By Stephen Ortiz, Director, Marketing & Sales, Kansas Lottery
One enhancement worth mentioning would be the Coupon Wallet/Storage Enhancement that launched in FY21.
It has been a useful and important enhancement for the Kansas Lottery. The purpose was to provide storage of and allow members to access their Kansas Lottery coupons directly within the PlayOn app and website as opposed to receiving by email in the past. Coupon expiry was also included in this enhancement so coupons that had expired would no longer be shown in the list of available coupons.
Since KSL offers several monthly coupons that players can enter to win or redeem points to receive, this new functionality has proven incredibly useful for players and solved a frequent pain point of players losing track of their coupon emails and needing to connect with customer support.
Dormant Accounts
This was a new initiative that we implemented at the beginning of 2022 intending to clean up the dormant, deactivated, and unconfirmed accounts on the platform. This was aimed to help reduce the number of accounts were on the platform that were inactive and no longer being used.
We ran our first campaign of this kind back in January 2022 and since then have run one in June 2022. The goal moving forward is to run this campaign quarterly to help keep the membership base to those who are active and engaged.
The campaign consists of emailing our dormant members with an incentive to re-engage or risk having their accounts deleted. Our segment of dormant members includes all accounts whose members have not logged in to PlayOn in 15+ Months. This will include active, deactivated, confirmed and non-confirmed accounts.
Only confirmed, active members who have opted in for marketing emails will receive the email communications. Those members who go the extra mile and complete an earn activity will receive 1,000 bonus points and a welcome back email.
All accounts who did not log back in during the campaign period will be deactivated for 2 weeks and then deleted.
For future campaigns we are reviewing the parameters and intend to make adjustments to ensure this campaign is the most efficient and effective it can be.
Since January we have removed a little over 225,000 dormant accounts off of the platform and had a re-engagement rate of just under 0.5% for both campaigns run.
Welcome Email Series
This is an automated series we implemented in 2021, consisting of 5 emails that are triggered when someone creates and confirms their PlayOn account. Emails are automatically sent out to players and provide additional information about the app, submitting tickets on the platform, completing their player preference survey, social media and referring friends with opportunities to earn bonus points throughout. The triggered email progression runs for 12 days after a player has confirmed their account. The email series has been an effective way to educate players about the benefits of being a PlayOn member when they are earliest in their tenure, and most excited about joining, with the intent of keeping them engaged.
Retention Campaigns
Our focus for the past year and moving into FY23 would be to continue to increase retention of seasonal players and jackpot chasers through various tactics including; jackpot & holiday retention readiness campaigns, quarterly lapsed player campaigns, and automated welcome email series.
Each of these have allowed us to retain members who may normally fall off after their initial engagement. Some of the campaigns we ran this previous year include…
Jackpot Retention Campaigns (May 2022 Powerball Retention)
Our objective for this campaign was to try and retain Jackpot chasers – PlayOn members who registered to PlayOn and submitted one or more Powerball tickets between April 13 – April 28, 2022. These dates are between when the jackpot hit over $300 million and when the jackpot was won.
The reward given to this segment was the Lucky Numbers Free Play game which was activated on the earn pages for members to play with a chance to win up to 350 bonus points. 4.8% of the segment engaged and played the Lucky Numbers game. 1.6% of the engaged players continued to engage after the campaign had ended.
Moving forward we will test different rewards and communications to help further engage the jackpot chasers (points, coupons, promo codes, etc.) This is further discussed below.
Lapsed Player Campaigns
Our goal with the Lapsed player campaign was to encourage lapsed PlayOn members (members who have not engaged with PlayOn in 3 months – completed an earn or redeem activity) to submit an instant or draw ticket of any value to receive a $2 coupon. Coupons were awarded for their first ticket submission during the promotional period. This campaign is run quarterly with aim to get at least a 1.5% re-engagement from the lapsed players. We ran these campaigns in July 2021 (1.4%), November 2021 (1.1%) and May 2022 (1.4%) and will continue to run each quarter as we have found them to be successful in re-engaging players.
