2024 was an action-packed year for sport, with events such as the European Championships, Olympics, and Copa America, among others, filling the calendar.

To recap the year, SBC’s Multimedia Editor, James Ross, was joined by Optimove’s Strategic Services Team Leader, Jonathan Collins, who revealed some of the biggest trends witnessed by the CRM marketers throughout 2024.

Overall, Collins explained there were “no big surprises” this year and similar patterns of behaviour were observed in previous years.

He did note, however, that an area of interest was the rate of players who ceased activity, known as churn, after an event. Operators experienced just under half of their player base churning in the month after an event. However, this slowed following the four-week mark.

Collins also outlined that another mistake made by operators is that they are not starting their marketing activity early enough.

He said: “Typically speaking, we always say we should start around four weeks before the start of the campaign. Something I’ve noticed recently is that a lot of operators we speak to, their window for planning is actually perfectly far in advance, but the actual activity that they’re sending out, the marketing activity is still held up until almost the last minute.

“That’s not really building your customer journey in a coherent way. I know it sells itself to a certain extent, but you’re relying too much on organic activity and traffic if you’re not building up some certain sense of anticipation if you’re not marketing towards it. So that’s definitely something I think people can improve upon.”

Collins explained that during the 2023/24 NFL season, players who engaged in betting during the competition’s pre-season games were twice as likely to remain active all season compared to people who placed a bet on day one.

Sticking with the theme of the US for his 2025 predictions, Collins anticipates the end of the bonus “gold rush” next year.

“Bonus generosity spending has to equalise in parts of the US,” he explained.

“Operators should be very careful. They don’t want to be caught out being the most generous operators because they are going to get exposed to bonus abuse and throwing money away that they don’t need to.”

Collins added that “cross-sell generosity” will also be a top priority as operators look to transition players to other aspects of their content.