Case Study
Optimizing promotion engagement by shifting from campaign execution toward lifecycle experience strategy
Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG)
Impact
~21% improvement in promotion engagement by shifting from campaign-driven to behavior-informed strategy.
Identified friction across the promotion lifecycle. Shifted focus from campaign exposure toward lifecycle experience optimization. Informed prioritization and communication strategy across Product, Marketing, and CX. Introduced a more behavior-driven approach to promotion engagement.
Client
Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG)
Role
CX Research Consultant — Customer Strategy & Insights
Duration
4–6 months
Context
Promotions are one of the strongest drivers influencing engagement across digital sports betting experiences. They support acquisition, encourage participation, influence repeat activity, and shape how customers perceive value within the overall platform experience. At OLG, promotions already existed across multiple touchpoints, including campaign placements, promotional banners, and in-product experiences. Visibility was strong. What remained less clear was why participation and redemption outcomes varied so significantly throughout the customer journey. Customers were seeing promotions, but they were not consistently engaging with them. The strategic opportunity became understanding how customers discovered, interpreted, trusted, and acted on promotions throughout the broader experience lifecycle. Rather than treating promotions as isolated campaigns, the initiative reframed them as part of a broader behavioral and experience ecosystem influencing customer confidence, trust, effort, and participation decisions over time.
Approach
The work evaluated promotions across the full lifecycle: Awareness → Comprehension → Engagement → Tracking → Redemption. A mixed-method approach combined exploratory interviews, journey evaluation, usability testing, Voice of Customer analysis, and stakeholder perspectives. Work focused on two connected areas: evaluating the end-to-end promotion journey, and understanding how customers interpreted value, trust, and participation effort. To support decision-making, opportunities were evaluated using Kano-inspired thinking to distinguish foundational improvements, performance drivers, and future-state differentiators. This helped teams prioritize friction-reduction opportunities first while identifying longer-term personalization opportunities for future evolution.
Key Insights
The challenge was not promotion visibility. The challenge was how promotions were experienced. Three themes consistently shaped engagement behavior. Relevance: customers responded more positively when promotions aligned naturally with their betting behavior and intent. Clarity: customers often struggled to understand conditions, participation requirements, and reward mechanics. Trust: engagement weakened when promotions felt difficult to interpret, track, or redeem. The strongest engagement occurred when promotions felt simple, relevant, timely, and easy to understand.
Strategic Impact
The initiative contributed to approximately 21% improvement in promotion engagement. The work also informed communication improvements, lifecycle engagement strategy, personalization opportunities, and stronger alignment across Product, Marketing, and CX. It reinforced that engagement is rarely created through incentives alone. Customers respond to experiences that reduce uncertainty, fit naturally into behavior, and make value easy to understand. The most meaningful outcome was helping shift stakeholder thinking from campaign performance toward a more connected understanding of customer behavior and experience quality.
Next Steps
If extended further, the next phase would focus on operationalizing customer insight into ongoing optimization systems through experimentation and A/B testing, behavioral segmentation, lifecycle-triggered engagement, and more adaptive personalization models. The long-term opportunity is not simply creating more promotions. It is building a promotion ecosystem that feels relevant, trustworthy, and effortless to engage with.