Smartphones, tablets and social messaging have fundamentally changed the way consumers respond to advertising and marketing offers. The IAB / PwC Digital adspend study 2016 showed that mobile advertising in the UK now eats up a £3.866 billion budget – a year-on-year increase of 50.8%.
Yet, despite the evolution of marketing cloud suites, many gambling operators still don’t have the tools they need to interact with and engage customers in real-time, across multiple channels.
At the recent EGR Power 50 Summit 2017, attended by many of the Top 50 ranked operators, we spoke to several CMOs and Heads of CRM. They explained that one of their biggest challenges is creating marketing ‘moments’ – one-to-one communications which catch the customer with the right message, at the right time, and which would enable them to fulfil that offer there and then.
Some of these senior marketers told us that many of the marketing solutions they use are only able to blast out batch-based campaigns that target consumers by segments. This approach makes it difficult to follow up with automated real-time retargeting and, more crucially, doesn’t allow them to close the loop in the customer journey. Often this is because the response data is sluggish, being stored in a data warehouse elsewhere.
These traditional marketing automation suites are often used for just two channels, email and SMS, and some operators struggle to then add in newer over-the-top (OTT) communications, such as web push or in-play messaging and Facebook Messenger.
Gresham House Strategic PLC (LON:GHS) has a total interest of 13.5% in IMImobile PLC, correct as of 30 June 2017 month end NAV announcement, released 03 July 2017.
