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South Africa is one of Africa's newest and hottest markets, but there are plenty of idiosyncrasies that international operators need to take into consideration before entering. Localised and personalised marketing across all markets is a huge challenge, but what is best practice for player acquisition and retention across South Africa? Well, luckily we're joined by an industry expert who can help us answer just that. Welcome back to iGaming Daily, supported by Optimove, the creator of positionalist marketing. and number one player engagement solution for sports betting and iGaming operators. Learn how OptiMove's positionless marketing is changing how iGaming teams operate. Discover how operators are using OptiMove's positionless marketing platform to launch personalized CRM campaigns, dynamically change casino lobbies and bet slips, and create engaging gamified experiences. can learn more at OptiMove.com. I'm Charlie Horner and today I'm joined by OptiMove's account executive and uh African expert, Henry Ross. Henry, thanks for joining me. How's things? Yeah, all good. Thank you. All good. Thank you, Charlie. Yeah. So excited about the podcast today. Fantastic. Well, we're placing our focus on South Africa today. Maybe it be a good place to start by just giving us a bit of an overview about what South African operators should be thinking about when it comes to their CRM marketing. So yeah, I think The African market is, and the South African market specifically is in a really interesting time. There's a lot of pressures on those marketers and they might just be thinking, how can I get more messages out? How can I get more campaigns out? And maybe not thinking enough about how they can also use that as an opportunity to learn more about their players and to really help them stand out amongst what is now a very competitive space. Yeah, it's short. It's a very competitive space and it's When we talk about new markets, can sometimes be that land grab, as we might call it. Everyone's just trying to acquire so many players. I guess it's about being a bit more intelligent about the way that they gather that data and learn about their players. Yeah, absolutely. think that you point out a very clear problem or challenge that within a market that is so dominated by... a few big players as people look to enter the market or look to gain more market share. Like how do you do that in an environment where uh the big money is being spent and you've got to kind of stand out. So I think that how you look at CRM as an opportunity to gain intelligence, to be more uh efficient with your marketing, it doesn't just improve things from a retention perspective. Obviously we would think that. But it can also help you be a bit more efficient on the acquisition side as well. you know, when we look at campaigns, it's, know, how can you, how can you react to the response? You know, the response is better. How can you identify where you're not getting through to the right players at the right time? Is it about bonusing? That's the issue. it about abuse of those bonuses? Are you over relying on specific promotions and, you know, are you being local, being relevant with your language and how are you, you know, identifying preferences within players to identify the right strategy. So instead of looking at as a kind of execution, getting campaigns out the door and then worrying about it later, uh you maybe need to think about it within this market about, um, instead of hitting the same button repeatedly, being a bit more different and intelligent with your outcomes, um, or with your execution so you can have better outcomes. yeah, you mentioned there that operators should be shifting their thinking from traditional sort of calm. pain-based marketing towards a more personalized and customer-led engagement strategy. Could you just walk us through what that looks like in practice? obviously maybe OptiMove's solutions kind of come into that as well. I think it's a really interesting, as I say, it's an interesting time because as the market is maturing, there's a lot of new opportunities for marketers within the iGaming, within South African iGaming space. They're focused, as I've mentioned often on just, we get these campaigns out the door? you know, these, as you reach this kind of scale, there are the challenges that come with that. So is it creating content? Is it being able to look at multiple channels? Does that mean different vendors you need to look at? Is that a broader number of people you need to kind of engage with internally to get these campaigns out the door, know, data teams and stuff like that. So, you know, when we look at this focus shifting, it's now about being able to leverage a technology or leverage partners that are going to give you the right pieces and the right advice to take campaign execution from a point of, just send an SMS to everybody with the same offer, to can we personalize and make more relevant the campaign down to very individual, very granular data points. And maybe also having a clear understanding about what does good look like? the benchmarking opportunities that we can offer to operators as well. you know, it's, I think probably very easy to get stuck in the, I think it's that kind of campaign execution loop of just sending the same thing and pressing the same button. As I mentioned before, you know, having a more holistic understanding of the player allows you to be a bit more driven in terms of the engagement opportunities towards their actual interests versus, you know, what you might assume they're interested in. I guess that's perhaps a common challenge in new markets and emerging markets like South Africa where operators don't necessarily have that data on their players to start off with. is that something that you see across emerging markets in Africa? absolutely. So South Africa is probably the leading market, but we see this in Nigeria, in Kenya, in Ghana, in Tanzania. I mean, I could lift off soft countries