Gartner, the leading global technology research company, just released their new Magic Quadrant or “MQ” for mobile marketing platforms and Dublin-based Xtremepush was included in the report.
“We are now at the top of the “Challenger” in the quadrant which is pretty big news for us, for a five year old company which is non-VC backed. We’re really, really excited about it to be honest with you”, Xtremepush CEO Tommy Kearns shared.
Kearns was recently featured on a G2E Digital 2020 panel, discussing the importance of omnichannel marketing in the gambling industry, especially when it comes to bridging the gap between the land-based and online world.
“If you simplify the whole game of how to communicate with the users be them land-based or omnichannel as you call it, it all comes down to an understanding of that user, of the data”, he said.
“What we have the ability of doing is taking or consuming that data into our platform and then unifying it and creating a single customer view”, Kearns added.
Xtremepush uses data such as where the player is coming from- land-based, online, mobile- and what channels they’ve opted in on- email, push, web push, SMS – to create this single customer view.
“We then use our decisioning and engagement engine to then message these customers, be it service marketing or transactional, to drive revenue or retention across those channels”, Kearns explained.
“The core to understanding omnichannel is to getting the consumption of the data into one platform so you can understand the user or the customer and from there everything else flows out- decisioning, personalization and then engagement”, he added.
Responsible gambling is an area where companies like Xtremepush can add value for their clients, ensuring that operators are not burning out their players with messages and that they are not sending messages to players who have opted out of receiving them.
“The beautiful thing about having our piece of software on sites or on apps or mobile websites is that we’re understanding what’s happening in real time, so when someone does get locked out of their account, we can do a pop-up or we can send an email or a push notification explaining to the user why they have been locked out”, Kearns explained.
“They’re getting a really good explanation of why, which then gives them at least a good experience and understanding of why they’re being locked out in real time”, he added.
This type of real-time messaging could also give operators an opportunity to share helpful tools, such as RecoverMe, with customers who are displaying a dangerous pattern of behavior.
Looking into the future, in addition to smoothing out the omnichannel process and contributing to safer gambling, companies like Xtremepush will become more and more relevant following “the apocalypse of the cookie”.
“In the advertising world there’s this concept of the 3rd party cookie and it helps brands when they go to acquire new customers in the iGaming sector”, said Kearns.
However, slowly but surely browsers are killing off 3rd party cookies as are Apple IOS and Android, with the “apocalypse” expected in March 2021. When this happens, there will basically be no way of re-targeting users online.
“So that is a huge problem from an advertising perspective. The reason why its being done is around privacy. Being able to follow someone around the web anonymously for 72 hours…that is no longer going to happen”, explained Kearns.
As a result, companies are going to have to re-examine their communications and marketing plans, figuring out how to drive users to their sites in a targeted manner.
“That’s where an Xtremepush comes in because we can go down into these micro, micro segments where it becomes that segment one. We know that profile so well, we know what to be showing you, what to be talking to you about, we know what not to talk to you about, we know what device to talk to you on”, revealed Kearns.
“We also know your permissions because we’ll look at what we call this ‘zero party’ data where we’re saying to you, how do you want us to talk to you and you’re coming back in on your preference center saying talk to me about this, don’t talk to me about this”, Kearns said.
“So its really putting the power back into the consumer and the customers’ hands, which is great, by the way, as long as we all embrace that”, he added.
