Players can often pinpoint what they enjoy about a favorite lottery game relative to its play style, mechanics, prizes, or odds. Yet the total experience extends beyond these features. It encompasses how a game is priced, promoted, purchased, and delivered. That’s why even the most successful games can benefit from fine-tuning each point in the player journey.
To help customers optimize their draw game portfolio, Brightstar Lottery’s draw game specialists recently initiated a thorough examination of how consumers engage with each draw game type, digging into all aspects of the player experience. They aim to uncover ways to better serve consumer preferences and unlock even more value. Brightstar’s Cash Pop™ draw game is a prime example:
Refining the Self-Service Interface
Now live in 17 U.S. markets and counting, Cash Pop resonates with players who appreciate the game’s simplicity, customizable odds, price-point options, and frequent daily draws. Looking for further areas to optimize, Brightstar analysts found that Cash Pop consistently over indexes on self-service lottery vending machines (LVMs), making it a strong candidate for interface optimization.
“In many states that offer it, Cash Pop generates a larger share of LVM sales than most other draw games.”
Joe Charest, Brightstar Senior Manager, Game Development and Portfolio Management
What’s more, jurisdictions with a greater penetration of LVMs are seeing a high percentage of total Cash Pop sales from this channel. The finding suggests there is an opportunity to further align standard prompts on LVM user interfaces with how Cash Pop fans naturally play. “With games like Cash Pop and Keno, consumers typically prefer to choose their own numbers,” observes Sarah Walker, Brightstar Senior Director, Draw Based Game Portfolio Optimization. “Players are likely to appreciate it if the purchase flow at an LVM offers that choice first,” versus defaulting to Quick Pick.
The team is now analyzing Cash Pop LVM interfaces across jurisdictions to identify best in class approaches and implement them across the network. For example: Adding a prominent button to highlight the “5 Pop-play,” which improves players’ odds to 1 in 3 and ensures that a prize won will never be less than their investment, since the minimum prize in Cash Pop is 5X the wager.
Driving Measurable Lift
Brightstar continues to innovate with the Cash Pop game itself and make ongoing refinements to the patent-pending side-bet options. A recent, highly successful enhancement is the $20 price point. New Jersey, the first lottery to launch the $20 Cash Pop price point in November 2024, has seen sustained performance gains since launch. Average daily sales of Cash Pop have increased by nearly 18% and gross gaming revenue per day climbed more than 16%. Today, the $20 option represents roughly one quarter of Cash Pop sales in the state. Pennsylvania, the latest state to launch Cash Pop, debuted the game with the $20 price point in place. Early results show a meaningful share of sales, ~30% since launch, coming from this price tier, validating the strategy of offering premium options at launch.
Promotions & Draw Timing
Promotional innovation among Cash Pop lotteries is also accelerating. “Following strong results from the Cash Pop instant-win feature launched in Georgia, we worked with Brightstar to design a similar promotion, tailored to our state’s players,” reports Ammie Smith, Director of Product Development, South Carolina Education Lottery. “The promotion delivered standout performance, resulting in a ~19% increase in Q4 sales over the prior Q3. We’re now expanding the promotion to other game types.”
Draw timing is another variable to optimize. “Draw frequency is highly market specific,” says Walker, citing two examples tuned to local player preferences. New Jersey’s shift from 15 minute to four minute draw intervals in June 2022 resulted in sustained, positive sales growth for its keno interleaved Cash Pop game. Average weekly sales show more than a 13% lift. Michigan reduced its draw interval from 15 minutes to seven minutes in April, with Brightstar projecting a similar lift based on historical performance. Walker adds, “We’re happy to consult with lotteries to identify the optimal cadence based on player behavior and local conditions.”
Innovation Beyond Game Parameters
Brightstar recently expanded its draw game team to formally integrate specialists with path to purchase and retail analytics expertise. By analyzing multi-jurisdiction RMI (Retail Market Insights™) data down to the terminal, game, and retailer level, the team is now identifying ways to optimize accessibility, visibility, and communication at retail. As these efforts advance, additional Cash Pop rollouts are slated for this year.