With Super Bowl LVII heading to our screens on February 12^th, we sat down with Flows Director of Sales, Domenico Mazzola, to talk about how smart data collection and the use of no-code innovation platforms can enable sportsbooks to enhance their customer experience for the Big Game and beyond

The Super Bowl is the USA’s biggest sporting event and will invariably provide masses of opportunities for sportsbook operators to enhance their customer offering if they’re able to think outside the box.

As ever, the main driver here is always data – and with the NFL consisting of 17 games over an 18-week period in the run-up to the Super Bowl, there should be ample time to gather plenty of useful information on bettors. The trick is to then combine the key findings you have on player behavior with technology that will help you to create promotions and better inform your overall marketing strategy.

While at the time of writing the Super Bowl LVII finalists are yet to be announced, we already know that the majority of sportsbooks are placing the Kansas City Chiefs as their red hot favorites. So what can we do with this information? A good place to start would be to look at the betting activity of VIP customers and identify those who have actively bet on the Chiefs over the preceding 18-week period.

Once we’ve done that, we can work out where they’re based. If, for example, they’re located on the other side of the country or abroad, there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to make it to the main event – so why not offer them a special promotion to make up for that fact? Alternatively, if you’ve seen them winning specific bets, why not offer these markets to them on the Super Bowl too?

Of course, the real value in data collection stretches far beyond the Super Bowl, so the event is also a great time to start drilling down into the behavior you’re witnessing. Were your customers backing a certain team or were they betting on both sides? Did they prefer to bet on the overall points outcome or the individual actions of players? This is all valuable information that can help you develop automated workflows which trigger on specific events or when certain wagers are placed in future.

The first thing you should probably be looking at post-Super Bowl is whether there are any friendly matches being played in the run-up to the new season and if there are, how can you use the data that you’ve gathered up to this point to target them? Is there an opportunity to offer your customers an early promotion based on the last first touchdown bet they placed at Super Bowl LVII, for example?

When the season starts proper, you can further focus on bettors’ location to find out whether they’re situated within a set distance of a particular stadium. If they are and have previously placed a bet on the team that plays there, you could target them with a location-based promotion. This could be anything from providing them with early odds on their team to a special bet if they don’t have tickets.

Using a no-code innovation platform like Flows allows you to automate this kind of promotion without the need for manual targeting. You simply funnel in all the necessary data and set up a flow that will trigger based on certain parameters. This way, you’re able to quickly and easily offer tailored promotions to customers based on their previous activity that they’re far more likely to engage with.

Given that many sportsbook in the USA have partnerships with in-state teams, there’s also the opportunity to take this a step further by offering competitions for tickets and other behind-the-scenes incentives. Should a sportsbook have such an arrangement in place, you could use Flows to automate the awarding of matchday tickets as a prize for winning a certain bet or leaderboard event.

You could also use it to manage and distribute exclusive content that relates to a customer’s favorite team such as locker room footage and interviews with players or coaches. This way, bettors can enjoy a personalized content library that’s exclusive to them the minute they log in, meaning no two user experiences will ever be the same and that your sportsbook is able to provide something truly unique.

As a final suggestion on the topic, you could also use Flows to set up automated deals and discounts on NFL tickets and merchandise. You could, for example, create special offers that are automatically applied to a customer’s account whenever they bet on a certain team or outcome. This can help you further engage with the activity of individual bettors and create an even broader cross-market appeal.

Of course, tools like Flows can also help you adhere to state regulations by allowing you to set up automated audits and compliance checks. Our platform features a very flexible regulatory control panel in several areas that allows sportsbooks to configure many of their business regulatory requirements directly through Flows, rather than having to develop them after each and every update.

As regulatory authorities tend not to give much notice when changes are made to the current industry guidance, many organizations may find that their planned road map becomes interrupted. This can be significantly alleviated through Flows as it can allow certain regulatory directives and checks to be implemented on demand, cutting out the need for extensive and often time-consuming manual work.

Overall, using a no-code innovation platform like Flows can help you remain compliant while leveraging the data you’ve collected and any partnerships you might have with local in-state teams in a more efficient way. This in turn provides added value to the customer both during the NFL season and in the event their teams makes the next Super Bowl, ensuring a continual cycle of engagement.