Even when it comes to marketing, the cards are stacked in favor of the house. That’s the perspective of Pini Yakuel, whose retention marketing company Optimove built its business working with gaming operations in Israel. “Gaming is able to offer much more to customers. It’s not like e-commerce. They have nothing invested in inventory, so they can afford to make all sorts of crazy offers to people in casinos because, statistically, most of the money is going to come back to the house,” Yakuel says.
This week, Optimove introduces version 3.5 of its retention automation software with an eye toward importing its high-stakes brand of gaming loyalty to the U.S. “In Israel, there’s not a lot of e-commerce, but there’s a lot of gaming, so we took what we did for casino games and refocused it on SKUs,” says Yakuel, the company’s founder and CEO. “When you open the barricades, you can become really creative. You can drill down and create highly specific promotions and campaigns.”
Optimove 3.5 promises higher sub-divisions of target groups into more homogenous micro-segments, according to a company press release. In March, the company announced an applications programming interface (API) with Facebook Custom Audience that marketers can use to predict what visitors will do next and serve them with messages and offers. It doesn’t use any customer-identifying data, but it can track the behavior of Facebook app users in a near real-time manner.
“Many marketers struggle with Facebook because they’re only set up to do one list a month for targeting. We can do 50 lists a day,” claims Yakuel. “It’s like when you throw a party and it’s very successful, but there’s always a portion of partygoers who hated it. Our software can isolate those people and help e-coms throw another party for them.”
The software supports multichannel campaigns that include email, push notifications, and SMS. It also offers response history targeting that’s based on how frequently people received or responded to earlier campaigns.
