With major corporations spending big to corner the US online gaming market, smaller operators need to be smarter than ever to compete. But technology that can increase efficiency and help get the marketing right means everyone’s got a shot, says Flows.

For operators looking to enter the US market, how important is it to get the tech right?

It’s probably the most important consideration. Entering the US market has proved to be very challenging for many operators. Major corporations, from Caesars, to MGM Resorts, to Fox, are splashing huge amounts of money on acquiring players. Last year, Caesars vowed to spend $1 billion marketing its sport betting app in the ensuing 24 to 30 months. It’s very difficult to compete with that.

Meanwhile, the US landscape is a hodgepodge of different regulations with several individual requirements for each state. Adapting costs resources and time.

Faced with these hurdles, its crucial operators adopt technologies that can help them with personalised customer engagement, while streamlining roadmaps and offering regulatory agility.

How should operators approach acquisition and retention in the face of such competition?

For operators entering the US market that don’t have a spare $1 billion to splash, differentiation is key, not only in the look and feel they present and content they offer, but also in how they introduce themselves to the market.

It’s also important to think about the way you engage with customers and the type of customer you want to target. Creating a first-class user experience is vital in helping you to stand out and places you ahead of the competition. That experience is about much more than just the onboarding process or the initial content offering you present to your customers.

Creating a personalised experience is vital in the US, where brands are competing fiercely for a share of the market, and it’s important that your technology supports that.

Bettors’ playing habits and needs are ever-changing. Offering personalised, localised and tailored promotions helps to improve the relationship you have with your bettors, increases loyalty and reduces acquisition cost.

Once you build trust, it’s much easier for you to build a loyal customer base. To do this, it’s important to think about the initial experience and journey you are creating for every new customer and continuing to create for every existing loyal customer.

How should we use technology to build personalization?

Creating a personalised marketing strategy requires a level of creativity to ensure that you can offer something remarkable.

Consider tailoring your acquisition and retention campaigns by offering registration bets on demand, for example, or personalised birthday promotions for your VIP customers. You could offer a ‘weather bonus’, based on a player’s location, to cheer them up when it’s raining, or tailored free bets based on a bettor’s team/sports preference. Ultimately there are unlimited options in what you can do, providing you have the right tools in place.

Consumers are demanding, and recent studies suggest consumers in general are becoming less brand loyal. Personalization is the antidote to this. Some 80% of US consumers said they were more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provided personalized experiences, according to Epsilon. Meanwhile, 90 percent said the find marketing personalization very or somewhat appealing, per a Statista study.

The bottom line is, if your new US customers don’t feel they’re getting the right kind of love, they will go elsewhere, and it’s unlikely they will come back.

How can operators better equip themselves to negotiate the US regulatory landscape?

You need to have a control panel that allows for a flexible regulatory approach in several regions. Software that allows you to configure disparate regulatory requirements, rather than having to develop them individually each time, is a must-have.

Regulatory authorities don’t tend to give much notice, which can disrupt an organisation’s road map. This can be alleviated with the right tech, as certain regulatory directives and checks can be implemented directly on demand. It’s about agility and efficiency.

Smaller operators may lack resources of the big corporations, but can they make up for that by being more agile and efficient?

To a degree, yes. Most businesses today struggle with roadmaps that tend to end up with an ever-growing backlog of development requests coming in from several different business departments. As a backlog grows, it’s typical to also see that several trivial tasks end up taking months to complete since they are blocked in a queue behind bigger tasks.

But now, technology exists that can automate digital processes, build digital features, and produce applications without the need for coding.

With Flows, we can bring many items off the development backlog by allowing business units to implement those features and tasks directly through a no-code interface that everyone can work with.

This spreads the control of a business roadmap across more departments and relieves the pressure from development teams who will in turn gain more time to focus and execute properly on bigger development tasks.

You’ve previously said that the gambling industry should be more willing to share things like API’s and open-source technology. Why is this important?

The gambling industry, more than most other industries, is one that is made up of a large number of providers: payments, games, KYC, platforms, etc. Through more open APIs, innovation can come from 3rd parties that create middleware software that leverages APIs from multiple providers all at once. Ultimately, making this more accessible makes it much easier for the industry to streamline work processes and become more innovative and efficient.