here, but yeah, that emerging market, it's not the situation where maybe in Western Europe or in North America or another kind of more mature markets where people are going to go through that kind of consistent structured approach of becoming slowly more mature over time. These, a lot of these operators are going to be able to immediately skip the queue, let's say of, like becoming smarter incrementally to becoming very smart and very data driven very quickly. It's an, it's an incredibly promotion driven environment as well. So, you know, people are taking that kind of blast approach to campaigns at the moment. What we're offering is that ability to kind of layer in a lot more intelligence, you know, be responsive to churn patterns of behavior, responsiveness to campaigns, engagement in real time with the site. All of these insights that we can pull together now, we're going to compound in a way that will help you shift player behaviors and kind of reshape the way that you approach player loyalty. And that's not just within South Africa, as you say, it's within other emerging markets. So yeah, it's a really interesting, it's a very exciting opportunity these marketers have to to a bit more informed with their engagement, yeah, for sure. And you said that these emerging markets are very promotion heavy, lots of bonuses in there. uh That can be quite costly for operators who want to try and acquire those players. But how can they do that in a smarter way? How can they manage that promotion in a strategic way without oh missing out the opportunity to acquire new players? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's not just about the costs of promotions, it's the over-reliance on them. em It's the lack of intelligence or kind of in a blind approach, you know, throwing a dartboard, seeing what lands kind of thing that maybe a lot of operators are struggling with at the moment. I think there's also going to be a massive shift in the way the regulators approach these strategies. I think that's coming down the line within South Africa. It's being talked about in other markets as well. If your strategy is overaligned on one outcome or one channel, so to speak, uh you are becoming inefficient over time without really knowing it. think what we talking about in terms of that campaign intelligence where you are learning more about players and being more prescriptive rather than reactive to outcomes that you're looking to achieve, you have to look at the segments of data in a much more granular way. You have to understand uh who is promotion sensitive, who's likely to be an abuser that you don't necessarily want to push press campaigns towards. Maybe identifying where it has been inefficient, looking at future value metrics uh to send campaigns, whether it's maybe not worth it. These insights, as you gather them, allow you to be much more precise rather than just, okay, let's dial it up and send more. You could start maybe even sending less and seeing better results or similar results and being Like you say, probably more cost effective at the same time. I guess those operators who have that data-driven approach, who understand those insights and can use them to their advantage, not only can reduce costs on the acquisition side, but they make the investment in the acquisition worth it because they can retain players for much longer. And we know how important retention is for operators nowadays. I it's even more important in emerging markets like South Africa. So I guess the question is, can operators use that data-driven CRM strategy to improve and bolster player loyalty and lifetime value? Yeah, it's a real challenge because I think tied into the the bonusing approach and that affects both retention and initial player acquisition as well. you really are starting to... You can't really differentiate yourself in that environment, or it's very difficult to, because the biggest pockets will often win. It becomes, like you've mentioned there, the loyalty side of things becomes more interesting when you can add multiple layers to it. And what we talk about with now multiple layers, it's not just about multi-channel execution, it's not just about being more relevant and interesting with the player in terms of the types of communications they can get from you. It's probably table stakes now to be able to do multiple channels at once. Um, what becomes more meaningful is when that intelligence allows you to be more prescriptive with the types of tools you use. Right. So it's not just about broadcasting out the same experiences you can layer in, you know, gamification, you can bring in different, um, types of, uh, kind of fun and surprise and delight campaigns, which are going to be materially different from the, uh, from the competitors that are out there within this space. So if you think about it in the context of engagement, when you can start kind of layering in those fun, different experiences which react to different triggers that look into players' preferences and context. It's not so much about the similar mechanisms playing again and again. It's about that intelligence becoming very strategic, how you use the intelligence becoming very strategic. And you bring that down to a one-to-one level where one player might get a completely different action from another player because of how they've engaged with the brand. So whether that's a gamified experience, whether it's... it is a promotion, whether it's something that's a bit more brand led, we can do that. That's the approach we prefer people take versus that kind of one size fits all approach. Fantastic. And we'll dive into some of those individual methods just after the break. But yeah, Henry, we'll take a quick breather and we'll come back and we'll chat a little bit more. Welcome back to iGaming Daily. I'm joined by Henry Ross, account executive at Optimove and a specialist in African markets. Henry, we spoke just before the break about different ways of driving long-term engagement and driving lifetime value of players. And something