Real-Time App Engagement and Cross-Channel Journeys That Maximize Revenue

As business needs evolved, there was a clear and present need to invest in a platform capable of supporting the real-time and cross-channel experiences customers have come to expect of sports betting applications. Given the structure of their team, they also set out to find a solution that was easy to use and implement and soon settled on Braze. It was also crucial that the solution plays well with the tools they already had in their vertical stack, like Segment and Mixpanel.

Furthermore, to meet the customer demand for personalization, they found Braze offered them the versatility they needed to create a highly engaging experience without sacrificing speed or execution time. While legacy sports betting brands are often saddled by tech debt and outdated marketing clouds, Picklebet could create more relevant experiences with Braze since it is built on first-party streaming data that processes information and audience segments in real-time. With its ability to support in-the-moment engagement, Braze allowed Picklebet to orchestrate complex cross-channel journeys using Canvas Flow. Their innovative team of three marketers now uses the Canvas Flow all-in-one interface and drag-and-drop feature to intuitively build, customize, and send messages without writing a single line of code.

Building A Winning Cross-Channel Onboarding Experience to Increase Retention

The first few days after a new customer joins Picklebet are make-or-break for the platform. This is the brand's chance to retain customers and cement the value of their platform. They built a proprietary betting and promotional engine that could sync with Braze to meet their customers at key moments throughout their gaming journey. The first step toward building that experience was to focus on the activation stage.

*All offers were displayed to eligible, existing customers only in accordance with local laws & regulations.

Three marketers run Picklebet’s customer team. To build these new campaigns, they partnered with their engineering team to support implementation. First, they identified how success would be measured and chose metrics to help them understand the short-term and long-term returns on their investment. The first metric was daily sessions per user: This would ensure users were getting the most value out of the app in their first few days of onboarding. The second was two-month retention rates: This would enable the platform to ensure users continued using the app after the initial onboarding period of a few days or weeks.

To get the right channel mix early on, the team quickly mapped the customer journey and linked each channel to the appropriate business goals. They used SMS and push notifications for time-sensitive campaigns to drive users to the app. For less-time-sensitive campaigns or more general communications that were better suited to long-form delivery, email and targeted Pay-Per-Click (PPC) were a perfect fit.

Last but not least, they knew they would rely on serving up a series of compelling in-app messages to keep sports betting fans engaged while in the app. Combined, they had the ingredients for a cohesive experience that would resonate with their users.

Embracing Experimentation to Boost Sustainable Growth

A fine-tuned growth strategy is critical to any brand’s success when paired with a pathway to profitability. Instead of employing overpriced promotional offers to clients to capture their loyalty, Picklebet took a more sustainable approach– keeping users authentically engaged to retain them.

Their Strategy

1. Having established their ideal onboarding flow, the team focused on a broader company-wide goal of profitable, efficient growth. It’s hard to sustain rapid growth long-term; they needed to devise a way to drive genuinely higher engagement rather than provide expensive promotional offers that would quickly devour their budget.

2. Rather than “buy” customer loyalty, they created a pipeline in the user experience. To do this, the team set out to understand what drove profitable engagement and retention and focused on this.

3. Picklebet’s customer team first created a range of promotional offers to test which types generated the highest engagement within their app. Next, they composed a series of automated campaigns with Braze Canvas Flow. Within the customer journey orchestration tool’s streamlined interface, they could easily segment customers for more advanced experimentation and access analytics in real-time to inform and adapt future optimizations.

4. Ultimately, they found the most expensive offer, despite generating the most robust response, did not yield the best ROI for the business.

5. Additionally, Picklebet’s team tested multiple channel mixes to determine which allocation was most effective in driving engagement. They leveraged and tweaked various combinations of in-app messages, push notifications, SMS, email, and paid ads until they found the correct “goldilocks ratio” that met their goals.

Focusing on Profitability to Boost Retention

By the end of their initial experimentation, Picklebet saw clear signs that veering away from legacy sports betting customer engagement strategies was the right move forward. Instead of expensive promotions, they focused on customer engagement strategies that could help them minimize the cost of customer acquisition and shorten the time to pay back. By prioritizing longer-range company goals like a higher lifetime, they were able to drive more efficient and profitable activities around activation and customer retention. Ultimately, their Customer team used a mix of in-app messages, push, SMS, email, and paid ads to achieve a 13% increase in 2-month retention and a 116% increase in sessions per user.

Picklebet is proving the future of sports betting is delivering personalized, cross-channel experiences that draw users directly into the heart of their favorite games and live events—keeping customers coming back for more without overextending their budgets.

Key Takeaways

1. Experimentation is an always-on endeavor. It’s no longer enough for teams to launch one experiment and move on. Instead, try keeping a consistent approach to testing, and leverage reporting and analytics with real-time capabilities to help you test everything from copy to channel mix.

2. Having a long-lens view leads to long-term results. It can be tempting to think you’ll get more juice for the squeeze by putting your investments towards getting as many new customers through the door as possible, but think twice before heading down that path. Sometimes, long-range solutions like boosting customer lifetime value or going after more consistent engagement instead of spikes are more cost-efficient and effective overall.

3. Seek out a customer engagement solution that can grow with your company. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to customer engagement. You’ll only naturally want to shift your campaign strategy to follow suit. Look for solutions that enable your company to start simple, with one or two channels, and expand into more advanced complexity as you go.