When it comes to innovation, it’s often best to look beyond your own industry and learn from other growth leaders.
It turns out that lessons learned from global leaders in fintech, e-commerce, and entertainment brands like Spotify and TBS might be directly applied to players in entirely different industries — including sports betting and gambling.
Nowadays everyone has a smartphone. Users prefer a native app experience to a mobile web experience, which also benefits businesses who see more revenue from app users. Moving web or social traffic into the app is crucial to provide this experience and reap the rewards. The majority of gambling operators have a huge presence on web and social but still lack options to move users to their apps. Limiting engagement options on mobile web leads to drop-offs and brand negativity, a huge problem when the market is so saturated.
TBS, for instance, solves this problem with simple calls to action (CTAs) for users on the web to download the app. They use two types of CTAs depending on user intent — a full-page interstitial smart banner for higher-intent users and a smaller floating button for lower intent users. Gambling companies can easily employ a similar strategy to help ramp up app usage.
How can you retain more customers?
Companies invest millions to acquire customers, seemingly for a short-term gain and a long-term loss. Competing in expensive land grabs with a porous retention funnel hinders building a successful business. Just look at the U.S. gambling market incentivizing acquisition with $1,000 bonuses and questionable strategy on how to keep them. Focusing only on acquisition is not sustainable, and it requires a change in mindset.
Acquiring users is only half the battle. The best brands retain customers through outreach and direct, seamless engagement. They send push notifications and emails to pull users back in. So why do so many brands drive users from customer communications to the mobile website?
Sometimes the communication that marketers send to customers is either not immediately relevant or, even worse, carries no conversion potential. The number one culprit is broken links in marketing communication that send users to the mobile web or the homepage of the app rather than linking to the specific app content. This leads to instant drop off.
The gambling industry would benefit greatly from taking users straight to that bonus slot or promotion. Deep linking customer communications to specific app content is powerful because it can also skip steps like logging in or navigating, which customers perceive as a burden.
QVC, for instance, uses deferred deep links to take mobile web users directly to the app for a free gift with purchase.
How can you get customers betting from one click, from any ad?
The gambling industry spends millions per year on TV and social advertisements. Yet, they have few easy ways to drive users to bet in their apps. Rather, they leave it to the user to track down the bet or promotion they just saw — again leading to poor conversion rates. For example, Ray Winstone promotes amazing odds on the next goalscorer. But navigating a platform with millions of bets to find the one bet you just saw advertised is too much hassle for even the most interested users. Just think how many more bets users would make if it was a one-click bet made directly from the ad.
When scrolling through all the social media accounts of betting providers, you’ll notice they leave money on the table by not bringing customers from these massive social audiences straight to the app. They miss the opportunity to simultaneously enhance their users’ experiences and increase conversion metrics by mastering just this one established use case. Consumer brands in a variety of industries have tapped into this efficient source of growth, and the opportunity for betting apps is enormous.
For example, Revolut partnered with Anthony Joshua to promote a limited edition Revolut card for new and existing users. They deep linked users from Anthony Joshua’s social media straight into the page in the app to purchase the card. This led to extra revenue, 12,000 new customers, re-engagement, and a better user experience. It also allowed Revolut to fully attribute this campaign to confirm marketing budget well spent. It was a huge success!
How can you make betting more sociable?
The pandemic didn’t only mean that pubs and brick-and-mortar shops closed. It also meant sports betting moved to the app. People placed bets from anywhere, including their couch in front of the TV. This led to more user isolation, which was a shift for the sports betting industry.
Enabling users to share bets can solve this challenge in the gambling industry. This technology has been used across other industries for years. Take music streaming, for example. Listeners send a song or a playlist to a friend, and the recipient is sent straight to that song or playlist in the native app with deep links. Spotify was one of the first companies to leverage the potential of deep-linked sharing. They realized that asking users to manually search for names and sift through results was negatively impacting user engagement. Using deep links shared by users as well as highly influential celebrities, Spotify makes it easier for listeners to find and share everything from albums and playlists to podcasts.
All of these strategies are compelling because everything betting companies want to do has already been done — outside of their industry. Gambling companies just need to look at other successful non-betting apps, implement their best ideas, and use deep linking to power it all.
Branch is ready to make you a winner!
Open your organic channels today, increase user retention, gain new customers, and, best of all, enhance the user experience. This traffic is already generated by you — we just direct it to the relevant place for your customer. Branch can help you fully utilize this opportunity and many others through the power of deep linking.
Let us help you understand deep linking and how it could work for your sports betting business.