iGB Affiliate 68 April/May | Page 45

FEATURE Richard Moffat, CEO at sports betting community OLBG Oshri Kostiner, CMO at sportsbook 10Bet Gavin Moore, head of traffi c and brand at Better Collective Richard Moffat: Using an attractive welcome offer ahead of a World Cup makes absolute sense. In fact I would argue that the run-up to the World Cup 2018 will be the best time ever, in the history of online gambling, for operators to be generous with their welcome offers. But the structure of offers is key. With 64 matches to bet on, tailoring an offer to reward loyalty throughout the tournament would be attractive to customers and operators. Our experience shows that each operator has specific points where it sees customers drop off. The smart operators know their points very well and will use their welcome offers to help get players through those barriers. Gavin Moore: I think that the problem definitely lies in how bonuses are used. The issue with bonuses is that they are predominantly built for user activation – not retention. The World Cup already aids activation as a concept, so massive activation bonuses may not be the ideal strategy in the long run. The general attitude from operators toward bonuses at the moment can be gauged based on the smaller amount of bonuses offered for this year’s Cheltenham Festival. Plus, you could see that bonuses were not as creative as they had been in the past, most likely because of the recent compliance issues. This shows that operators are shying away from their reliance on big activation bonuses in their overall marketing, at least in relation to how they have been used in the past. The way to get bonuses back on track would be to focus them more on facilitating customer retention rather than activation. Operators have access to users and their betting preferences with the