theScore: Promotion Engine

Customer Motivations

There isn’t a lot of loyalty to sports betting platforms, the key driver to choosing one over another is how strong their promotional offerings are.

Business Motivations

Currently theScore utilizes an external software to publish promotions, the turnaround time for adding timely/interesting promotions is too long and is putting us behind our competitors. theScore does not have direct access or control over the promotion engine which limits visibility, understanding of the system, increases overhead, and restricts planning.

Our marketing team was placed at a disadvantage when it came to building momentum off of current events to acquire more users.

Research

• 80% of our US based users said they would use our Bet app MORE over their current apps (Draft Kings, BetWay, WilliamHILL) if we offered better promotions. (Survey)

• 97% of American bettors agreed when asked if promos are an important factor in the decision to use a sportsbook. (Survey)

• Dissatisfied the Score Bet users were 20% more likely to take issue with current promotions than satisfied users. (Survey)

Goal

How can we create promotions that incentivize users throughout the worst pain points in their acquisition journey?

Impact Targets

• Increase user conversion rate from theScore app to theScore Bet.

• Decrease registration drop off.

• Increase revenue by acquiring more high engagement users.

High Level Approach

You can think of promotional campaigns similar to any other kind of marketing initiative. There are very specific user groups they want to target (or exclude) with these promotions.

Let’s use our sign up process as our example. Users often dropped off throughout this process because it is so lengthy, as it is a betting app there are multiple required legal steps that customers must navigate through before successfully signing up. In order to motivate our users throughout that sign up process we use promotions such as a free $10 bet at the end of sign up so they can get into the app and immediately start to see the value, before having to make their first deposit.

Promotions are pivotal for user conversion & retention, as we saw from the research often times promotions are the only thing keeping users on a specific platform.

Wireframes enabled us to quickly work with the marketing team to understand their goals and the needs of a promotional campaign.

Designs

If you’d like to get a better feel for what we are trying to achieve you can click through the figma prototype. This prototype was used to test with our marketing team to ensure it actually fit into their expectations.

Promotion Engine Prototype

Outcomes

• Our marketing team reduced their time to launch promotional campaigns by 74%

• Promotions can be maximized for creativity, accuracy, and speed for specific user groups that enabled our marketing time to incentivize new users through the onboarding process.

Personal Outcomes & Learnings

• The promotion engine nestles perfectly into our launch of our new back office ecosystem. I designed this entire system to have a coherent design language, seeing all of them work together & communicate together was a really exciting outcome for me.

• To watch the marketing team run through the test scenarios so successfully was just a testament to how closely they were involved throughout the whole process, it was nice to see.

• I always thought measuring impact would be as simple as usage success, but for this project we were looking at impacting the Betting app retention at our highest level, and learning ideally impact reaches beyond your tool was a big part of this project for me.

• Having the marketing team be such a close partner during the discovery process turned out to be invaluable, once we got to the final solution it was incredibly obvious when they effortlessly flew through the flows.

• Not having access to the current interface that the marketing team is currently using made it difficult to make improvements, but a lot of the inspiration came from other tools they are familiar with, like Amplitude and Periscope.

• Being able to immediately dive into the Home Screen Project on the Score Bet mobile side to see the impact of the back office work was a really valuable experience to learn how enablement tools on the operational front empower our users.