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FEATURE
types of offerings, similar to the fight against prize draws today.
But Becker argues there is a need among younger and female demographics for new and novel solutions within lotteries.“ There are new target groups, other target groups than the traditional lottery player, younger target groups, female target groups. And there are ways to address the needs of those target groups, and that’ s through product innovation. Creating new types of lotteries or new types of games like Dream House raffle, for example, unlocks another layer of growth [ for operators ],” he says.
Zeal has both invested in and developed an in-house version of a prize draw offering but offered under a charity lottery licence, and Becker suggests it is this agility and commitment to innovation that has powered Zeal’ s progressive growth in recent years.
In its full-year 2024 results, Zeal posted a record group revenue of € 188.2 million($ 203 million), beating the previous year by 62.2 %. It also saw bottom-line net profit rise 333.2 % to € 59.4 million.
On this trajectory, Beker says the company has continuously optimised and grown its core business, while making constant improvements in ecommerce, ensuring excellence in unit economics, efficiently allocating marketing spend, and ultimately improving the customer lifetime value of its loyal customer base. There is clearly still demand for more traditional lottery betting offerings.
CAN IT CROSS-SELL?
In the US, lottery courier services have exploded in the market. These offerings enable players to participate in draws operating in multiple states by buying tickets for different draws and enabling players to purchase them via the product.
In February, DraftKings CEO Jason Robins talked up its 2024 acquisition of lottery betting app Jackpocket, insisting the product was already proving a valuable customer acquisition and cross-sell tool.
“ Jackpocket has been great in terms of both cross-sell and, also, we have had really strong customer acquisition during its last $ 1 billion jackpot run. I do think that there’ s room to invest more there,” Robins told analysts in its Q1 earnings call.“ For us, it’ s probably more effective in states where there’ s legal sports betting and iGaming because the LTVs( lifetime value) in the immediate term are going to be higher because we can cross-sell right away.”
He compared the product to DFS in terms of player acquisition opportunity, and of course it was DFS that helped skyrocket the likes of DraftKings and FanDuel to the top positions for both betting and iGaming in the States.
But Becker says he is less certain of lottery’ s cross-sell capabilities.“ The jury is out on how big the synergies between different forms of gambling are, and whether it is possible to capture them and how,” he comments.“ I haven’ t seen the data yet, so for me the case is not closed on the cross-sell opportunity between lottery players and other forms of gambling being as big as expected.”
Nikolina Gabelica, head of lottery operations at EveryMatrix, supports Robin’ s claims that lottery games can be successful acquisition tools.“ I worked for an operator previously, and
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