How Mido Lotto Hit the Jackpot with 3X Conversion with SMS

The Challenge Needing to create programmatic nurture campaigns to build trust and convert users into paying customers

The Fix Experimentation with SMS as a messaging channel and creating onboarding campaigns based on user behavior

The Result Mido Lotto saw a 3x conversion rate with dormant users going back to the app and purchasing tickets after experimenting with SMS. They also saw a 2000% increase in paying customers and an 1875% increase in registered users within a year of using Customer.io

Mido Lotto is an online platform that allows users to play the Lottery in a modern way: digitally. Their app allows users to order Lottery tickets, manage those orders, check tickets, and instantly collect winnings for state-licensed Lottery games online, directly from their phones.

When Mido Lotto first started with Customer.io, their main driver was to create programmatic nurture campaigns to convert registered users on the app into paying customers. With the help of Customer.io’s powerful marketing automation, Mido Lotto has been able to grow paying customers by 2000% and registered users by 1875% in just 1 year. The app has now reached hundreds of thousands of installs.

Mido Lotto uses Customer.io for 6 primary reasons:

• New user onboarding nurture campaigns, with the goal of converting app registrants into  paying customers
• Utility based reminders in the app, for example reminding people there’s a jackpot coming up
• Retention Marketing 
• ReEngagement of inactive users
• Advertising promotions
• Ad hoc for calendar based reminders and communications

Trust

There are many layers to any company’s messaging strategy, but a unique hurdle Mido Lotto has to overcome is instilling trust within their customers. The lottery is a notoriously challenging space to build trust and legitimacy in, so they rely on sending the right messages to the right people at the right time to build that confidence. 

“Communicating with our audience in the right way at the right time with the right messages is critical for us to convert non-paying users into customers, which is why we trust Customer.io to manage and help us with those communications tactics.”

–Hamish Elmslie, Chief Operating Officer

Mido Lotto’s onboarding workflow consists of over 40 unique messages that are geared towards getting a user comfortable enough with their brand and product to become a paying customer. Through Customer.io’s complex messaging buildout ability, they are able to nurture this trust programmatically over the course of a month.

Experimenting: Reengagement with Customer.io with SMS

“One of the greatest gifts Customer.io has given us is the ability to experiment, quickly refine, and iterate our strategy with clear results”

-Hamish Elmslie, Chief Operating Officer

As any fast-moving startup knows, having the prowess to think of new hypotheses, test them out quickly, then swiftly pivot is the lifeblood to growing your business. That’s a critical reason why Mido Lotto uses Customer.io.

One experiment Mido Lotto used Customer.io for was leveraging SMS to engage with dormant users. This was uncharted territory for Mido Lotto that ended up wildly successful. With an SMS campaign targeted at inactive app users, they saw users coming back and placing an order through the app at 3x the conversion rate! 

They’ve now harnessed the power of SMS, a traditionally challenging channel to get right, to learn how to communicate with their customers in a way that is personalized enough to convert users. With our integration with Segment, Mido Lotto is able to truly send hyper-targeted SMS messages based on user behavior.

“We use Customer.io to understand the difference between SMS push and email, and to understand which types of communication work best for each channel. It’s very easy to do with Customer.io and we’ve seen unprecedented results. “ 

-Hamish Elmslie, Head of Operations

Small Teams with Mighty Power

Being able to experiment with messaging techniques is only half the battle when you have a small team like Mido Lotto. With a small team, everyone has to wear multiple hats but more importantly, know how to wear the hats.

“As a startup, you might not have someone with 15 years experience with CRM or ESP tools on the team from day one. Customer.io is so intuitive that anyone in our organization can understand how to use the platform. Being able to build and launch complex automated campaigns with a small amount of resource is phenomenal.”

-Hamish Elmslie, Chief Operating Officer

Small teams need powerful players, and having everyone be able to perform complex tasks without the dedicated resources needed to execute is one of the foundations of any successful startup.

New User Onboarding Campaigns

Mido Lotto relies heavily on their new user onboarding campaigns, which are a set of emails and SMS messages geared towards making users comfortable enough with the brand and platform to become a paying customer. Through continuous A/B testing, they’ve been able to create a campaign that converts 16% better than their previous approach. At any given time, there are tens of thousands of people in this workflow, so a 16% increase makes a huge difference on revenue.

Takeaways

With the help of Customer.io, Mido Lotto has been able to scale their business at an incredible rate. Their ability to send hyper-personalized messages to the right people, at the right time, in the right channel has allowed them to garner the trust they need from their audience to gain traction in the Lottery space. The journey to gain this momentum wasn’t by chance, however. It took crafty trials and leaps of faith paired with a marketing messaging platform built to scale with them.