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A daily podcast delving into the biggest stories of the day throughout the sports betting and igaming sector.
Fernando Noodt (00:02.072)
The World Cup is the biggest customer acquisition event in sports betting, but attracting new players is only half the battle. The real challenge is turning a surge of first-time and returning betters into long-term profitable customers once the final whistle blows. In this episode of iGaming Daily, we're joined by Mauri Coleman, BP of Revenue and Gaming at Optimove, to unpack data from the 2026 FIFA World Cup group stage.
we will together explore what the numbers reveal about player behavior across the US, Europe and especially Latin America, and how operators can use data, AI and smarter segmentation to maximize retention after the tournament ends. Motti Coleman, welcome to iGaming Daily. How how are you today?
Motti (00:48.757)
I'm good mate, I'm excited for the England game tonight. I'm tired at the end of a very long World Cup but I'm doing good. How are you?
Fernando Noodt (00:57.532)
all good. I haven't introduced myself. I'm Fernando Nott, Media Manager for SVC and your host for today's episode of iGaming Daily, brought to you of course by none other than Optimove, the creator of Positionless Marketing and number one player engagement solution for iGaming and Sports Betting operators. Like Motti said, at the time of this recording, we're still waiting for the second semifinal to happen. Argentina versus England. A very exciting clash with a lot of history.
And we'll see what happened. We'll hashtag wait and see. of course, this episode is likely going to be out after the World Cup, I reckon. but we have some early data from the from the group stage. So Moti, let's dive right into that. So, how can operators identify which World Cup betters have real long-term value and avoid overspending on those who are unlikely to stay? Of course, this happens a lot on the
on tournaments like the World Cup, probably the World Cup is the biggest event in which this this happens. So how how can operators deal with that?
Motti (02:03.543)
It's a great question.
and it's an important topic. The data that we released that you're referencing looked at a timestamp just after the group stage is finished, which of course takes up the bulk of the World Cup. don't know exactly what the numbers were, but I think a big percentage of the games would have been played then. And of course includes all the various different countries that are there. And as time goes by, by definition, these countries start to drop out. And so there's many different things that are now happening
post the group stages. The most important thing that's happening post the group stages is that you've accumulated, the brand, the operators have accumulated quite an enormous amount of data on the individual customer. And that creates a very different understanding of who the customer is and therefore what you do with the customer, how you talk to the customer, where you wanna try and transition them. And of course, you mentioned that the World Cup itself is a massive acquisition event.
We've seen some of that data, I think in Latam, it was about 300 % above the baseline, which is obviously an enormous uptick in first time depositors. But of course, when those first depositors come in, you don't really know anything about them other than perhaps their affiliate source or marketing idea or wherever it is that they came from. What is integral that the businesses have been doing over that first few weeks is trying to learn who the customers are, what they've done, and
There's a huge number of different behavioral indicators that you can look at, that you can utilize for how you talk to them going forward. So, they might be things like win to loss ratio, number of deposits that the customer have made, have they only bet on their home country, which is obviously a very, very big one that people tend to bet on is their home country.
Motti (03:58.695)
who might their second favorite be? Might they be showing interest towards an individual player rather than just another country? Have they shown any inclination towards changing their preferences between being a mobile only customer to also betting on web? Have they bet in play? Have they bet pre-match? Have they bet on singles? Have they bet on multiples? So there's an enormous amount of betting behavior and just consumer behavior that you'll have learned from the customer. And by understanding
effectively the correlation between the behavior and the value, the behavior and the next best action, upon that information is how you start planning and scheduling the second phase of what you do with the customer.
Fernando Noodt (04:42.146)
You mentioned first time depositors, which is of course a a major metric to to look at during a tournament like this. And Latam saw the strongest growth in first time depositors. Of course, this is I I think you could easily explain this by the passion Latam has for football or soccer, depending on where people are listening to us right now. and Latam significantly outpaced
Motti (05:02.24)
Mm-hmm.
Fernando Noodt (05:11.96)
the US and Europe as well, where football is also very popular. So what do these regional differences tell operators about how they should approach each of these markets?
Motti (05:23.903)
I think there's some very interesting factors connected to that when comparing between the three different spaces. The first thing is that the World Cup was in Mexico as well as the US. And from a time zone perspective, it of course sat right perfectly with La Tame. I can tell you myself that I woke up at some ungodly hours to watch some games and I missed a huge chunk of the World Cup just by sleeping, which has never really happened before. I never really had to do.
