example of personalization. The sender used data they had on you to send an email that caught your attention.
Personalized emails will perform better than non-personalized ones. That makes the concept a critical part of email marketing for casinos.
5. Relevant marketing
The content of the emails must be relevant to the reader. You’re an online casino, so your emails should revolve around that. Avoid veering into unnecessary topics, or you risk annoying the user.
Timing also plays a major role in advertising campaign success. It’s said that the best time to send an email is between 8 AM and 10 AM, the peak period for response rates. Besides, you can also send automated, transactional emails based on user activity, e.g., a welcome message to a newly registered user. UniOne lets you send these types of emails with ease.
6. Email marketing testing and optimization
You can’t just deploy a marketing campaign and call it a day. Your campaign needs constant monitoring and testing to see if it delivers the intended results. If it doesn’t, then you need to make adjustments.
Important metrics to watch out for include:
- Open rate: The percentage of subscribers who open your emails.
- Click-through rate: The percentage of subscribers that click on a link in your message.
- Conversion rate: The percentage that takes a suggested action within your message.
- Delivery rate: The percentage of your emails that get to the intended recipients.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of emails rejected by the email servers.
Digital marketing tips for online gambling
Here are some tips that enable successful digital marketing for online gambling:
Use engaging content
We discussed the importance of creative and engaging content in the above section. You must adhere to it if you want a successful online campaign. You should engage in storytelling to hook the reader and ensure the story is relevant to your target audience.
Use powerful subject lines with words that indicate a sense of urgency. Alternatively, you can personalize the subject lines to draw the recipient's attention.
Your email content should be visually appealing and carefully designed. The text and images should be optimized for both mobile and desktop screens. All these factors add up to delivering an engaging message.
Segment email lists
We’ve already discussed segmentation in the above section. It involves grouping your users according to different characteristics and sending targeted messages to each group. Segmentation is helpful because it narrows down your marketing strategy. You can use different techniques for each group instead of a general one for all users, which will be less effective.
An ideal email service provider would enable you to segment your lists automatically. UniOne allows this and makes email campaigns much easier to deploy.
Test and optimize
Constant testing and optimization are needed for a successful online casino marketing strategy. You must monitor your campaigns to ensure they are giving the intended results. If not, you need to make changes and watch out for improvements.
Keep emails short
Your emails should be brief and concise. People have limited attention span for emails, so they should understand your offer at first glance. Go straight to the point and let the recipient know what your platform offers them. If it’s a new tournament, state that clearly. If it’s a new event or feature, state it clearly. This way, your customer can quickly decide whether to respond or not.
A short and precise gambling marketing email
Include strong calls to action
A call-to-action is a prompt for the email recipient to take a suggested action. Your emails should include a visible call-to-action button with a link redirecting the user to a specific page. For instance, if you want them to sign up for a new tournament, place a “Join Now” button with a link to the sign-up page. This makes it easy for the user to figure out how to take the suggested action and helps improve your conversion rate.
Observe the prominent call-to-action button at the bottom.
Monitor and analyze metrics
You need to monitor and analyze metrics to measure the success of your marketing campaigns. Important things to monitor include your open, conversion, and click-through rates. The average email open rate is 21%, the average conversion rate hovers at 8%, and the average click-through rate is about 3%. You’re free to strive for a much higher rate, but note that anything below these averages means your campaign needs adjustments.
Casino email marketing services
You will need an email service provider to manage your casino email marketing, especially if you have a lot of users. With UniOne, you can set up a system to deliver automated messages based on specific customer interactions. This will reduce your workload and free up resources to focus elsewhere. Our platform is safe and secure, and we guarantee a high deliverability rate.
Conclusion
Online gambling is not like most industries. It’s strictly regulated, and you have to tweak your marketing approach to follow the regulations and interact with customers better. We have explained the benefits of email marketing for online gambling operators and tips to follow to court customers effectively. UniOne enables you to easily deploy bulk marketing campaigns; you can sign up and see what we offer.