When ESPNBet emanated earlier this year in a pre-NFL flurry of hype, like the popular high school quarterback arriving very late to a sweet house party that was threatening to wind down, questions frequently asked included:
- To what extent is ESPN's massive digital customer base already captured by betting industry incumbents?
- To what extent would customer loyalty at those betting industry incumbents prevent ESPNBet from monetizing ESPN's built-in audience?
- How quickly would Pat McAfee do something to attract the somehow limitless attention span of Penn Entertainment's good friend, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission?
But others interested in burrowing for salience (shout out Chris Krafcik) posed a question underpinning the ones above: How easy would Penn be able to make it for ESPN customers to get from the digital place where they spend time (.com) to the digital place where they spend money (ESPNBet)?
I'm not even talking about getting them through KYC and deposit, I'm talking about getting them through the funnel above the funnel, porting customers from .com to the betting platform. Before you can pick what pew you want to sit in, you have to be able find the church.
The encircled odds badges on the two lower games below represent a nice start to this effort (I would have loved to have seen them displayed for the two in-progress games above, too). They also represent an infinitely stickier capturing effort than the linear on-air ticker with spreads and point totals we've seen beneath Scott Van Pelt's face for the last five years. I can't click on my SmartTV and get to ESPN's sportsbook (R.I.P. Fubo) but on my phone or desktop I can click on this link next to the game whose score I'm checking and -Boom!- be swept straight to ESPNBet. Right?
*Right??!*
For now, clicking on either blue-bordered badge keeps the customer within the ESPN.com confines, sending them to the game's Gamecast page. There, a second click away, the customer is told they can venture to ESPNBet if they desire. After a third click confirming that they would indeed like to venture, they arrive to ESPNBet.
And then the customer gets to start signing up for an account.
Maybe this is for regulatory reasons. Maybe the (hardly insightful) suggestion of having one-click instead of three-click transportation is already in the works and it takes an army of developers to make even the slightest change to a platform like ESPN's. All fair points, and a reminder that Rome wasn't built in a day. The venture has a ton of talented people behind it.
But regardless of whether I'm an ESPN.com audience member well-cannibalized by one or more top market-share operators, or I'm brand new and brand agnostic to sports betting, the difference between asking three clicks and asking one click can be a lot.
The KYC funnel is rough enough as it is.
I look forward to seeing Penn/ESPNBet continue to condense the various route maps that deliver customers to its threshold.
#betting #espn
Multi-Platform Sales Consultant That Thrives On Connecting Brands To Their Desired Audiences Via Podcasting, Streaming & Play-By-Play Campaigns
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