Soft2Bet increases deposits from players around the world with Apifonica’s Player Engagement solution

For online gambling operators, it’s getting increasingly more challenging to retain and engage players. 70% of an average operator’s account base is inactive, with customer lifetime hardly exceeding 12 months. Operators invest a lot of marketing effort (and money) into retaining their account base.

However, not all marketing efforts are equally efficient. Once-dominant marketing channel in the gambling sector, the email, is losing its power. 80% of emails are never open while another 20% struggle to convert players. With dozens of emails competing for a person’s attention, breaking through the noise nowadays takes more effort and creativity than ever.

Like many in the sector, the international gambling operator Soft2Bet was looking for new ways to tackle the “crowded inbox” challenge and reach its audience. Their search for a communication technology partner that could reach Soft2Bet’s international audience across ten countries has led them to Apifonica.

Apifonica is a multi-channel communication platform that allows companies to automate their conversations with customers over the phone, SMS, and popular messaging apps in 150+ languages. Apifonica’s Player Engagement solution delivers promotions personally to each layer over a phone call, reaching 90% of the target audience at 75% engagement rate.

The pilot Soft2Bet’s campaign with Apifonica targeted the operator’s account base in Finland and Italy. Every contact on the list received a phone call from a mobile number in their home area code. Once they picked up a call, they heard the voice message with a promo offer. Those who were interested could receive an SMS with the link to the page with offer details and deposit form. If a customer who missed a call called back, Apifonica would automatically answer the call and play the same voice message. Soft2Bet has access to real-time campaign stats. These include the number of successful calls, user response (keys pressed, call duration, etc.) the number of messages delivered and a list of customers that clicked the link in the SMS.

As Apifonica makes up to 10 000 calls per minute, calling the multi-thousand customer base took less than an hour. The campaign reached 9 in 10 contacts, 8 in 10 listened to the entire message, or requested an SMS with a link. The campaign was up and running in a few days, during which Apifonica arranged recording of the message by native-speaking voice artists, set up algorithms for calling and messaging and provided phone numbers in Italy and Finland.

“We are very pleased with the outcome of the pilot campaign,” says Head of CRM at Soft2Bet. “The impact is almost immediate, on both the user activity and the number of deposits. And then we appreciate the possibility to integrate Apifonica’s solution with our CRM via API. This integration will allow us to trigger automated calling and messaging campaigns based on user behaviour, make them more personalised and relevant to each customer.”

Shortly, Soft2Bet intends to launch Apifonica-powered engagement campaigns in all ten countries of their presence, including EU, Brazil, India and China.