10 Factors that Drive the Conversion of Punters to Your Sport Betting Website - To Register and to Deposit

 

Achieve 90% Conversion Rate by Implementing the ideas on this post! 

The Sports betting industry is now a NGN45 billion business in Nigeria and is expected to grow at 15% annually. New technological advancements, and fierce competition are shaking up the way customers are betting online. Ever-growing numbers of sport betting operators(over 65 brands operating in Nigeria) are seeking to differentiate themselves to stand out from the crowded market by creating unique experiences.

The major challenges has been how to not only to get new customers to register but to deposit and start betting regularly. To reducing cost of customer acquisition, customer retention, and increasing customer lifetime value. 

a) Fundermental Factors

There are fundermental factors a sport betting operator should ensure first is to continually improve customer experience and reduce as much as possible difficulties they may be experiencing:

1. Easy to use website: 

Most operators spend big on advertising to acquire new players but many of those efforts are diluted if the website isn’t performing to its best potential or meeting the players’ expectations for a good gaming experience. 

Website should have a good mobile and desktop interface seeing that there are increasing use of mobile devices to bet. New bettors may go to kiosks to understand how people bet, but more and more bettors are using their desktop computers at home or their mobile phones on the go. 

By now, we’ve established that for Sport betting business to thrive, the player experience needs to be exceptionally good and personalized, but player experience requires much more than a pretty website. Ultimately, it’s about understanding your players’ needs and personalizing the player experience while reminding them of the thrill of finding new games to play.

2. Maximum Gaming Options

Yeah, a lot of punters in Nigeria are football fans and bet more on football games to reward their passion. But sport betting isn't about football, their are many bet options: horse race, dog race...especially "professional punters" who bet almost every day. 

A sport betting website should have a near maximum gaming options that keeps the punters busy always. 

Maximum payment options

Some punters complain of payout issues, that operators make it easier to deposit and when it comes to win payment there seems to be a lot of bottlenecks. 

Operations should endeavor to make both pay-in and pay-out easy by providing several payment options: bank card (Visa and MasterCard),PayPal, myBank, union pay, Venmo, webmoney... Most punters prefer their winning payment should be transferred straight to their bank account. 

4. Providing of Odds

Customers look out for an operators odds on their website. Odds provide a measure of the likelihood of a particular outcome. They are calculated as the ratio of the number of events that produce that outcome to the number that do not. 

Display of both long odds (high risk) and Short odds (lower risk) has a way to motivate bettors to make decisions. A study by Bethand shows if long odds bets are priced to provide poorer value to bettors compared to short odds, they would increase gamblers' losses and equivalently increase operators' profits. Some bettors prefer to take high risk, while many more prefer lower risks on short odds. 

b) Popular strategies

Sports betting operators competitive strategies seems spread out so much that you wonder if they really lead to any form of conversion. When one brand come up with a strategy soon others would put the same in place too. The popular strategies are aggressive promotion of credit incentives and bonuses, using affiliate partners to reduce costs of advertisement. 

5. Welcome Bonus

The recent competitive war in the Sports betting industry is the use of welcome bonus or free betting. 

Welcome bonus is a cash reward, usually a percentage of the customer's first deposits, and can be anything from 25% to 200%, or more depending on the betting site. When you sign up on the betting site and make a first deposit, you account will be instantly credited with your welcome bonus.

Welcome bonus cause bettors to move rapidly from one betting platform to another as the bonus keep increasing. Melbet is offering upto 300% welcome bonus now and Betway is offering free betting upto NGN 500. 

It is one thing to get bettors to register and deposit money, it is another to retain them in your platform. Welcome bonus is greatly affecting customers loyalty. 

6. ACCA Bonus

Another strategy most operators in Nigeria are also using is ACCA bonus to drive conversion and as well retain customers.

An accumulator bonus, or an 'acca' bonus for short, is a betting promotion in which bookmakers offer extra winnings if you place a winning multiple wager with a certain number of selections. For example, you could get a 10% boost on football accas with 3+ legs. 1xbet offer as much as 20% ACCA bonus now. 

7. Affiliate Partnership

Sports betting operators understand that the business depends largely on aggressive promotion and engagement of customers to put their brand active in their mind. With the rising cost of CPM advertisements, most operators have ahead to develop CPA affiliate partnership, also known as affiliate marketing program. 

Sports betting affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy that enables affiliate marketers, content providers, online influencers to send potential customers to the sports betting platforms by making use of various means and for every conversion, affiliate marketers earn a commission. Brands like 22bet is offering upto 30% CPA commission on lost bets. 

c) Destruptive Strategies

What is required to make a difference really is disruptive strategies you can use to drive in new custmers in a way that they will not only register and deposit money, but continue to bet on the platform during a given cycle. 

Disruptive Strategy enables you to make innovation a reality by .developing frameworks to better understand customer needs and betting behaviors. There are different types of Disruption - Sustaining Innovation, Low-End Disruption, New Market Disruption. Approach innovation through finding solutions for the customer. 

The preferences of players are difficult to predetermine and preferences also change over time. Artificial intelligence accelerates understanding player behavior which is the first step towards an excellent player experience.

8. Strategic Promotions and Engagements

Use social proof to promote games and drive a sense of urgency

Social proof plays a major role in your players’ purchase decisions. Even when people are impressed by your services, they almost always look at the actions of others to guide their decision-making process. Simply, social proof helps you build trust in your online business. You might want to show the first-time player how many active players there are on the site and what they are playing at that particular moment. Testimonials and game ratings are also effective social proof to promote games and increase conversions.

Recommendations for better engagement

Recommendations are a powerful way to increase conversion rates and the player’s lifetime value. AI-powered recommendations ensure that you’re harnessing all of the data available on every touchpoint of your service. You can leverage this data to start predicting what slot/game/market your player would like to see next. This continuous combination of learning from a player’s product interest, their profiles, and the context of their visit, means that you can offer highly targeted, relevant, and engaging content.

Betway can be sure that they are serving the right content to the right customer at the right time while minimizing their churn rate. Machine learning helps them select content based on a deep understanding of the players’ preferences.

9. Sales promotion

Sales promotion is a very powerful tool to drive in new customers and get them playing during a promotional campaign cycle. Set a Car or a trip to the next world Cup for a certain frequency of bets in a time cycle. 

Set other giveaways like Nigeria national team or Chelsea  jerseys, balls and tickets to Super Eagles world Cup qualifiers  to motivate bettors during the sales promotional campaign. Be creative, think of other sales promotional ideas you can implement. 

10. Sponsorship Activations

Sponsoring a program or event gives you access to the audience the event attracts. Sponsorship activations is to make use of such partnership to get what you want. For instance, you may decide to activate registration and deposit during the event or program. 

9jaBet and Betway had in the past years, sponsored Big brother Naija, and gained access to millions of audiences that follow the program on TV. 

The final factor here which may be perhaps, the most important is your Customer service. How your customers are cared for and the personnel who handles their case and help them find solutions quickly, without stress. May just be what you need to keep the bettors and get much more referrals. Treat your customer truly like a king!