that you mentioned was loyalty and gamification, often positioned as sort of engagement tools, but how do they evolve into genuine, meaningful retention strategies than just, rather than just an additional promo? Yeah, I think it's... If you take it back to how the players are perceiving the messages they're receiving, that's where I think you can start to paint a meaningful difference. The difference between to the recipient, the different experiences we can send to people, is very much that. It's a different experience versus just we can press the SMS send button. We can press the web pop-ups button. These are all very much like you say, these are kind of the old school way to look at this as pure engagement rather than what experience are we actually trying to deliver? If we take into account real-time engagement, we can talk about real-time player preferences evolving and changing, how that can influence the predictive models that sit at the core of what OptiMove is. This can mean that when we go to a player with these different opportunities, different options, it's engaging them with something interesting and fun rather than something that's, like I say, one size fits all. The difference, in my opinion as well, is that... especially within the South African market and other emerging markets globally. If you look at the different operators out there and the types of strategies that they employ, they're often maybe not having to, and this is maybe to more to the more enterprise operators, they don't really have to maybe be as innovative. They can rely on market position and brand awareness. If you can't rely on that same, you know, awareness and that same kind of strength, let's say your opportunity to engage players and, know, it has to be something fun and innovative versus, um, and be a lot more data-led and intelligent, um, with that approach, rather than just being a bit more broad broadcast approach. So yeah, I think it's, it's a necessity to, to approach things with that lens versus, uh, let's just do what the other guys are doing. If that makes sense. Yeah, operators certainly have to sort of forge their own path when it comes to those retention strategies. A lot of that is sort of driven by AI and it's done in real time through different technologies. From the outside looking in, we have these conversations about AI and real time marketing quite often. But I'm quite eager to learn from you sort of on the ground really, because I see them as buzzwords and... and things that we talk about quite a lot, but what does AI driven optimization genuinely look like in practice on the ground? And do you think there's sort of a bit of a misunderstanding of what it is and the value of it? First things first, absolutely. there some misunderstanding going on? I think there's also some deliberate misunderstanding, convolution of what is actually AI versus what's just automation. Um, so yeah, do think that that is happening. Um, and the outcome again, if you're thinking about operators as they do just end up looking at it as, well, that is a buzzword. It doesn't offer me anything real or, or, or transformational. So, yeah, I think that can be very difficult. So, um, being able to do something faster isn't necessarily just art is in, you know, on its own artificial intelligence. It's just smart automation, you know, where it becomes really meaningful as where we can layer in the different levels of intelligence that, um, you know, AI or agents might want to call them, can apply learnings into different campaign flows and structure. So, you know, on your own, can you optimize an end-to-end life cycle for a player? uh Maybe with a lot of intelligence and taking a lot of time. But if you can use a platform which recognize patterns and helps you incrementally improve your decision-making process as a marketer, that's where I see a meaningful difference between just more generative capabilities to something that's actually uh going to drive more meaningful uplift. that's the outcome of most optimization is uplift, trying to meaningful improve something between campaign iteration one and campaign iteration two. So to me, the difference between what is a buzzword is, and what ultimately is more meaningful is that where you're not just doing things faster, you're doing better and incrementally better over time versus oh something that's individually tactical outcomes to something that becomes much more strategic. those kind of... buzzwords come to the fore really when there are really competitive markets. When we see new markets emerge, they tend to become quite competitive. We saw that in the early days of the US. We saw that in Latin America. We're starting to see that in Africa as well. There's plenty of competition, some regulatory pressure as well. As a result of that, how do you think Operators should be thinking about their approach to player behavior and engagement on a deeper level using those kind of AI driven insights? Yeah, it's a very interesting moment because I think you're right, North America, South America, now within South Africa and more broadly across Africa, we're seeing a lot of change and change is inherent. That's the only constant, isn't it, sometimes. And that unpredictability within the regulatory environment the competitive aspect of some already well established operators, international operators coming in with new offerings within the South African market. It's going to create an environment where there are winners and losers. And I would suggest that, and we saw this in, we've seen this across the world. I think that if operators become rigid in their approach, if they become over-reliant on individual tactics or strategies, they are very likely to become vulnerable to change. And they probably already are, they may not know it. So what we would suggest the other way of looking at that is to add as many uh outcomes or experiences that you can send to players that allow you to be tactically flexible. So when you think about all of the data that you're feeding