Australian-based lotteries company invests in new marketing technology platform to help improve personalisation in campaigns and communications with customers
Intelligent campaign segmentation to give customers what they want is finally becoming a reality for The Lottery Office after making the leap into a new marketing orchestration platform.
The Lottery Office launched in 2018 and is an Australian owned and operated business providing locals with access to overseas lotteries and jackpots. Having commenced as a small startup with a lean team, promotions and transactional communications and campaigns to date have been basic, lacking segmentation.
“We knew when we were big enough and operating more jackpots and customers, that we’d need a campaign platform that was more intelligent,” The Lottery Office CEO, Jaclyn Wood, told CMO.
Having participated in a former Adobe Summit several years ago, Wood had her eye on the vendor’s marketing platform portfolio as the likely next step. When it came to the crunch, the team also evaluated Optimove, a solution more specifically oriented to retail, but ultimately decided Adobe technology and localised support was its best bet.
Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) is a cross-channel campaign management tool including intelligent decisioning and real-time customer journey planning capabilities. It’s part of the Adobe Experience Cloud and marketing solutions suite. The Lottery Office commenced the martech rollout in mid-2022 in partnership with consultancy, Anchora. It’s one of the first two rollouts of Adobe Journey Optimizer by the consulting group in Australia alongside Cbus Super.
Adobe Journey Optimizer offered a single, consolidated platform to do both email and SMS campaigns and communications, the two primary use cases for The Lottery Office. It also has capabilities for push notifications as well as more intelligent segmentation tools.
“Marketing is critical in communicating to new and existing customers,” Wood continued. “Delivering the right offers for the right customers at the right time via their preferred channels is exactly where we want to be.”
While the vision is clear, the reality is implementing martech takes time. “This was a significant project to undertake and larger than we expected. We needed Anchora to help us go through this project,” Wood commented. “Their team has worked closely with our development and marketing teams to make this happen.”
Anchora integrated Adobe Journey Optimizer into The Lottery Office’s existing custom-built data ecosystems and connected it with its enterprise data warehouse, CRM. It also centralised all customer data from Web and mobile applications into AJO’s customer data platform (CDP).
The first step was moving promotional campaigns across, and all have been running through Journey Optimizer since the end of last year. The current focus is moving transactional emails across. The Lottery Office also plans to integrate native push notifications and in-app messaging as a further program of work.
“We have huge volumes of emails, and everyone requires us to redevelop, redesign and push data into Journey Optimizer,” Wood explained, noting eight different lotteries per week. These can be drawn two or three times per week and vary significantly in terms of jackpot size. “It’s quite a lengthy process to convert those across and we expect that to take us another next three months. Then we’ll be fully operating out of AJO.
“We’re yet to explore the full capabilities of the product; we have just moved what we currently do. Now we’ll really dive into segmentation, refining our segments and giving customers what we think they want, rather than just giving everyone the same thing. We’re really looking forward to getting to that point.”
The organisation’s segmentation approach will be recency, frequency and monetary driven at first. “We do feel in time, once we split our segments more intelligently and start sending more personalised offers they want, for example, the lottery they want, jackpot amount, or channel they want, we’ll see an increase in revenue,” Wood said.
“We didn’t have ability to do that in our previous platform. That increase in revenue is our ultimate goal, and we see other positives, such as higher open and clickthrough rates.”
Initially, the integration has been a very intensive process for the development team to go through. Once it’s done, it will require very little dev work, and The Lottery Office’s marketing team will be managing things day-to-day.
Another part of the progress has been deliverability hygiene. “Whenever you change to another email provider, you have deliverability issues, and we had to go through warming up phase of the new IP address and some of those teething issues,” Wood said. “We have gotten through these now and all seems to be going smoothly.”
One noted difference is emails that would take hours to go out previously are now going out a lot faster. “It’s great for us, especially with a jackpot as they do have how many hours before a draw included in the communications,” Wood said. “Emails are dynamic when customers open it and there’s a countdown included, but the quicker they receive emails, the better.
“We’ve also increased the number of lottery games we can display when you get a confirmation email. Previously, we had to push them to the website, so they could log into their account to see all of their games. We don’t have such limitations now - we can’t wait for that to be gone.”
Wood signalled this AJO as the beginning of ambitions to bring a new era of marketing through technology and data to The Lottery Office. She noted a hope of investing in more Adobe products in future such as Advertising Cloud and its reporting platform.
Skills wise, The Lottery Office has also invested in a campaign manager, who started at the beginning of the program of work. It’s now looking for a designer to support digital communications plus wider media activities, which include out-of-home advertising.
For Anchora chief growth officer, Nick Jia, Journey Optimizer is a marketing automation solution offering a single customer view, easy email designing via templates and centralised asset management, as well as capacity to build and orchestrate omnichannel customer journeys orchestrations across Web, email, SMS, direct mail, push notification and in-app messaging.
“The implementations have taught us a lot, including a variety of new enhancements,” Jia said, referring to both The Lottery Office as well as Cbus Super. “This experience will assist us in the future product development and implementation we undertake. For the businesses who are still on the fence on implementing AJO, I would recommend spending more time building a robust business case, as well as a customer experience and engagement strategy. This will help you get it over the line with decisionmakers.”
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