Lottery Loyalty: How the New Jersey Lottery Is Powering Their Loyalty Program with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
The New Jersey Lottery, with marketing and sales powered by Northstar New Jersey Lottery Group, LLC (NSNJ), engages hundreds of thousands of players every year to participate in the Lottery’s numerous games—primarily Scratch-Offs and a variety of Draw Games, offering players many avenues for entertainment and of course, many chances to win!
As a way to reward their most loyal players and keep customers engaged, the Lottery offers a VIP Club program—a free service that offers members the ability to receive personalized notifications across channels, along with early notifications regarding new games, and chances to be entered in second chance sweepstakes and drawings. VIP Club members also receive coupons for Lottery products.
Loyalty programs are becoming an increasingly important focus for marketers who are looking to capture more first-party data from their customers. Of course, loyalty programs are also a key component in driving brand loyalty as consumers become inundated with endless options across all industries.
NSNJ uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) to power a majority of the components that make up the VIP Club program. Below, Michele Pastena-Kasian (Sr. Manager, Interactive Marketing) at NSNJ shares some of the ways that NSNJ leverages SFMC for the Lottery to drive customer loyalty through the VIP Club in partnership with her team, Liana Pena (Interactive Web Designer at NSNJ) and Jorge Garcia (Sr. Solution Architect at Lev):
Using Journey Builder to power a new member email series
Once a new member joins the VIP Club, they are entered into a new member journey that includes 6 emails from welcoming members to the VIP Club, informing them on how to maximize their free membership, and a ‘Happy Birthday’ email.
Providing personalized offers to their players
As the NSNJ team was looking to migrate to SFMC, the ability to have a scalable solution for providing personalized offers to Lottery players was one of their most important requirements. Partnering with Lev, we identified a unique way to use Cloud Pages to provide personalized coupon codes to players so that no two players can receive the same code, and so that no single player can receive more than one code—regardless of which source of entry they are accessing the coupon from. This dynamic solution is critical to maintaining data cleanliness and ensures that players have a seamless experience across channels.
With this highly-customizable solution in place, the NSNJ team can repurpose Cloud Pages using easily configurable drag-and-drop content blocks, powered by coupon code data extensions—helping drive efficiency for their team and enabling them to scale their abilities to provide these personalized offers.
Creating a custom preference center
Having a solid preference center in place is a key part of any customer engagement strategy. For NSNJ, this ensures they are communicating with customers where and when they want to be communicated with. On the Lottery website and mobile app, players have the option to set their communication preferences by channel and by which games they are most interested in.
Leaning into mobile
Leveraging SFMC for its ability to power cross-channel campaigns has been key for Lottery player messaging. Recognizing the importance of mobile, NSNJ has leaned heavily into players’ increasing preferences towards SMS and push notifications (via their custom mobile app) to receive updates. To help drive SMS opt-ins, the Lottery offered players a unique buy-one-get-one free (BOGO) promo as a reward for signing up to receive texts. They now use SMS as a key part of their engagement strategy.
When it comes to loyalty programs, creating personalized experiences for members is key, ranging from providing exclusive offers, to ensuring that you are communicating with members in a way that’s preferable to them. Through their efforts to create a more personalized experience for their members, NSNJ has seen a 3% YOY increase in open rates, a 2% increase in clickthrough rates—and an increase in overall member satisfaction. Members are able to easily find and access the information they want, which has led to a decrease in support messages from members.
A reduction in support messages isn’t the only efficiency that NSNJ has found through maximizing their use of Marketing Cloud; they’ve also greatly reduced the amount of time it takes for their team to build campaigns, and their custom, user-friendly templates have allowed for the entire team to be enabled on building and deploying emails—freeing up the time of their internal technical resources and fostering a more collaborative team culture.
With the results NSNJ has seen from the VIP Club, it’s no wonder that companies are making big bets on amping up their loyalty programs.