Online casino, MrQ, site ups the ante with omnichannel marketing

When MrQ first partnered with Dotdigital eight years ago, the online casino was in search of a platform that would help it communicate with customers through operational emails and basic marketing messages. Since then, a lot has changed. MrQ’s business has grown rapidly, and the site is more popular than ever with players. The team knew they needed to implement dynamic solutions to keep pace with demand.

Challenge

One of the key pain points MrQ faced was that it was losing existing players. “We were successful in bringing in new players, but we knew that if we didn’t have the retention piece to support that, it was essentially money down the drain,” says Hannah Whyte, Senior CRM Manager at MrQ. “That was ultimately our biggest challenge.”

MrQ was also using a number of different channels to reach its audiences, including direct mail, email, SMS, and Facebook ads. Its efforts were becoming increasingly disconnected and not as effective as they could be.

“We knew that the easiest way to execute omnichannel marketing is to keep everything in one place,” adds Hannah. “If you have assets and campaigns across multiple platforms, it can get messy, hard to track, and difficult to repeat or scale.”

Ultimately, MrQ needed to find a way to improve its marketing ROI, better target its players, and create a unified experience through a strong email marketing automation strategy.

Solution

With the support of their in-house developers and the dotdigital team, MrQ employed a variety of solutions to do just that.

Using Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) scoring paired with its in-house CRM tool, MrQ was able to segment its customers and create a strategy to drive reactivation. MrQ created a campaign to target two important segments: churning customers (those whose recency score has dropped but are still valuable) and unqualified players (those who have registered with MrQ but have never made a deposit). After using Dotdigital’s drag-and-drop templates to design emails, the team then ran targeted campaigns that were personalized to each segment.

By using Dotdigital’s integration capabilities to set up a single workflow for their channels, they were able to overcome the obstacles they faced with disjointed campaigns. “The integrations have been instrumental for us, as they enable us to run our campaigns all in one place and use program reporting to measure the overall performance,” Hannah says.

By leveraging Dotdigital’s automation solution, the team was also able to set up automated campaigns for different customer segments based on their RFM score.

Results

Through their targeted campaign, MrQ was successful at reducing customer churn. In fact, the company has seen a 59% increase in revenue from December 2020 to March 2021 from retained players (those who made their first deposit and wager in the prior month) who would have otherwise been lost. MrQ has also seen a 65% increase in retained active players over the same timeframe.

In addition to improving retention rates, the CRM team has benefited from the time savings of data-driven automations. Today, 60% of their campaigns are automated, enabling them to take a more strategic and holistic approach to their marketing campaigns.

“Dotdigital has empowered us to cultivate personal, player-focused experience journeys at scale,” Hannah states. “We are supported by our Account Manager and the wider team; they’re helping us grow our use of the platform to support our business needs.”

What's next

MrQ has ambitious plans to continue to scale their marketing efforts in the months to come. While the majority of MrQ’s channels are now integrated with Dotdigital, the team have their sights on integrating two additional custom extensions: direct mail and WhatsApp Business. They will also be launching their first TV and radio adverts this summer and will partner with Dotdigital on the onboarding journey for new players through automated campaigns.

“We’re moving quickly, and there’s so much more we want to do,” says Hannah. “Dotdigital is supporting that so we can scale at speed.”