Martin Collins: “Gamification and personalization allow us to take on Netflix and TikTok”

Martin Collins, Chief Business Development Officer at Soft2Bet, sits down with Casino Guru News to talk about the impact gamification has had on the iGaming industry. Yet, gamification cannot exist in a vacuum and its success is predicated on another important ingredient, personalization. Understanding both concepts to their core, Collins walks us through how these technologies and practices have become a lode star in the industry, and how they dictate technical decisions that are ultimately player-centric.

Q: Martin, could you help us better understand the concept of gamification in the iGaming space and why you believe it’s one of the pivotal solutions for businesses to grow and remain sustainable?

Traditional Gamification in the iGaming space is built on 4 key pillars: Tournaments, Missions, Achievements and Challenges. The majority of B2C and B2B platforms will have these capabilities and with the right CMS and CRM systems you can build compelling user journeys for your various cohorts. However, these features have been available for over 10 years and provide zero competitive advantage as a B2C operator.

Where gamification becomes pivotal to your operation is where you have a unique feature, built specifically for your players, providing compelling user journeys that drive engagement and ultimate ROI.

Armed with customers who are spending more time on your site, engaging with various features, built specifically for their experience, the entire business becomes more sustainable, and you are then competing for screen time against the mainstream players like Tik Tok, Insta and Netflix, opposed to other Casinos and Sportsbooks.

Q: Have businesses been leveraging gamification solutions already, and do you think they are genuinely trying to harness the technology’s power, or more so paying lip service? How is Soft2Bet doing in this regard?

Gamification has been in the industry for many years; however, the mechanics are traditional and an expectation of a B2C offering, more than driving innovation in the User experience. The mechanics are very specific to the industry and therefore, although they work well with a small cohort of your player base, they do not engage with the majority of your customers.

What we realized at Soft2Bet was that other industries were driving engagement much better than we were in iGaming. For example, Casual Gaming; Social Games and MMORPG were building engagement solutions way in advance of what we could ever imagine.

Armed with this information, we took these mechanics from other industries and started to embed them in our casino and sports betting experiences.

Q: When we talk about gamification – should we also mention personalization in the same context do you think?

Personalization for me, is simply data, armed with a mechanism to execute. For example, if a customer does a particular type of bet on Sportsbook, you can reward them automatically. A simple example but relevant nonetheless. Gamification takes the day to day data we have on the customer and exponentially increases and allows us to segment to a more significant extent, building more specific user journeys relevant to the player and their interaction with the platform.

All in all, personalization can be provided without Gamification, but personalization with gamification becomes entirely more powerful with added data, to provide more relevant user journeys, driving engagement and sustainability.

Q: How is personalization already impacting iGaming businesses and are they prepared to leverage such solutions?

Personalization is a key component of many platforms already within the industry. However, it is only as powerful as the data available to action against. Some platforms have lots of data, but some are irrelevant and they cannot act on journeys against the data and others have small amounts of data and can build small, but compelling user journeys. The dream is to have both relevant data and the ability to build compelling user journeys across your site. We have seen various AI platform materialize as data becomes more prominent, providing the ability to create relevance to the data and action as a consequence, but still, it is early days and we are still way behind the likes of E-Commerce and the Netflix/Spotify experiences built in other industries.

Q: What do you reckon the biggest change in the coming months or years would be when it comes to gamification and personalization in the industry?

Relevance is the most single key factor in both gamification and personalization. If you deliver a gamified experience that is not specifically built for a specific cohort of your audience, it will not resonate. If you do not have the data to segment your audience appropriately and build relevant user experiences, it will not resonate.

As a consequence, the single most important challenge in the coming months and years is creating a solution that can not only deliver appropriate gamified experiences to your various audiences, but also to be able to create those segments in the first place, is vital towards success. Here is where the challenge lies.

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