MT: This is much more than pre-registration because our free to play product delivers immediate customer engagement and a platform that is close to feature parity with the future real money product. This achieves three important goals by building a database of addressable customers, giving those customers safe immediate value and engagement in a safe and controlled environment and giving them familiarity with app-based sports betting that effectively prepares them for the roll our of real money app.
At the same time, betJACK can hone its operational model and product readiness to ensure they will be as competitive as possible with the global operators who will be entering the market.
The consumer response in Ohio has been strongly positive and we anticipate that the free-to-play betJACK app will remain in place even after the introduction of real money as an on-ramp for customers who are learning if they want to try sports betting for fun before staking money.
MT: Shape Games’ origin story is in consumer app development for companies like Apple, RedBull and IKEA so we are very good at building consumer-friendly sticky apps that make it easy to convert interest into engagement. For betJACK that translates into simple onboarding journey that leverages our local sports knowledge and the customers’ social network to build sports conversation and bragging rights between friends as they share bets and challenge each other’s skill at picking winners and losers. The app provides statistics on your betting behaviour to help you improve your picks, win badges and earn experience. Customers can subscribe to news with customized news feeds on their favourite teams and players to keep up-to-date on the most relevant sports news.
MT: We have seen a broad uptake of the product from the novice to the more experienced bettors that want to test things out prior to real money launch. We believe this will build much better conversion along the spectrum of sports-betters.
We will also soon be introducing links to betJACK’s retail casino operations so that their existing land-based customers have more reasons to sign-up and play the app.
MT: The success of the online poker model in free-to-play is well established both with real money operators like PokerStars – where I led marketing for a few years – and social games like Zynga Poker.
During my time with PokerStars we built very healthy ecosystems in both free-to-play and real money economies. This created strong brand awareness, familiarization with the product and the ability monetize through cross-selling making it a low-cost acquisition channel.
Free-to-play is very successful when it lowers to the biggest barriers for customers to join an iGaming product: Trust and Skill. Our betJACK free-to-play customers gain familiarity which brings trust while increasing their skills through engagement with sportsbetting in a safe and fun environment. This is critical because we compete for share of time [and wallet] with entertainment experiences. So, providing a low/no cost experience give consumers greater enjoyment so we get more of their time, and this will result in better long term value for the customer and for betJACK.
MT: The recent US experience with online sports betting (including DFS) has been about huge marketing spends in order to gain brand awareness and drive demand for category and acquire customers at almost any cost. But, frankly, very little has been done to ensure a high-quality, simple and engaging customer experience. Most of the big European and domestic sports betting apps are simply digital versions of the old bookie’s spreadsheets. We are delivering a compelling and competitive consumer experience that starts with our front end on the bet\JACK app and runs straight through to the customer service and marketing services that we provide betJACK to have a seamless and sticky experience that will outperform the competition.
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