So I'm sure that there are plenty of European bettors that missed a lot of betting opportunities. you had this World Cup being in that part of the world, I think was a very big part of it. If you compare Latam to Europe, if you compare Latam to the US, I think you highlighted a very key point there, which is just the passion, right? The general level of care and attention towards the World Cup. whilst, definitely the US saw a
in people that started to care about the World Cup and started to care about soccer. The level of passion and care from La Tame is unmatched, I would imagine, across the world. And also online gambling as an industry in La Tame, think the last five years, that's been kind of the key growth market anyway. And I think that the underlying products that are there, different businesses that have sites
in Latam I think have really, really grown massively anyway and I think it was fully ripe for this kind of level of growth. So yeah, it's been really interesting to see how much activity there's been in Latam. It's very, very exciting.
Fernando Noodt (07:11.02)
And of course, betting may increase in terms of players on on participation, but Optimop's data shows that while that increased, while participation increased, average betting frequency and wager per better declined. So what does that tell us about the quality of growth of like that operators experienced during the World Cup?
Motti (07:31.478)
Yeah.
And by the way, that analysis is consistent with every single World Cup or European Championships or Copa America that we've ever seen. And it was exactly what my expectation was going into this World Cup. And there's a very simple reason for that. And that's because the big uptick that you see, the surge that you see is from new customers and new customers aren't as engaged as existing customers are. And in general, new customers show exactly the sort of behaviors that you
explained there which is less number of bets, smaller deposits, lower levels of activity and so whilst you've gone wider in terms of the number of customers that you've taken you haven't penetrated as deeply within each individual customer. So I mentioned something before which is primary country that a customer bets on. So a new customer in Brazil by far and away the most likely thing that they're going to do is have a bet on Brazil and we saw that the Brazil-Norway game for instance was by far and away the biggest
was the biggest bet that any customer placed on, which will mean that most of the new customers that were acquired, which is, if you like, it's diluting the behavior across the entire portfolio of customers you've got because there's a very, very big surge in new customers. And they will primarily bet on their country. They'll primarily choose one way of betting, either pre-match or in play. They'll primarily have either on mobile or on web. They won't mix and match their...
preferences. So it's unsurprising that new customers who are far less engaged and understand the platform less and just kind of have less touch points effectively engage less. That's kind of reasonable. And that should impact the way that CRM and strategy is built. It goes kind of back to the first point I made. When you're thinking about customer preferences and you're thinking about levels of engagement, one of the biggest jobs that
Motti (09:33.393)
a CRM team could be doing in the early stage of a customer's life cycle is trying to create as many different betting or preferencing opportunities as possible. So I've touched there upon platforms. So if you're only betting on mobile, the best type of customer you've got isn't a mobile customer or a web customer, it's a customer that mixes and matches both. Your best type of customer isn't your pre-match bettors or your in-play bettors, it's a customer that does a bit of both.
and you'll find what the right level is between the two. one of the things the CRM team should be trying to inspire in the customer is that they do more than one thing during the World Cup. You've got this opportunity over a five week period to do multiple things, to introduce them to different bet types, to introduce them to different types of potentially even cross-selling to different sports or to cross-sell them to a casino product or to cross-sell them into another platform, whatever it would be.
A big opportunity here is to try and mix and match preferences for the customer so that they're doing more. And then you increase that level of engagement and then you'll see the data start to change alongside it.
Fernando Noodt (10:44.354)
Yeah, I think it's very important that you mentioned that this data is consistent across all World Cups and all major tournaments, because I actually want to go deeper into what you just elaborated on, which is engagement strategies during these tournaments. But I'll leave that as a hook. Right now we're gonna do a very quick outbreak and we'll go right into that after this very short commercial break. We'll be we'll be right back.
Fernando Noodt (11:40.515)
Moti, you were mentioning how participation increases, but averaging betting frequency and wager per better declines, not only for this workup that we were just experienced in the in North America, but also across all workups and major tournaments. So as these tournaments progress, how do operators adapt their engagement strategies for different specific groups of betters, whether they are the loyal better that is always there?
Or a first time or a reactivated better.
Motti (12:13.877)
Yeah, that's it's a really interesting question. So
The first thing is to be able to identify who those different cohorts of customers are. And that is a relatively basic concept of lifestyle marketing or life cycle modeling. And most people do that, but it's very important. The one area that you touched upon actually that a lot of companies and people don't do is reactivation. So you've kind of got this notion of a churned customer and then you've got an active customer. And the customer that comes back from churn is called an active customer again. We actually look at it slightly differently.
