Over the past few months, we’ve seen the pandemic radically disrupt the rhythms of everyday life. Many activities have completely shifted to the digital space, with consumers’ expectations evolving by the minute.
Marketers must be more nimble and responsive than ever, but many are limited by a tech stack and production process designed for a much more static world. While they may have the necessary data to create fully personalized campaigns, they simply lack the ability to leverage it.
Luckily, Movable Ink allows marketers to be data-activated no matter where their data lives. Just ask Oddschecker, who partnered with Movable Ink to deliver one-to-one personalization at scale.
For over 21 years, Oddschecker has been the world’s leading odds comparison provider and gambling affiliate. Until recently, their platform acted only as an affiliate, where customers would go to find information about bets, then head off to bookmakers to do the actual placing. However, over the last couple years, they’ve moved into aggregate betting, allowing customers to place bets with all of the major UK operators, all in one place. Under the new business model, the company found itself servicing a more varied customer base than before, which meant they could no longer afford a one-size-fits-all approach to their communications.
With their user base becoming increasingly diversified, Oddschecker’s Head of Marketing Tech and Digital Analytics, Adam Palmerini, knew that automated personalization would be the key to keeping customers engaged.
The first step was to understand the company’s data architecture, including where data was captured, how often it was captured, and how Oddschecker used it. With this information, the opportunity for personalization became clearer and they were able to plan personalization points to focus their messaging and drive higher engagement, as well as identify gaps in their data.
In the meantime, they were determined to get some MVPs live with existing data. Starting with their Saturday morning newsletter, they used a simple pyramid to identify customer segments and corresponding message variations. At the top was “everyone,” which was sorted by customers who placed bets and those who claimed offers. Next, Oddschecker filtered these two groups by the types of bets or offers they engaged with. Then, in the case of people who placed soccer bets, they refined it by yet another factor, favorite league. Results from simple tests like this helped the marketing team prove the value of personalization and helped get buy-in from other departments.
Once Oddschecker had the requisite data points and plugged them into their CRM, they were ready to tackle the final and arguably biggest challenge: how their small communications team was going to generate content for each segment — regardless of how large the segments were — without having to hire a small army of designers. That’s where Movable Ink came in.
Together, Oddschecker and Movable Ink built apps that allowed the marketing team to create campaigns and leave them to run, automatically generating relevant content to customers at the moment of engagement.
With these apps, Oddschecker can now build emails using content blocks that pull data directly from their API, requiring no extra lift from the marketing team. This means that information like article headlines, bet prices, account information, and even images are tailored to customers’ individual behaviors. So whether the recipient is a longtime horse racing better or a rugby fan who’s only ever viewed an offer, they’ll be seeing custom content that speaks to their specific interests.
This daily roundup email from the week of the Cheltenham Festival contains some powerful examples of personalization. At the very top, the banner image shows a customer’s qualifying bets and how much they raised as part of a charity promotion. Below, tables show which accounts they used, the days they bet, and how often they got the best price. At the bottom, customers can see any winning bets they had placed, along with how much they were priced at and how much they won.
If any of these content blocks don’t apply to a particular customer, they’ll either be dropped from the email or replaced with content encouraging them to participate.
Since campaigns are automated and emails are updated the second they’re opened, Oddschecker can bring users more relevance and frequency without the extra manual intervention traditionally associated with personalization.
To learn more about Oddchecker’s personalization strategy, watch our webinar recording, The Journey to Meaningful Personalization Part 2: Oddschecker.