“If you look at the two verticals, you can say that social games have the reach while online gambling has the money. Just to say, a few years ago, when social casino games first started, it was actually quite a surprise to see that casino game players will pay even though they don’t have the possibility of winning,” Pini Yakuel tells his audience at Casual Connect Europe. “But still, despite that fact, if you look at the social space, there is a lot of hype and a lot of talk and a lot of players, but still, in terms of money, you don’t find too many companies doing great numbers, unlike the real money industry where you have a lot of companies turning good numbers.”
Pini Yakuel is Founder and CEO of Optimove, a company which he proudly describes as a one-stop shop for retention marketers. Optimove originated in 2009, when Yakuel was finishing his Masters in Operational Research. He teamed up with Dr. Sachar Cohen, who had just completed a PhD in Data Mining. They combined their knowledge to help companies improve marketing efforts through harnessing customer data. To do this, they developed a unique customer modelling methodology and applied it to clients’ databases, allowing them to better understand their clients and personalize marketing efforts. As they gained more clients, Optimove developed into a customer retention automation platform powered by predictive micro-segmentation technology. As CEO, Yakuel is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the company, including product development, customer relations, sales and marketing, and to lead the company to achieve its goals.
Streamlining the Process
Optimove began as a technology that modeled customers interactions and provided actionable insight on them. While visiting one of his customers, Yakuel attending a meeting with the CRA, Marketing, and IT teams as they planned the next month’s campaign based on insight from using Optimove. At that point, he realized the Marketing team actually plans the campaign, with CRA and IT providing relevant support. “Why,” he thought, “was there not a single system that empowers marketers to take immediate action? Why not a one-stop shop for marketers to plan, schedule, and execute their campaigns without needing IT support or data scientists?”
This insight led him to develop Optimove in the direction that would allow marketers to manage and automate their entire cross-channel customer marketing plan. The Optimove software enables marketers to maximize revenues and customer lifetime value by automatically personalizing, executing and evaluating a complete system of customer-data-driven campaigns. And Optimove became, as Yakuel claims, “a lethal weapon for marketers.”
Yakuel describes the software this way: “Optimove models customers based on lifecycle stages and segmentation layers, which are based on behavioral attributes. When those are combined, the technology assigns every customer to a micro-segment and monitors their migration between micro-segments, enabling the discovery of customer patterns, customer personas, and future behavior predictions.” He claims that seeing customers using their LTV prediction, generating granular target groups, and running personalized campaigns as part of their day-to-day tasks is amazing and gives him the best possible feedback.
Thinking About the Future
The future of the gaming industry, according to Yakuel, will see many more operators, developers, and publishers providing a rapidly growing audience with many more exciting games, better game experiences and a huge range of platforms to choose from. As a result, operators and publishers will find it much more difficult to keep players loyal and engaged. Marketers will be forced to become experts in personalized marketing. He believes that marketing campaigns will be crafted to meet the exact passion, wants, and needs of every player. Game experiences will be personalized based on player affinities, preferences, and past behavior. Operators unable to personalize the experiences and incentives for their players will rapidly become irrelevant. He insists, “The next big trend, in my opinion, will be the next level of personalization—personalize or vaporize!”
Yakuel also foresees major changes coming to the iGaming ecosystem, for both real money segments and social gaming, with the evolving real money gaming regulations in the US.
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