Day one of the Mobile & Tablet Gambling Summit took place at the Victoria Park Plaza Hotel today in London. This two-day event offers sessions addressing topics related to mobile & tablet strategy within the iGaming industry and roughly 100 attendees were present today.
Innovation in mobile gambling technology was a hot topic of discussion and William Hill’s Head of Product Development, Amitabh Ghatak, delivered a presentation on mobile product innovation.
Ghatak emphasized several points, one being “performance is key” as mobile phones are still restricted with battery life and other limitations. He advised developers to be careful of creating battery and data-hogging apps and said half a line of code change can help with this problem. “It will resort in a significantly higher conversion rate”, he said.
Ghatak said the user should be able to go from ‘discovery to conversion’ in 60 seconds and emphasized the importance of intelligent notifications. “Know when to ask the customer for something, when he or she is primed to say ‘yes’ to whatever you’re asking for”, he said. “Cluster” is a good example of an app that does this well, he added.
William Hill has recently launched several innovative mobile products which Ghatak walked us through, “William Hill Darts”, an app to help convert casino players to sports betting and “Get in the Race”, a virtual reality app using Google Cardboard to transport users to a virtual racetrack.
Today’s “Get Maximum Traction Through Mobile Panel” featured panelists Peter James of OpenBet, David McDowell of FSB Technology, David Change of Betcade, Leigh Nissim of IGT and moderator Paul McNea of Sportlobster.
Chang started off by making a prediction. He said in the future, mobile apps will slim down in terms of what is the expected user behavior in those apps. Take a look at the success and simplicity of Tinder. Facebook understands this simplicity concept as well, illustrated by their move to separate the Facebook app and the Messenger app.
“The gaming industry should start slimming down these apps into specific use cases”, Chang advised.
All panelists agreed personalization is extremely important when it comes to mobile apps and Nissim pointed out the focus on this topic at past events this year such as GiGSe and G2E.
“Its harder than ever for operators to get in front of the consumer in the right time”, said Nissim. With this in mind, its more important now than ever to get the right messages and only the right messages out to your customers.
James said operators must be much more personal with messages, for example, make sure to know the prices customers like, the games they like- make sure to have the best data and real-time data to determine this information. “At Openbet we take data from all of the channels that all of our customers are using and give access to our operators to use that data and push it into their products”, he said.
Andrew Dagnall, CEO of Bettorlogic, spoke on how to manage mobile sports bettors by knowing their bet preferences. He said Bettorlogic creates profile groups of their customers based on the sports they bet on and segment by market, odds, staking, pre-event bettors, in-play bettors and relationships between the two.
Bettorlogic profile customers and collect all sorts of data such as how frequently customers are betting and how much. Using this data, Bettorlogic determines what content is likely to stimulate each group and puts that content in front of them. For example, if a customer has been losing, offer them information to help them win as opposed to a free bet, Dagnall advised.
“The sportsbook of the future will have a full personalized experience”, he said.
Metric Gaming’s CEO Peter Bertilsson talked on small screen challenges that come along with mobile apps. “The limited size of screens create huge challenges for operators offering mobile solutions”, he said.
In order to solve some of these challenges Bertilsson suggested having an architecture that takes the content from really fast data centers. “Everything the customer reads has to be much closer and much faster”, he advised.
Relevance, making it simple to deposit, one-click betting – these are all features operators should keep in mind when delivering on small screens, said Bertilsson.
He also mentioned Metric Gaming’s dynamic screen functionality where markets are visible only when they are “live” and are taken away if there’s a second screen experience, a method for showing only what’s relevant at the moment and making the most out of limited screen real estate.
