By Joshua Johnston, Deputy Director,
Washington’s Lottery
First, I’d like to talk about the strategic reasoning for developing and enhancing our MY LOTTERY 360. As a state with restrictions around online sales, including second chance entry, we recognize our players’ expectation that we have some form of online presence that allows them to engage with us. The question is how do we do that and stay within the confines of the law? We looked at what was popular within our current app, draw ticket checking, and brainstormed how we can build on that. We expanded our ticket checker to include draw and scratch tickets so a player can check for winning tickets on the go. We also launched a loyalty program as a way of rewarding players and giving them something to extend their experience with us. While the ticket may not be a winner, it can still be redeemed for points toward prizes.
Since the launch of our new app and loyalty program, we have seen engagement with our players expand. We look at how many unique players are interacting with our app; how many points are earned and how many points are being redeemed. The redemption of points shows us that the prizes we offer our players are of value to them. Since we launched about three years ago in November 2019 and through the end of 2021, our players earned 270 million points and redeemed 189 million points for over 62,000 items.
Scientific Games manages our app and loyalty program, and in June of this year, we launched their Optimove Platform which tracks and analyzes interactions with players. Since we have strict online selling restrictions, we must tread carefully, but at least with this we can test and pilot our communication and marketing to players in new ways to see the effectiveness of different strategies in terms of playership increase, player behavior, player retention, etc. We can deliver communication in a way our players want to receive it, is not overburdensome, and keeps them engaged.
As far as metrics, from August 2021 to August 2022, the app has been downloaded nearly 817,000 times. Over 38 million tickets have been scanned. Our average monthly active users are over 37,000. Average yearly active users is nearly 85,000, with a total of over 382,000 total registered users. In 2021, the total retail value spend entered is $118,339,833. The top gift from the loyalty store is a $25 Amazon gift card.