into the CRM as an opportunity to gain a meaningful and leverageable edge over your competitors. That's where you're building a better understanding of players, their preferences, how they respond to different campaigns. That gives you adaptability. That gives you flexibility in a way that your competitors may not have. it's that deep understanding of players, the ability to leverage artificial intelligence and insights to optimize those campaigns. That's what's going to protect you within a inherently changing environment. oh We've kind of talked about this throughout the entire show really, in particular since the break, but Do you think there are any different strategic challenges between those large, if you like to call them, tier one operators and then those smaller emerging brands who are trying to maybe take market share from those tier one operators? Yes, sorry, I didn't let you finish. But yeah, absolutely. There are uh different challenges at Enterprise and uh at... scale up, know, smaller emerging market, emerging brands, let's call them. um The pressures themselves are actually sometimes very similar, but they're perceived in very different ways. you know, can a small operator be more flexible to get a campaign out the door and in the appropriate channel with the right experience for the player, you know, than a larger operator? Maybe, maybe not. It actually often comes down to can they create the content? Do they have a granular, deep enough understanding of the player to actually send the right campaign? Do they have the right intelligence? Do they really know each and every player? And you would assume that a smaller operator, some people might assume that a smaller operator might have a smaller list of players and ergo know them better. I don't know if that's true. The problem also exists on the enterprise end where you would assume that they have more capabilities, more like depth of tech. and experience within their CRM teams. That's also not necessarily true. So I think it's kind of a pervasive issue of, executing campaigns at scale with the right level of intelligence that is consistent with both smaller and larger operators. They're just felt in different ways. It's why, you know, without getting into too much of a pitch, why we can, why we serve both ends of the market. Right. So I think those, those challenges are, I mean, we can get into the granular depth of them, they're not They're not as different as you might think in terms of the challenges themselves, like a player value, know, bonuses, all the, you know, the, reaction to the regular, uh, the regulatory changes that we've referenced, how they react to them is, is, um, is often because they don't have a clear enough understanding of the outcomes that they're looking to achieve, um, because they don't truly understand the players at a granular level. And I think that's the probably shows how, you know, these data. driven insights and these new solutions can help level the playing field a little bit between those large tier one operators and maybe some of those challenger brands around them. Just giving people the tools to be able to understand their players a little bit better and make better decisions going forward. I'm talking about looking ahead and going forward. uh These markets are going to evolve, they're going to mature. We're going to see how they develop over the next few years. rather than making predictions about how those markets will evolve, maybe could you talk a little bit about what opportunities and shifts that you see coming down the tracks over the next three to five years in Africa? Yeah, absolutely. I did an interview not too long ago where I talked about some of these big predictions, one of which was along the lines of the market maturity that we're seeing, the kind of the evolution of the availability and access to data that our operators are seeing means that they can significantly speed up the rate at which they catch up with many of the otherwise more mature markets. We've called some of them out today. The evolution of these markets will be faster than... in other countries, will take months what happened, maybe took years in others. Regulations may and probably will tighten. Communication channels will probably shift, preferences will shift. So within those challenges, we recognize, our prediction focuses around the winners and losers that come to the outcome of these changes, will come down to those that really truly understand their players that keep their players active and engaged for longer and that they build out their understanding and the intelligence they have around each individual player to mean that they are adaptive and an ability to be reactive to change rather than getting left behind, I think is kind of the problem. There are probably a few things that we probably can see coming down the line around promotions and kind of out in the world marketing. that are coming within South Africa that we'll probably have to shift where budgets go. This also means there's going to be a heightened importance on retention in a broader experience based type of marketing rather than just being that one size fits all approach I mentioned earlier. So that kind of intelligence advantage will be even more compounded there. It's understanding who wants what when in what channel at what time. think those are. Those are going to be some key advantages. And the outcomes will be a structural competitive advantage, which creates a moat around your business. You know, if you can treat players better, they'll play with you for longer. Thanks a lot, Henry. Yeah, I think all eyes are going to be on Africa or plenty of eyeballs will be on Africa this year and beyond as these markets continue to mature. So it's great to get your expertise and insights there. So thanks, Henry Ross, account executive at Optimove. And thank you to the listeners for tuning into today's episode of iGaming Daily, and make sure to come back tomorrow to keep up to date with all the latest global gambling news.