How Caesars Entertainment Hit the Email Marketing Jackpot
Caesars Entertainment Corporation is one of the largest gaming companies in the world. Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, the entertainment giant’s long history can be traced back to the 1930s when they began forming their rich history of customer loyalty and customer-centric hospitality. The company now owns and operates over 50 casinos and resort hotels on three continents around the globe.
When Chris Jenner (VP, Email Marketing) and Tonya Carpenter (Director, Email Marketing) joined the team, Caesars set an ambitious goal to increase productivity without increasing the size of their team by leveraging automation and dynamic content. Their team could spend more time tackling additional deployments to grow and engage their loyal customer base instead of re-creating the same campaign for different audiences.
Prior to implementing SFMC, Caesars email volume was capped due to a variety of reasons, the manual nature of email builds being the biggest constraint. The implementation of SFMC enabled their team to increase sending capacity by 800%.
Their team then turned their efforts to focus on efficiencies using data to scale campaign builds, and drive revenue with personalization and targeted content.
Key differentiators for the Caesars team are:
- Utilizing data to automatically populate email templates with conventions like property-specific From Name, font, color scheme, images, and more.
- Leveraging data-driven dynamic content blocks for highly personalized customer emails. One email build can be deployed as 50+ versions highlighting custom offers based on the customer’s preferences.
Jenner argues personalization doesn’t necessarily equal higher open rates – which is why their team pays attention to content and continues to test for optimal engagement. “As long as what you’re sending is relevant, people will engage,” he shared in a presentation during Salesforce Connections in June 2019.
By watching for and reporting on key trends in their emails, Caesars attributes an estimated 50% increase in revenue by sending the right offers to the right customers at the right time.
Seeing the impact their email marketing has made on revenue motivates the Caesars team to innovate on strategy and tactics. Next, they plan to leverage tools such as Heroku and Audience Builder to standardize data formatting to provide more automation and efficiency to the team.
“Email is your online identity,” states Jenner. Email is the most preferred marketing channel because customers have full control over their inboxes and can curate their own experiences. It’s a cross-generational channel that enables connecting with customers of all demographics, and it allows brands to communicate via a channel that demonstrates a customer’s trust.
The Caesars email marketing team continues to reinvest into SFMC, partnering with Lev to keep customers at the center of their strategy. After all, the Caesars team plays to win.