Jackpocket is attempting to change the gambling landscape.
The lottery courier service is the first to dip its toe into the online casino world. By doing that, it’s giving online gambling operators a look at the cross-sell potential of casinos to lottery.
It’s a big reason why DraftKings was willing to pay $750 million to acquire Jackpocket.
Recently, the VP of Interactive Gaming at Jackpocket, John Worthington, sat down for an interview with Zero Latency: An Eilers & Krejcik Gaming Podcast.
Worthington covered a lot of topics, mostly how the lottery connection to casinos could revolutionize online gaming.
Jackpocket Casino up 282% in revenue
The first Jackpocket online casino did a soft launch in New Jersey back in October.
After a few months of establishing a gaming library, the company began to really promote and push the new product starting in January.
The push has seen results, as February had over $800,000 in gross gaming revenue. That was a 282% increase from the $210,000 it did in January.
Worthington noted that last week was the best week yet for Jackpocket in terms of active users.
Jackpocket continues to add more gaming options to its online casino, including expanding on its live dealer offerings.
Also aiding in customer acquisition is Jackpocket came out with an aggressive sign up bonus for its online casino. It offers up to a $500 match on a new customer’s first deposit. On top of that, it also includes $10 in lottery credits for its NJ service.
Worthington detailed why the bonus offer was so large during the podcast interview:
“We thought it was important to kind of offer a really good signup offer, and also include a lottery offer. That’s kind of core to what our differentiator is, we’re able to give out lottery credits to come over,” Worthington said. “So, from a customer friendliness standpoint, our multipliers are also very low so customers don’t have to turn the bonus over too much. We wanted to make it easy and fun and really not frustrate customers.”
Cross-sell opportunities working well for Jackpocket
The real appeal of Jackpocket growing its online casino is the cross-sell ability it has through its lottery and vice versa.
In January, Jackpocket began an email campaign to promote its iGaming platform, while also adding icons that would take players to the casino through the lottery app.
It also amped up the television and radio ads that were originally used for its lottery service, and began promoting the online casino.
“The big thing for us was making sure that it was very, very easy for customers to get from lottery to casino, and then vice versa, going back to lottery from casino, all while making both of those journeys really simple,” Worthington said.
It wasn’t a difficult transition for Jackpocket users to get access to the casino. Their account information for the lottery product was transferred directly over to iGaming.
What DraftKings sees in Jackpocket’s product
The appeal for DraftKings to purchase Jackpocket was the low customer acquisition cost and its player database.
Draftkings has stated that the acquisition costs for a Jackpocket player are 80% lower than what it took for its own database.
On top of that, the lottery customer tends to skew more female, as does iCasino. That makes cross-selling to bring in new customers from one platform to the other much easier than sports betting to casino. Worthington explained:
“Our customers tend to be a little bit more on the female side than traditional, so it’s been a nice blend to get them over to the casino side.”
Between being able to draw in a casino customer and cheap acquisition, Jackpocket believes it is already showing DraftKings’ instincts to purchase the company were correct:
“We’re seeing that the model works for sure. Our primary source of acquisition is lottery customers, that the crossover to casino, we’re seeing that the (crossover) branding works really well. We can use existing kind of advertising that we’re already doing and bring down our cost of acquisition that way,” Worthington said. “I think all around the model’s proven itself. The conversion rates are right where we thought they’d be, maybe a little higher. A lot of our assumptions are proving correct. Some aren’t. But, I think on the large majority, that’s been really good.”
Will Jackpocket Casino launch in other states?
With some success for the online casino product already, Jackpocket has been focused on growing its player database.
“We’re seeing the conversion rates much higher than we initially expected. Pressure has been more about, ‘let’s drive those acquisition numbers, let’s make sure that the experience is good.’ We don’t want to create any harm or mess up the experience that they might have had in lottery side once they get to the casino side.”
As the New Jersey online casino sees growth in revenue, it’s normal to wonder what is next for Jackpocket.
Worthington noted that in order to expand, it has to already have its lottery service established in one of the few states that have legalized online casinos:
“When we looked at this originally, we kind of looked at the map of where Jackpocket was live with lottery and kind of overlaid that with where casino was available, where we could have online casino. The one other option at this point is West Virginia,” Worthington said. “We launched lottery probably a year and a half ago there. That would most likely be the next kind of opportunity. We’re still in the early stages of New Jersey, seeing great signs, but yeah, expansion is definitely in the cards.”
Photo by PlayiLottery
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