Online Gambling: and making *MILLIONS* Case Study
Morning everyone
I thought this may be of interest to some of you, especially those involved in the online gambling industry, although I think the concept of this piece would extend to other industries fairly well.
As a bit of background, I'm a designer/advertiser by trade so this is more to do with an IDEA rather than Internet Marketing per se.
This was a piece I did a couple of years ago for the casino division of online gambling giant Bodog.com. At the time, Bodog did a lot of online advertising targeted at the industry, but had only just begun doing more mainstream stuff. The Casino marketing manager had gotten ahold of a gigantic list of addresses for land based casino high rollers - that is to say, people who gambled a lot of money at traditional casinos and was eager to direct a marketing campaign towards them. This was a demographic that had not had much, if any exposure to our brand. In order to tempt them to sign up with us, the brand manager decided to offer $100 free upon sign up, no gimmicks. Obviously, not a whole lot of money for someone who may blow 10 grand on a single hand of blackjack at the Wynn, but hopefully enough to get them interested in signing up with us.
Traditionally, the direct mail campaigns up to this point had consisted of sending out postcards advertising the offer. Fortunately, the marketing manager I worked with was open to change, and after proposing a mock wallet with a $100 bill enclosed, neatly matching the offer on hand, agreed to me pursuing this concept.
Working with the excellent folks at Metropolitan Printers in Vancouver, and after quite a lot of research into US postal regulations and laws surrounding replicating money (I follow the laws...not too sure about the rest of the company.
), the following direct mailer was produced. The piece consisted of an outer shell - the wallet, a sticker closing it (designed as a clasp) and then a removable replica $100 bill with the offer on hand. Since this was the heady days of Bodog, the /unit budget was relatively high, so I loaded the piece up with an array of Met's best printing effects. Spot glosses, diecuts, embosses - oh it was fun. On another note, even though an online casino is essentially a license to print money, we did have to look quite seriously into the implications of actually printing money. Thanks Secret Service!
Results wise, I can't remember exact numbers but I know this was by far and away the most successful DM campaign ever run there. I think we printed and sent out 75,000 pieces at a cost of around $100,000. The response rate including calls to the call centre was around 5% i believe (previous DM pieces had a response rate of less than 0.1%). I think the average casino user is worth between 800-1500 to an online gambling company...so do the math!
The Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992, Public Law 102-550, in Section 411 of Title 31 of the Code of Federal Regulations, permits color illustrations of U.S. currency, provided:
The illustration is of a size less than three-fourths or more than one and one-half, in linear dimension, of each part of the item illustrated
The illustration is one-sided and
All negatives, plates, positives, digitized storage medium, graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices, and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof are destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use
Title 18, United States Code, Section 504 permits black and white reproductions of currency and other obligations, provided such reproductions meet the size requirement.
I thought this may be of interest to some of you, especially those involved in the online gambling industry, although I think the concept of this piece would extend to other industries fairly well.
As a bit of background, I'm a designer/advertiser by trade so this is more to do with an IDEA rather than Internet Marketing per se.
This was a piece I did a couple of years ago for the casino division of online gambling giant Bodog.com. At the time, Bodog did a lot of online advertising targeted at the industry, but had only just begun doing more mainstream stuff. The Casino marketing manager had gotten ahold of a gigantic list of addresses for land based casino high rollers - that is to say, people who gambled a lot of money at traditional casinos and was eager to direct a marketing campaign towards them. This was a demographic that had not had much, if any exposure to our brand. In order to tempt them to sign up with us, the brand manager decided to offer $100 free upon sign up, no gimmicks. Obviously, not a whole lot of money for someone who may blow 10 grand on a single hand of blackjack at the Wynn, but hopefully enough to get them interested in signing up with us.
Traditionally, the direct mail campaigns up to this point had consisted of sending out postcards advertising the offer. Fortunately, the marketing manager I worked with was open to change, and after proposing a mock wallet with a $100 bill enclosed, neatly matching the offer on hand, agreed to me pursuing this concept.
Working with the excellent folks at Metropolitan Printers in Vancouver, and after quite a lot of research into US postal regulations and laws surrounding replicating money (I follow the laws...not too sure about the rest of the company.
), the following direct mailer was produced. The piece consisted of an outer shell - the wallet, a sticker closing it (designed as a clasp) and then a removable replica $100 bill with the offer on hand. Since this was the heady days of Bodog, the /unit budget was relatively high, so I loaded the piece up with an array of Met's best printing effects. Spot glosses, diecuts, embosses - oh it was fun. On another note, even though an online casino is essentially a license to print money, we did have to look quite seriously into the implications of actually printing money. Thanks Secret Service!Results wise, I can't remember exact numbers but I know this was by far and away the most successful DM campaign ever run there. I think we printed and sent out 75,000 pieces at a cost of around $100,000. The response rate including calls to the call centre was around 5% i believe (previous DM pieces had a response rate of less than 0.1%). I think the average casino user is worth between 800-1500 to an online gambling company...so do the math!
The Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992, Public Law 102-550, in Section 411 of Title 31 of the Code of Federal Regulations, permits color illustrations of U.S. currency, provided:
The illustration is of a size less than three-fourths or more than one and one-half, in linear dimension, of each part of the item illustrated
The illustration is one-sided and
All negatives, plates, positives, digitized storage medium, graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices, and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof are destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use
Title 18, United States Code, Section 504 permits black and white reproductions of currency and other obligations, provided such reproductions meet the size requirement.
Direct Response Copywriting