Brand loyalty’s role in sports betting

What is the importance of brand loyalty, and what are the tools and strategies at a sports betting operator’s disposal when it comes to developing it?  

In a sector where competition for customer eyeballs and share of wallet can be particularly intense, cultivating brand loyalty can be a vital tool in the arsenal of the ambitious sports betting operator.

There are many strategies for attracting customers – competitive pricing, clever advertising, enticing sign-up offers – but ensuring that those players return long term is just as critical in support of sustainable growth and meaningful success. Developing a brand identity which customers respond to is key to both widening the acquisition funnel and broadening retention in sports betting.

Brand loyalty is a core part of customer engagement which we will explore further below. For even more insight on keeping customers coming back, tune in to Solving the Player Engagement Challenge at Kambi’s Festival of Sportsbook on Wednesday 4 June.

How to build loyalty amongst sports bettors

Achieving consistent quality and reliability

Sports betting customers naturally seek a stable and consistent experience every time they visit a sports betting operator. Major sporting events such as a World Cup Final, a Super Bowl or March Madness are key acquisition opportunities drawing high traffic, but if that volume causes slowdown in bet validation or heightens latency in the live product it will harm loyalty and retention.

For operators looking to grow their customer base around high-traffic events, a core platform that has been stress-tested at scale and is proven to deliver a consistently excellent experience is key to gaining customer trust and promoting longer term loyalty.

Fostering a solid brand identity

The sports betting marketplace is undoubtedly crowded – customers have plenty of options when it comes to where to place their bets, and for a sportsbook provider, giving operator partners access to a few different colour options and widgets is not enough to help them stand out from this crowd.

Demand for differentiation is often the highest in the front end, and delivering localised, superior user journeys with brand consistency across all touchpoints – be that web, mobile or retail – is vital to building a brand that customers want to return to time and again. Kambi’s Front End product suite is fully customisable, affording operators complete control over the look and feel of each brand, and how the user is guided through each step of the journey within that sportsbook’s ecosystem.

Moreover, the scale of the sports betting offering is growing, evolving the relationship between bettor and bookmaker. On the Kambi network, between 2019 and 2024 the number of player props offered rose by more than 300%, while in the same period the number of legs per bet grew 24%. Presenting these increasingly complex offerings to the end user in a digestible way is a growing challenge, and one which can only be met by best-in-class UX capabilities.

Deploying high-performance products

An attractive sign-up offer or competitive pricing can be important factors in acquisition, but in building retention – and ultimately ongoing brand loyalty – offering those acquired players core products that are of the highest standard is the critical factor.

The challenge of offering advanced functionality such as multi-sport capability and cash out within the bet builder, by way of example, represents a huge challenge at a structural and technical level. This is why so many sportsbooks fall short of the required standards.

No sportsbook wants to find their ability to offer important products such as bet builder curtailed by an inability to successfully price and manage the risk of bets placed on large, inter-related combinations – a factor which is especially pertinent as player appetite for complex products of this nature grows. It needs a high level of quality in technology, as well as confluence of processes in data and product development. These core competencies and quality products are crucial to cultivating a loyal player base.

Prioritising personalisation

Providing personalised services to players – making the player feel seen and their specific preferences catered to – is a cornerstone of building customer loyalty. From the beginning of the customer lifecycle, every interaction and decision a player makes, or doesn’t make, can be used to build a picture of the player and inform the kind of content, bonuses and marketing they want to see.

An underlying tech-stack capable of facilitating this is vastly important, complete with machine-learning algorithms that build a 360-degree view of the customer and help to serve them the right bet at the right time.

Crafting bonuses which put the player first

Deployed strategically, bonuses have the potential to play an important role in building a relationship with the customer and cultivating brand identity. The importance to retention of rewards such as free bets, odds boosts, profit boosts and best odds is clear – proven to positively influence customer actions, incentivising bettors to reengage or continue engaging with the sportsbook.

A methodical and deliberate approach to bonusing – that is to say, giving value to the player directly – can also be core to building a positive impression of a brand with that customer. When and how the value proposition presented to customers through bonusing is handled can help reinforce an operator’s positioning, and how the brand is perceived in each target market.

Once a customer has created an account and shown a propensity to engage with a sportsbook brand, they become part of the sportsbook ecosystem. The key becomes the smart leveraging of data to understand which bonuses, offered on which sports and at which times will be most effective in driving value.

Delivering consistent transparency and excellent customer service

An effective approach to CRM builds goodwill with customers, goodwill which can spread throughout the sports betting community and draw in more players to a site or land-based location. Operators can further build this with terms of service that are transparent, customer service that is accessible and loyalty programs which entice players to return.

For many operators around the world, utilising a Turnkey Sportsbook that is capable of handling the entirety of the end-to-end process, from sports data ingestion to bet settlement, can empower them to focus on competencies where their efforts can drive the most value, freeing them to build the best version of their CRM strategies.