We always build out for our clients a lifecycle called reactivation, which operates in a similar way to a new customer in so much as there's kind of a two week period where you're looking at that customer and understanding there's still a high likelihood that they could go back to churn during that period of time. But equally, the CRM team has an opportunity to fully convert them back to an active customer and they have very different sets of behavior. Now the one really interesting thing of a difference
between a reactivated customer and a new customer, it goes back to one of the first things I mentioned earlier in the discussion, that's around historical behavior. So we've always shown our clients that by understanding their customers better and based on a lot of these different types of behavioral analysis, you can build your segmentation and your personalization in a much smarter way. Reactivated customers have all of that history. You know who they were before they churned. You know what bets they placed. You know what they're
their winter loss ratio was, you know what their VIP level was, whatever it is about what they did, you now know. And so when they reactivated, you can utilize a lot of the old data that you've got from their historical behavior and again, use that to drive a much smarter type of CRM strategy for them to fully convert them back from reactivated to active, whereas with your new customers, again, you don't have that information. So fully converting a new customer to an active customer is a lot harder to do.
Motti (14:17.101)
than bringing back your reactivated. It's also a lot cheaper to bring back a reactivated customer than it is to bring back a new customer or to create a new customer. So whilst big tournaments are very sexy from an acquisition standpoint, and it's certainly the case that companies spend a lot of money there, for mature businesses that already have a large portfolio, they'll have been doing an enormous amount of work. It's certainly the case with our clients that they were doing an enormous amount of work in and around the World Cup to actually
on their churn lifecycle and move those customers through reactivation and back into being active. So I think in answer to your question, it depends exactly on where the customer is on their journey with you and to identify that and then to think about that very specifically based on who they are today.
Fernando Noodt (15:08.012)
And of course, a tournament like the World Cup, specifically the World Cup, brings a a big a lot of traffic to to an operator's website. But once the World Cup ends, where should or which data should operators look at to determine whether this was a temporary spike or if they had created a sustainable customer value?
Motti (15:32.693)
Yeah, so...
What you're looking at there is predictive analytics. I mean, that's a very, if you wanna take a snapshot of where the customer data is today, you're gonna be looking at things like predictive analytics. And there's a lot of predictive indicators based on consumer behavior, okay, on what the customer's done over that period of time. So when you look at long-term churn, about the easiest one that jumps off, I'll raise two, number of deposits that a customer has made, okay? So the drop-off,
of risk of churn from a customer that's only deposited once to a customer that's deposited twice is enormous. And then for every additional deposit, there's a decreasing impact on saving, on preventing churn. But the biggest thing that a CRM team can do is trying to make sure that a customer does more than one deposit and moves to the second. So of course, after you've acquired a customer, they've made their first deposit, the CRM team would be
presenting the customer with very high deposit offers in order to try and inspire the second deposit and beyond. If you've got a customer that has a very bad win to loss ratio, i.e. they've lost most of their money during the World Cup, the likelihood is that they will churn. If you have a customer that's won loads of money during the World Cup, they also have a high likelihood that they'll churn. If you have a customer that's become a recreational player, that's turned over their money a lot and is either just slightly profitable or just slightly in
in losing, those customers are far more likely to be long-term customers. So there's a lot of predictive metrics that exist. And of course you look at them bundled together and try and get a holistic sense of who the customer is. But in doing so, you'd be able to take a very good snapshot of the cohort of customers acquired going into the World Cup and see what the expectation is for beyond. What you then do about it from now is of course the next right question. And again, it goes back
Motti (17:33.995)
to a lot of the different strategies that we've put in place before, now would be the time for cross-sell. Now would be the time to try and figure out what else the customers like to be doing and then you're talking about next best action, secondary preferences, tertiary preferences, all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of interesting things that you can do by looking at similar customers historically and seeing how they perform next.
Fernando Noodt (17:57.901)
Moti, you have given us a lot of things to think about, a lot of data to consider, and I encourage all listeners to look at Optimov's World Cup twenty twenty-six group stage report because it's a very interesting document with a lot of interesting insights about a tournament like the World Cup that of course I assume can be applied to other major tournaments, of course, this this information we have you or you have collected.
Adoptimus, so Motti Coleman, VP gaming and revenue at Optimus, thank you very much for joining us today. Hope you had a good time. Any conclusions about the World Cup?
Motti (18:35.991)
I'll tell you after England win it
Fernando Noodt (18:40.372)
Okay, well we'll I guess we'll we'll know we'll know who won it after once this episode goes live. But but yeah I'll be glad to to to talk about it after. I'll be only glad if Argentina wins it actually. But anyways, that has been all for today's episode of IGaming Daily. Thank you very much Modi Coleman and thank you very much Neo McDonald for producing this episode and Fernando Nott and to our listeners out there out there, sorry, we'll see you in the next one.