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ack in March, in what was the beginning of the pandemic, Optimove published a blog post with tips for gaming operators based on an early analysis of gaming trends amid the outbreak of COVID-19. These tips were actually put to work when Optimove’s Professional Services team partnered with Central European betting operator, Fortuna Entertainment Group, to mitigate the impact COVID-19 had on its sports betting players. The joint effort led the company to more than double the likelihood of sports bettors to play casino during H1 2020.

With sports being a significant portion of its business in key markets, Fortuna Entertainment Group turned to Optimove’s Strategic Services team following the closing of the leagues around the world due to the pandemic to help grow customer engagement and activity.

Over a period of three months, more than 280,000 players were targeted with over 150 campaigns, specifically created and orchestrated to keep customers engaged during the sport stoppage. The targeted player set consisted of players that had not been recently active on the platform, making the challenge of engaging them with something other than sports even more daunting.

Optimove’s multichannel orchestration and testing capabilities allowed Fortuna Entertainment Group to implement the data-centric marketing plan devised by the Optimove Strategic Services team and reap “impressive results.”

Petr Royce, Group Head of Acquisition, CRM & Marketing Innovation at Fortuna Entertainment Group explained: “With Optimove and its Strategic Services team, we’ve been able to manage hundreds of multichannel marketing campaigns that have significantly impacted our business. Their industry expertise and smart orchestration capabilities coupled with our team’s data-centric approach, provided Fortuna Entertainment Group customers with a formidable experience during hard time.”

The main result was increasing sports bettors’ response rate to casino campaigns by more than 2X. To measure the plan’s success, the teams used control groups to measure the impact of their campaigns on sports bettors’ casino activity.

A main challenge of targeting players who prefer a single product, and turning them into multi-product players is that they might erode the average value of the existing pool of multi-product players. The marketing plan devised by Optimove’s Strategic Services put those worries to rest, as it kept multi-product player value impressively high, despite the influx of new, multi-players.

Additionally, when introducing 150 new campaigns to an existing marketing plan, the risk of “campaign crossfire” and marketing over-exposure grows considerably. However, Optimove’s orchestration mechanisms allowed Fortuna Entertainment Group to increase their number of ad-hoc campaigns by 75% without incurring a single scenario of campaign misfires.