How Danske Spil took a privacy-first approach to customer experience and improved subscriber conversion by 4x

Danske Spil provides entertainment services through two main branches DLI (betting) and DLO (lottery). DLI offers sports betting, casino, poker, bingo, and so forth, while DLO is the Danish national lottery company, think National Lottery for those in the UK or Lottery USA for those in the US. They’re somewhat of an institution, having been around since 1948. They have a long history of providing fun and exciting games, with 16 brands across instant games, knowledge games, and gambling on machines. 

With a continuously growing game licensing portfolio and a mission to provide every customer with a "personalized, simple, and vibrant journey across every platform", they embarked on a digital transformation journey back in 2015. However, in comes ‘the GDPR’, which shook up these plans and introduced challenges realizing their mission to better connect with customers.

“Our mission requires good data — and data that is handled in a way that makes it accessible and usable across the organization”, says Peter Føns, CDP Manager, Danske Spil.

With digital transformation becoming the central focus for Peter and his colleagues, they embarked on a journey to achieve their mission of providing every customer with “a personalized, simple, and vibrant customer journey across every platform. And offer a high-quality, engaging, and reliable experience that ensures customer satisfaction and loyalty." But with the introduction of the GDPR shaking up their plans they had to shift their data modernization strategy towards consensual data collection directly from their customers. So, over the past two years they have worked to build a data foundation powered by ‘first-party data’ (data collected by a company directly from its customers).

“One of the biggest challenges and one of the main catalysts for our digital transformation journey was that customer data was simply not accessible or usable across the organization, so we didn’t know which parts of the customer journey needed improving”, says Peter. So, to achieve their mission they had to first ‘democratize’ their data and connect disparate data sources. Now, with Segment, Danske Spil has connected thirteen first-party data sources: external and internal data warehouses, six apps, four websites, their CRM, and Airship (mobile messaging) across 800,000 recognized users every month. 

Once Danske Spil established their modern data foundation with Segment they moved to the next phase of their digital transformation — improving the customer journey. Using data collected by Segment they implemented a recommendation engine utilizing machine learning to analyze customer behavior and preferences. This has enabled them to create customized recommendations and offer tailored experiences to every customer. The results — subscriber conversion has quadrupled and sign ups have increased +66% for the target group.

Safe data across the organization

The Segment deployment has become a central and vital component of Danske Spil's architectural framework. The platform and the processes established around the CDP have brought various departments together, fostering collaboration, shared understanding, and improved time-to-market. Segment makes customer data more accessible to BI, data science, analytics, product and marketing teams. This new level of data access became the catalyst for data-driven marketing, empowering Danske Spil to create exceptional customer experiences in a more agile and cost-effective manner. This has also led to departments working closer together and created a better understanding of each other's work.

What’s more, Danske Spil were able to do this all in a safe and compliant manner, utilizing Segment’s Privacy Portal (a way to automate your approach to keeping your customers' data private). They were able to gain real-time visibility into the personal information they were collecting, where it was being collected from, and where it was being sent. With this information they were able to set rules to automatically protect this personally identifiable information (PII).

Deliver a high-quality, engaging, and reliable experience to every user

Segment played a pivotal role in Danske Spil's data-driven marketing transformation. Segment allowed them to seamlessly activate their clean data across multiple channels and tools. They leveraged destinations like Meta, Snapchat, Eloqua, Airship, TV2 Play, Sitecore, and Azure Databricks to deliver personalized messages and experiences to their customers.

In addition, using the data collected by Segment they have leveraged machine learning algorithms to analyze customer behavior and preferences, and are able to create customized recommendations and offers tailored to each individual customer's needs and interests. For example, they can now send real-time push notifications based on user activity on their site or app. This allowed Danske Spil to deliver more relevant and engaging content to its customers, increasing their loyalty and driving repeat business. 

Their new first-party data collection strategy has also opened up opportunities for new projects. For example, in late 2022, they launched a Lotto-PLUS campaign. They automatically pushed first-party data to TV2 Play, an addressable TV channel, targeting relevant customers. On the TV2 Play activation alone, they saw a 25 per cent uplift in subscriptions. And when they added email and push, this increased to a 66% increase.

This approach has led to a number of benefits. First, their time to launch campaigns and access to behavioral and transactional data significantly improved. Instead of waiting for months, marketers could now access structured data within a few hours, empowering them to make data-driven decisions without extensive technical knowledge. Before implementing Segment, it could take months to make behavioral data and transaction data accessible to Marketing teams. Secondly, and most crucially, they were able to increase new subscriber conversion for one or more of their three weekly lotteries (Lotto, Vikinglotto or Eurojackpot), by 4x, with Segment making it possible to leverage first-party data and easily orchestrate communication across channels.

Improve campaign insights to find the best channels to connect with customers

Prior to implementing Segment, Danske Spil primarily measured marketing performance by channel, and could only look at performance in isolation. Now, with Segment, it is easier to measure uplift in conversion rates and deposits (i.e. how much a customer spends on the bet/game/lottery) as well as the customer's time spent and engagement on the app and website across channels. This has enabled Danske Spil to make data-driven decisions, ensuring they’re connecting with customers where they want to be engaged with and ensuring marketing spend is efficiently spent and not ‘wasted’ on ineffective channels.

Enable accountability and compliance in the gaming industry

Danske Spil's commitment to responsible gambling has been further supported by their use of Unify (Segment's solution for real-time customer profiles), which has unlocked a complete view of their customers. Now, they are able to prioritize accountability by considering players' risk scores, ensuring that marketing efforts are not targeted at individuals with problematic gambling behavior. This strategy applies to owned channels as well as purchased channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, or TV2 Play, where they can work with first-party data.

What's next?

Danske Spil are exploring additional use cases with Segment such as using ReverseETL to bring data from their warehouse into Segment and setting up advanced journeys, which automate and orchestrate customer communications across channels. This should bring Danske Spil closer to their goal of bringing “a personalized, simple, and vibrant customer journey across every platform, for every customer”.