Is There a Cross-Sell Between Sports Betting and Casino Games?

Depending on your perspective, it’s easy to get bogged down in one particular element of the gambling industry. Some people play bingo at the weekends, whereas others exclusively play the National Lottery. Some people only ever bet on the Grand National, and others play slot machines every single day, or head down to the races with their hard earned cash, looking to back the next long-odds winner. With so much variety available in terms of gambling opportunities, it’s all too easy to forget the depth of this industry.

Easy to forget, unless you’re tasked with promoting gambling services. From the other side of the table, there’s a huge opportunity in cross promotion. If you think about consumers as a block, some will gamble sometimes, regularly, heavily and never. In general marketing and advertising, it’s hard to distinguish between these segments with any real accuracy, and this can lead to inefficient results. But as soon as you’ve got access to a pool of people with at least some interest in gambling, there are always opportunities to attract them horizontally with new services and offers.

This is where the cross-sell opportunity exists, and it’s as alive with sports betting customers gaining access to casino games as with virtually any other parallel. But why specifically does this make sense as a promotional strategy, and how does this work to the benefit of online casinos?

Thinking About Demographics

When you look at the type of people who commonly bet on sports, there’s a clear intersection between the core markets being targeted by online casinos. It’s usually adult men between 18-35 that are amongst the hottest properties in the gambling industry, although that’s far from a hard and fast rule, and many more demographics are now coming on stream across various sectors of the gambling industry, ripe for additional cross-selling. You can read more about gambling participation here.

When you’re running a sports book, you have equivalent demographics in the palm of your hand for other gambling services. So it’s perhaps easy to project that a healthy proportion of these customers might be interested in more traditional online casino games, and sports books are increasingly popping up their own gambling add-ons to service these customers more effectively.

This works the other way as well, with casinos offering sports betting products to their existing customer bases. As well as sharing obvious demographics that make this a more straightforward pitch, there are serious advantages from a marketing perspective to leveraging your existing customer assets.

Leveraging Existing Marketing Assets

Imagine for a second you’re a sportsbook looking to launch an online casino, with a marketing budget and a whole list of customers. You have two options – you could spend the marketing budget in the run up to launch, in the hope of finding new customers for your fledgling casino. Or you can go straight to your existing customers, and leverage that asset by selling them on your cross-sell. In practice, most will do a combination of both, but it would be madness to have such a valuable asset as a list of like-minded customers to contact when you’re in this position.

Let’s put it another way – to acquire this list of customers, you’ve already spent a great deal of money. By launching a cross-promotion, you’ve got the opportunity to maximise the revenue from this spend, in the process converting this asset into one that offers a much higher yield for your business. That’s one sure fire way to make your boss, and the shareholders, a little happier.

Improving The Gambling Experience

But it’s not just a case of improving the bottom line or making the lives of the marketing department a little easier – there’s also a strong benefit to the customer in offering these type of cross-promotional opportunities. Someone who plays casino games for real money may very well be actively looking for a sportsbook, or may be an occasional gambler on football, for example. Instead of them researching alternative providers, setting up new accounts and go through the rigmarole of getting set up with someone else, offering new services can actually make their life easier – a win win for everyone involved.

Improving the gambling experience encourages player retention and engagement, which almost always meets driving revenue for the casino. It’s a favour to their existing customers, as well as a convenient extension to the business, and there’s no sense in allowing your customers to head over to a competitor when a simple cross-selling opportunity can keep all the growth within the operator at hand. However, it’s not just sports, the same can be said for video game and skill elements that casinos are also introducing into their repertoire. It’s the variety and mix of games that keeps players engaged and playing consistently generating a stable revenue.

Beating The Competition To Your Own Customers

In reality, the world of gambling is cut-throat, with casinos constantly jostling to snatch customers from each other. That’s why you see such juicy promotions and offers for signing up new players – it’s because casinos need to fight it out with the competition to get heard. By offering cross-selling opportunities to existing players, casinos are effectively beating the competition to their own customers, helping drive long term value while improving the offer available to their players.