Online gambling operators are overwhelming their customers with a tsunami of advertisements and promotions that, rather than engaging players, are actually sending them away. That’s the conclusion of a recent study titled, Optimove 2023 Report of Players’ Preferences in iGaming Marketing, conducted by the US marketing firm Optimove.
The study was conducted using a survey of 396 US adults in households making over $75,000 a year, which is the median household income for Americans. Those players expressed some pretty strong opinions about how they want to receive promotions and bonus offers from operators. Spoiler alert: it’s not how they’re being marketed to now.
According to the study, 86 percent of these players have turned away from an online gambling site because of what Optimove calls, “an onslaught of excessive or irrelevant emails, texts, and push notifications”. Another 30 percent of respondents said that they found the constant barrage of promotional offers served up on igaming sites to be “overwhelming”.
What players do like, according to the study, is plain old e-mail marketing. A full 57 percent of respondents said that email was their preferred means of receiving promotions, while only 18 percent preferred to receive them by text message. More importantly, 90 percent of them like to receive personalized email messages from their igaming provider.
Continually hitting players with promotional offers put them at risk of a condition Optimove calls “marketing fatigue”. That’s a condition the company defines as, “Marketing fatigue, characterized by consumers feeling overwhelmed or disengaged due to a relentless barrage of repetitive marketing messages, looms as a growing menace. Its pernicious effects include diminishing response rates and flagging engagement, which can severely impact brand perception and customer loyalty.”
Optimove recommends that operators slow down the pace of their marketing while focusing on the more effective marketing techniques such as personalized emails.