Holiday Retention Campaign:
The Holiday Season is one of the busiest times for PlayOn and we often see a fair amount of engagement drop-off after the season wraps up. Our goal with these holiday retention campaigns is to encourage the retention of holiday PlayOn members (members who joined PlayOn from December 1, 2021 – January 31, 2022) after the holiday season is over. For this campaign we encouraged holiday PlayOn members to submit any ticket of any value (between February 23, 2022 and March 9, 2022) to receive a $2 coupon. Coupons were awarded for their first ticket submission during the promotional period.
Our targeted segment was roughly 15,522 players and we had 624 of them re-engage resulting in a re-engagement of 4.02%. This was the first time we had run a campaign like this, and we plan to use our learnings to determine our quantifiable objective for future campaigns. Moving forward we will test various elements of the campaign to find the most effective combination in retaining seasonal players.
FY23
The focus for FY23 is around continued engagement of existing members, and increased player retention of seasonal and jackpot chasers. PlayOn engagement remains steady even 5 years in market, however there is a great opportunity to capture more “Fairweather” players who play only during the holidays or when large draw game jackpots are rolling and entice them to engage more frequently throughout the year.
Jackpot Retention Campaigns (Pre and Post):
We know that jackpot runs bring in a large volume of players. While the jackpot is building it is important to send targeted communications to players creating awareness around the jackpot amounts, drawing dates and encouraging players to purchase their tickets for their chance to win. KSL has run a few post-jackpot campaigns as mentioned earlier but will be revisiting implementing some tactics to communicate with players while a jackpot is building. This has been identified as an important initiative for FY23. Here are the suggested campaign pieces provided to the lottery:
- The threshold has been set at $300 million as a marker for our teams to identify the beginning of a jackpot run.
- We want to help spread the word during the early days of a jackpot run so we would like to provide some pre-jackpot communications such as: Email/Push, Newsfeed and website graphics. The focus here would be to remind players about the rolling Jackpot and where it is at while also encouraging players to find their nearest retailer to purchase tickets.
- To further encourage players to purchase and submit tickets within the PlayOn platform we would recommend running a point multiplier tying in to the tickets included in the rolling jackpot. This campaign could be a multiplier decided by the lottery and would run until the jackpot is hit. This just further incentivizes players to get their tickets and join in on the fun.
- We also would recommend providing some variety in the post-jackpot campaign options. Providing segmented players, the lucky numbers Free Play game would remain as one of these options.
Segmented players could also receive a coupon or a promo code they would redeem for points as an alternative to incentivize continued engagement on the platform. Post-jackpot would also be a great time to get to know this segment better by providing them a survey and find out more about what makes them tick and their general play behaviors, allowing us to know how best to engage future similar players.
Retailer Partnerships/Event Geo-Fence Player Communications
The lottery has a great relationship with their retailers and has collaborated with them in the past on joint ventures in-store and with their loyalty club promotions. In FY23 there is even more opportunity to expand on those initiatives. KSL has run specific geo-fence player communications in the past and we would like to carry this forward into FY23. These work by connecting specific locations to a push messaging that is triggered when a player comes within a certain distance from it. These have been tied to specific retailers and promotions in the past along and would be recommended to employ with events run with the KS Lottery moving forward (KS Speedway, KS State Fair, etc.)
The focus of these geo-fence player communications would be to drive traffic to specific retailers during times of promotion as well as encourage players to participate through PlayOn when at specific events.
Enhancing Email Communications – Increase Engagement and Efficiency of Emails
Even though our email metrics are strong, we have identified opportunities to enhance our communication with players in line with industry best practices, and ultimately keep them engaged. These would include…
- Focus on mobile optimization
- Strategic template design
- Hierarchy of information, focus on CTAs
- Animation and Interactivity to draw attention and gamify content