Custom messaging for the masses.
EngineeringConnected Experiences
Scratch-offs only scratch the surface.
Our work transformed hoosierlottery.com into a personalized digital experience for players all over Indiana.
With technology evolving and a steadily increasing user base, state lotteries have shifted focus to providing digital experiences for their players—not only in the gamified sense, but in an effort to responsibly track entries, validate winners, build loyalty and market personalized content.
In a recent fiscal year, Indiana’s state lottery, the Hoosier Lottery, sold over 168 million Scratch-off tickets, hosted over 3,000 drawings, tracked 89,505,001 tickets scanned in their app and supported over 380,000 members in their myLOTTERY loyalty program. Less-than-robust systems can’t scale to these numbers, and without the right technical set up, there’s no way to engage this volume of users in a personalized way.
Using a mix of enterprise level technologies, our solution was a custom-built infrastructure that added layers of personalization and automation to engage with the Lottery.
Managing content and custom workflows
When we first started working with Hoosier Lottery in 2019 as their AOR, their digital ecosystem lived on a restrictive platform lacking the capabilities needed to meet their growing content needs. They were dealing with a substantial amount of manual processes, along with inaccessibility in updating their content in a timely manner. Shifting to a more practical content management system (CMS) quickly became our team’s priority.
The Kentico platform offered the suite of capabilities Hoosier Lottery was looking for. However, we also had to consider the relationship that Hoosier Lottery had with International Game Technology (IGT), who owns the business data for winning numbers, Scratch-off statistics and more. Their old process heavily relied on moving data files into directories and loading them into databases—manually, for every promotion. With promotions growing, we not only needed to automate and streamline this process, but then seamlessly feed it into the CMS. Using a custom-built game admin API layer, this is exactly what we did, and the two were fully integrated for the new website launch.
Making it personal for all players
Hoosier Lottery’s new technical infrastructure gave them the ability to create very custom experiences and market their content dynamically for over 380,000 users. Our teams not only worked with Kentico as a platform; we further integrated it with Braze for a 360-degree user journey. From a brand experience perspective, this set up ensured that messaging was based on specific actions to strengthen user engagement. The result? A personalized experience that spanned multiple communication channels and created more engagement, more entries and more loyalty members.
Turning Creative Ideas into Gaming Experiences
Extending the player experience meant going beyond the purchase of a Scratch-off ticket and getting players involved in something larger, something digital.
Our custom tech stack allowed us to build what we call “digital activations.” For larger promotions, our team turned creative campaign ideas into digital gaming activities that myLOTTERY members could access on the website and play for merchandise, experiences and prize money.
On the build side, our engineers made digital wheels for players to spin, balloons for them to pop, an augmented reality snow globe and much more—including bringing a version of Frogger to the website. Additionally, our team enabled Fast Play games to be connected to digital activations, a capability that previously did not exist. Behind the screen, our digital infrastructure was hard at work authenticating users, capturing entries, validating tickets, recording and storing them in database tables, and ultimately making the digital experience possible.
The winning numbers
The custom technology we introduced to Hoosier Lottery streamlined their internal processes, allowed for flexible messaging and provided a digital gaming experience Hoosiers loved and came back to play, time and time again. Evolving towards a more personalized and connected brand experience drew ROIs across the board, making business differences along with digital ones.
Over the course of a few years, our work with Hoosier Lottery produced tremendous results–registrations for the myLOTTERY loyalty program increased by 112%, with a 148% increase in active members, and Scratch-off purchases rose almost 40%.