Joe McCallum, director of sportsbook at Sportsbet.io, reveals the secrets behind a winning World Cup and the key to ensuring momentum is retained ahead of the new football season.
While just one of the 32 World Cup teams returned home from Russia with a trophy in their luggage, it was more than just the French players who came away from this summer’s action as winners.
Sure, Kylian Mbappe and Co were the ones grabbing the back pages following their victory against Croatia, but the tournament as a whole left numerous industries celebrating, including ours.
Take the French sports betting market for example, which generated a total turnover of more than €1bn during the World Cup, according to new figures from regulators ARJEL.
The market boasted 960,000 new player sign-ups, with the number of active players also climbing from 302,000 to 527,000 in Q2 of 2018, compared to the same period in 2017.
France’s largest iGaming operator took a third of that €1 billion figure in bets across the World Cup, shared between retail and online, a figure inflated by patriotic punters backing ‘Les Bleus’.
It’s therefore impressive that, thanks to a lot of hard work, industry-first crypto betting innovation and a core understanding of player needs, Sportsbet.io was able to generate a turnover of more than €200m during the World Cup.
That’s more than 20 per cent of the whole turnover of a country packed full of mature, local brands, and all despite only launching Sportsbet.io just two years ago ahead of Euro 2016.
In addition, it wasn’t just during the World Cup that Sportsbet.io flourished, the record smashing continued after the final whistle with July 2018 alone producing an immense turnover of over 500 million.
Cashing in on currency options
When attracting bettors from all over the world, it’s important to offer a wide range of payment options in order to make a player’s ability to deposit fun, fast and fair.
After all, without players you don’t have a business. So, the upmost care must be taken when providing them with a secure service, because if you don’t, someone else will.
It’s for that reason we broadened our Bitcoin-first mentality ahead of the World Cup to offer bettors more options when it comes to depositing - integrating Ethereum, Euros and SOC Coin, which introduced a further 50m users from the All Football app.
Our players can also take advantage of our BTCXE’s fiat-to-Bitcoin exchange service, offering those new to cryptocurrency the ability to place bets without needing to go through the hassle of buying Bitcoin externally.
Telegram innovation
Whether it’s casino or sportsbook, the focus on speed, efficiency and on on-the-go betting has never been greater among an ever more demanding player-base, so it’s important to continually develop ways in which players can bet.
Time is at a premium for the modern-day player, it’s not just depositing and withdrawing that needs to be done quickly and efficiently, but also the placing of a wager, especially if a match is about to kick off.
Mobile betting through browsers and apps may be common place and largely effective, but they can still be time consuming and - when short of data or a Wi-Fi connection - a bridge too far.
So, to resolve these issues faced by our customers we turn to tech. Internal Hackathons and workshops dare our teams to disrupt and innovate, and of course, generate welcomed solutions for our players.
One such solution is our industry-first Telegram Betting Bot. Brought to life to enable users without access to stable, fast and affordable internet the same premium betting access.
Bettors benefit from a stripped-down version of our site which presents the essential betting components to our players, void of heavy imagery and text which so often cause lag when loading. Punters can deposit, place bets and withdraw, all without the expensive data costs.
But most impressive, is that it features a vast range of languages, including English, Russian, Chinese, Turkish and Portuguese, once again opening our offerings up to a wider player base.
Retention needs attention
We’ve learnt valuable lessons from our first World Cup glory, now we’re building upon those with no sign of stopping. Sign-ups surged thanks to our outrights offer, which consistent of a free bet to players every time their outright World Cup winner won a game. After proving its popularity we’re happy to see the outrights offer return for the English Premier League.
Though it’s all well and good offering players generous cost-per-acquisition incentives pre-tournament to get them through the door, it’s actually the post event unique selling points that are key in keeping the customer engaged.
We’ve consistently led the way when it comes to bringing innovative, customer-centric functions to our players; a wide array of social media sign-in options and the crypto gaming industry’s first cash out function all proved essential in retaining punters.
It is however, the varied currency options, ease of deposits, speed of wagering and average withdrawals of under two minutes, that ensure a fun, fast and fair player experience. This is a mantra we firmly believe in and one that keeps players returning to Sportsbet.io
