Sportsbet.io Q&A: Betting beyond bitcoin

Sportsbet.io is the sportsbook brand of Coingaming Group, a network of egaming brands and products overseen by CEO Tim Heath. The business has its headquarters in the tech hotbed of Tallinn, Estonia and also has a growing presence in Ukraine and the Philippines.

Sportsbet.io is one of the biggest bitcoin sportsbooks around and its two biggest player markets are South America – particularly Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela – and India – but it’s not all about bitcoin.

Following popular customer demand, Sportsbet.io integrated Litecoin (a spin-off to bitcoin) in April to enhance its range of alternative payment capabilities. Sister brand Bitcasino had gone live with the currency back in February and the move sparked a 22% increase in player deposits.

The switch means players can now deposit, play and withdraw in Litecoin, adding to previously available cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, ether and SOC coin. The operator also pivoted away from a sole crypto focus last year and has since integrated 11 traditional fiat currencies, including euros, in an attempt to make the product as accessible as possible.

Here, Sportsbet.io head of marketing Justin Le Brocque talks to EGR Marketing about establishing meaningful relationships with Sportsbet.io’s VIP customers, creating a new affiliates dashboard and being one of a handful of Australians trying to come to terms with Tallinn’s unforgiving winters.

EGR Marketing: What are your key responsibilities?

Justin Le Brocque (JLB): My job title is head of sportsbook marketing and that means that under my remit we are developing a strong team that covers everything from acquisitions, retention and bringing on new channels to overseeing SEO-related activity and giving them all a steer about the events that are coming up. Content is another area that I am involved in, so I brief the team about what will be happening to get some articles together. We are lucky in sports because the calendar is already set out for us. That is where strategy and events planning comes from so then we have to maximise our offering and awareness during March Madness or whichever event it might be. We like to look at cross-sell opportunities and build excitement for our players along the way.

Justin Le Brocque (holding the football)

EGR Marketing: What is it like living and working in Tallinn?

JLB: It is good! Obviously as an Australian, it is a hell of a lot different – it has a unique charm, but I still haven’t got used to walking around when there’s snow on the ground.

EGR Marketing: Has the decrease in bitcoin value had an impact on the business?

JLB: To be honest, no. In fact, it is almost better for us in many ways. Before people would rather hold onto their coins than bet because they were eager to see what was going to happen. The bitcoin betting world is a very profit-driven customer base. You do still have a lot of recreational customers, but not as many. Within that you get guys with big average bet sizes. If the value of bitcoin drops, then the number of bets actually goes up.

EGR Marketing: Has it made Sportsbet.io open to fiat currency?

JLB: When you are in crypto you get a higher average bet but a smaller pool of players. We have now moved into fiat as well. You can deposit about 30 different currencies. If you’ve got the product, why would you want to exclude people? We want players to enjoy that thrill wherever they are from, whichever currency they want to use or whichever payment providers they prefer. It is a new thing for us, but it is opening doors and we are happy to be going in that direction. Whether bitcoin will be the be-all and end-all we still don’t know, but it is about having it there and then adding more methods to become relevant in the eyes of the consumer.

EGR Marketing: How important is your VIP strategy?

JLB: I’ve met a couple of the VIPs and I’ve told them we use their usernames to talk about them on a daily basis. We talk about our players like they are in the room. When they heard that, they thought it was awesome as they didn’t realise we thought about them in that way. The group we took on the VIP trip, we ended up becoming friends with. They see that you are real people and building that relationship with the customer is the most important thing you can do. You can lose that connection really easily by being a purely online business. In a bricks and mortar shop, you can see there is another person across the counter so it is important when online to not be a nameless, faceless entity. VIPs are super important but we don’t want to just be for VIPs.

EGR Marketing: Do you have a close relationship with Sportsbet.io customers?

JLB: Every morning we look at our top 10 winners and losers. Within the room there might be 25 people from across the business, from business support to sports marketing, and we all sit there and get to know our players by name. This morning somebody got on with a multi-bet at odds of 32/1 and we all said ‘well done’ because as a sports bettor you need to celebrate the brilliant wins regardless of whether you’re the operator or player.

EGR Marketing: In the UK there is an ongoing debate about restricting winning punters. What are your thoughts on the situation?

JLB: We are in the business of longevity for our players and there are few people who are reduced simply on them having won a couple of times. However, we let people win into the hundreds of thousands before we sit there and ask, well what are we going to do about this? It isn’t fun otherwise and can show disrespect to the player if they are no longer allowed to play with us, just because they won a bet at the weekend. It is not part of our business model to chop people down, we want them to have sustained yet responsible fun.

EGR Marketing: How is the newly-launched Soccer Centre section of the sportsbook going?

JLB: It stemmed from the World Cup after we listened to feedback from our players. We also looked at the Google Analytics data and decided to take the best bits and put them onto the normal website for the normal season. We looked at the widgets we offer and the ones which bring value to the player to help them form an opinion for their bet and make them an expert. They might come to the site for the first time and think this is great, Sportsbet.io has it all worked out.

EGR Marketing: Is there much of a crossover between the sportsbook and the casino side of the business?

JLB: Within Sportsbet we have a casino platform as well. I oversee that too, so I look at a lot of cross-selling promotions. We want to build that extra excitement and bring it in for players along the way. It doesn’t always have to be a free bet on a sports betting promo. We can cross-sell an offer across to casino and that has its own benefits in terms of customer retention and actually keeping them playing within the Sportsbet ecosystem. It is a good way of doing it and it adds value.

EGR Marketing: How did the CONIFA Euros sponsorship come about?

JLB: Sheer luck. We caught coverage of the event on the television one Sunday morning, a few connections and conversations later they had invited us to the AGM in Poland. That was a good experience to learn more about the association itself. We became the headline sponsors and we are excited about it. Our motto is fun, fast and fair and that is a good crossover for the tournament. There are a lot of crossovers in our ethos actually. We’re in the crypto space and we want to innovate and disrupt in the same way that they are doing. It ticked a lot of boxes.

Sportsbet.io Soccer Centre

EGR Marketing: Will you take a different approach to Paddy Power when it sponsored the CONIFA World Cup? 

JLB: Paddy Power did its thing really well but that is not where we want to take it. We are here to support CONIFA because we really appreciate what they are doing. When the opportunity came up, I think the decision was made in about two seconds. The concept we want to go with is a total celebration of the people and the teams that are there and how they have overcome adversity.

EGR Marketing: Which markets are key for Sportsbet.io and Coingaming? Is there still no interest in the UK?

JLB: Markets are something we are constantly looking at. The UK is pretty flooded and the operators that are there do it well. Regulation is a factor but we want to offer a great product to as many people as possible. We look in to the Asian regions and have a strong foothold in Latin America. There are a few things happening this year with the cricket World Cup so that will dictate a lot of it.

EGR Marketing: Are there any plans to enter the US market?

JLB: I know a lot of people are saying it is going to be a goldrush but we don’t have any specific aspirations for going there. There are other markets we would prefer to focus on first.

EGR Marketing: You recently launched the brand new Partners.io programme for affiliates, can you tell us some more about that?

JLB: Affiliates are a big part of our business as always and we have been working towards focusing on them for a good while. We have always had an affiliate platform but we have just launched this brand new one. We brainstormed with some of our affiliates to create a friendly, easy way to access dashboard. With Partners.io if you are an affiliate, you can optimise your website based on data from that dashboard. It was a big box for us to tick and to keep on ticking. As a business we don’t want to acquire other businesses – we want to work alongside them as partners to get the best out of them.