Circus Casino - Email Marketing

The Challenge

Genting Stanley, the UK’s largest casino operator, were about to launch their first online casino – Circus Casino. Their existing business was done offline through local casinos throughout the UK and the online team needed to understand the online gambling habits of their existing customer base – do they gamble online, who do they play with and how often. The usual questions....

In this competitive industry getting noticed is difficult. Getting customers you’ve never emailed before to answer an in depth 24 question survey is like getting blood from a stone.

Approach

Getting blood from a stone? Great, just the kind of challenge we like.

Simple creative and a strong incentive were where we started with this campaign. Steve, our MD, knows from his direct marketing background that without a great incentive this campaign wouldn’t have got noticed.

A clever bit of thinking allowed us to offer a high value incentive which would actually drive customers through the casino when it launched and pay itself back. However, incentive only goes so far and we know we needed to ensure the survey was usable, appeared to be easy to complete and wasn’t a burden for the customer.

With a huge data set to work with we unleashed our market leading email marketing software and sent four different versions of the email to a subset of the data. Our software then worked its magic and told us which two emails worked hardest and delivered the best results. We then ran the test again to find the best performing email and hit the remainder of our dataset with that. Sounds simple when you think about it but highly effective.

Results

We’ll cut the marketing speak here as the figures do the talking.

Industry standard response rates are 2-3%. We achieved 6% with this campaign.