Public Gaming July/August 2016

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26 // PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL // July/August 2016
Gary Gonder: Recent research conducted by App Boy found
that levels of customer engagement have a direct correlation
with the level of customer retention. Only 55% of individuals
who use an app in the first week after download will be retained
or will show further activity over the next three months. But
90% of the people who engage every week for the first month
will be retained. So it’s key
to have them active for those
first 30 days.
Bill Thorburn: It can be
just one key feature that
drives success for the app.
For instance, we launched a
ticket scanning element to
the app in February 2015.
There’s been a tremendous
take-up of just that one fea-
ture. A great app has to have
features that people actually
value and want to use. In the
first month that we put that
feature onto the app, we had 7% of the lottery’s app users using
the feature. Within 30 days it had gone up to 24%, and it has
become a very effective acquisition tool for our digital offer. A
lot of our retail players who haven’t registered for digital play
wanted to use the app for that one purpose of scanning their
ticket. Once they download the app, then we have the ability to
talk to them about the other features on the app which include
convenient purchasing of product. And because of our player
registration system, once they scan a ticket that’s registered then
we can actually talk to them individually because we know who
they are. That’s a pretty good example of what value can be de-
livered through an app, or even a single feature of an app.
Kevin Gass: We are in an interesting spot because we are
always working to move forward with the application of tech-
nology to deliver more player benefits. We thought, for instance,
that it would be good to create a more horizontally integrat-
ed relationship to our player base. Create a one-stop app that
makes all of our games available to the player. We were surprised
to find that players do not necessarily want that. For instance,
our digital channel included a lot of casino-style
games and sports-betting. We did some research and found that
a lot of our lottery players got turned off by that. They felt
the site was all about gambling and lottery is not really about
gambling. So we hit the pause button while we think this one
through. We redesigned our website to tone down the casino/
sports betting component. We also decided that we’re not going
to mix these all together into a single app. We will have a lottery
app designed for lottery players which will be a transactional
app as well. The main thing is that it will be totally focused
on the lottery world because we have found that while we can
fairly easily migrate casino players into lottery, it’s much more
challenging to migrate lottery players into casino. There’s some
migration, but not a lot. So
we’re starting to separate
those worlds to match up the
player with the game catego-
ries they are most interested
in.
Bill Thorburn: Ditto! We
have had the same experience
in the southern hemisphere.
Our app has sports
betting, horse wagering, and
lotteries on the one app. We
are going to break that apart
and deliver a lotteries-only
offer which is properly focused on lottery players and their in-
terests rather than attempting to cover the interests of a sub-
group who like betting on horses and sports. Lottery pleayers
will have their own dedicated app.
Gary Gonder: We’ve heard the terms Beacon Technology,
Geo-mapping, and Geo-targeting, but have you heard of “Shop-
Kick?” It’s an app for the really cost-conscious consumer. You
go into a Wal-Mart or a Target or any of the big box stores and
you get points for just walking into the store. You get points for
scanning something. You get more points for buying something.
Those points can be turned into something that you buy at that
retail location. Where should we go with this? How can lotteries
take advantage of these kinds of proximity marketing tools, and
how can we make sure it’s not “spammy?”
Kevin Gass: I’m a bit of a skeptic. I hear lots of anecdotes,
but I haven’t actually seen business results or data that show the
benefit and the kind of incremental sales that you might get from
employing that kind of technology. The notion of spontaneously
responding to a beep or push message just does not really com-
port with my view of the way consumers actually behave. Con-
versely, I think the point-of-sale signage in our retail networks are
very effective in promoting impulse purchases.
Bill Thorburn: We are doing a significant level of direct mar-
keting through our established CRM programs. So, like Kevin,
We are going to break that apart
and deliver a lotteries-only offer which
is properly focused on lottery players
and their interests rather than attempting
to cover the interests of a sub-group
who like betting on horses and sports.
Lottery pleayers will have their own
dedicated app.
—Bill Thorburn