Honoré Gaming: Retention begins long before the final whistle

What separates operators that retain World Cup players from those that watch them disappear?

Proactivity, and knowing your audience before it arrives. A World Cup is an acquisition event, not a revenue windfall, its real value comes in the months following the final whistle, or not at all. The operators who retain those players prepared for them: they knew the traffic was coming and had already done the analytical work of understanding who they are and how to analyse them quickly.

Retention isn’t a post-match rescue operation. It starts with the ability to look at a first-time depositor in week one and understand what kind of player you’re dealing with, what they came for, what rhythm they play at, what would make them stay, and then personalise the experience accordingly. Operators who watch players disappear are the ones who saw a million registrations as one undifferentiated mass. The winners saw a million individuals to be understood. The tournament opens up the same traffic. What separates them is how early they started learning who was inside it.

How important is behavioural segmentation, and what early signals tell you whether a player is likely to become a long-term customer?

It’s the whole game. Treating post-tournament players as a single segment is the single most expensive mistake we see, because the two dominant cohorts need different approaches. A first-time depositor who came for one match and a reactivated VIP can look identical on an active/inactive flag, but the intervention that retains one will annoy the other.

The early signals we watch aren’t complicated: does the player return within the first few days without a bonus prompt, do they bet on a non-tournament fixture, and, the strongest predictor, do they engage with a second product at all. A player who only ever bets football during a football tournament is telling you they came for the event, not the operator. Someone who wanders into a lottery draw or a casino game in week one is showing genuine platform intent. We build player states around funding behaviour, product mix and recency rather than a single status field, and route each state into its own track.

The industry has traditionally relied on promotional campaigns after major sporting events. Is that approach becoming outdated, and why is always-on, automated CRM proving more effective for long-term retention?

The campaign model isn’t dead, but the ambition behind it is usually set too low. The question shouldn’t be “how do I run a good win-back campaign”, it should be “how do I turn a one-match visitor into a champion of my brand.” Those are different goals that require different tools. A scheduled promotional blast can retain a player for another week; an always-on system can build the relationship that makes them long-lasting.

The wider industry is moving the same way, from calendar-based sends toward always-on, trigger-driven journeys. The reason it works for creating champions rather than just slowing churn is that it meets the player continuously, in context, at the moments that actually shape a habit, not on a marketing calendar’s schedule. A campaign treats the player as a target to hit. An always-on journey treats them as a relationship to build. If your ambition is long-lasting, high-value players rather than a marginally slower churn curve, an event-based tool will always fall a step behind.

Your partnership with Smartico combines CRM automation with gamification. How should operators strike the right balance between automation and human decision-making when managing player engagement?

Automation should own execution; humans should own strategy. The mistake sits at both extremes, operators who automate nothing and burn out their team on manual sends, and operators who “set and forget” a journey and stop thinking. Through Smartico we automate the mechanical layer: the triggers, the timing, the gamification loops, the routing of each player state into its track. That’s work no human should be doing manually at scale. But the decisions about which segments matter, what a healthy player journey actually looks like, where to set the thresholds, and when a mechanic is quietly training players to wait for a bonus, those stay human.

The right model is automation running the engine while a person watches the instruments and adjusts. Gamification is the clearest example: the mechanics run automatically, but whether a given mechanic is building real engagement or just inflating a vanity metric is a judgement the platform can’t make for you.

Operators often focus heavily on acquisition during major tournaments. What are the most important retention foundations they should already have in place before the first match kicks off?

One foundation matters above all others: give the player a reason to come back. Create a habit, a genuine reason to open the app again and again, not just once for the match they cared about. Everything else is scaffolding around that. Yes, you need segmentation live before the traffic arrives, and always-on journeys configured and tested to fire the moment a signal appears. But those are delivery mechanisms. If there’s nothing habit-forming on the other side of them, you’re just simply reminding players of a product that gave them no reason to stay.

The operator who acquires a million football bettors and offers nothing but more football has built a leaky bucket, however good the CRM is. The pre-season job is to make sure that when a player returns, there’s a ritual waiting, a weekly draw, a daily game, a recurring reason. Acquisition buys the first visit. A habit earns the hundredth.

Cross-selling has become a major talking point. Beyond simply moving sportsbook customers into casino, how can operators use lotteries, instant games and other products to build broader entertainment ecosystems that encourage longer player lifecycles?

I’m a strong believer in raffle and lottery formats as the entry point into a second vertical, precisely because they habituate the player gently. The industry is right to be sceptical about naive cross-sell, pushing a football bettor straight into slots often doesn’t take, and can scare off the very player you’re trying to keep. Lottery is different. It’s low-stakes, high-frequency and culturally familiar in our markets, so it doesn’t feel like being pushed into a different kind of gambling. It feels like a ritual.

A raffle or a football jackpot draw is the softest possible bridge: it keeps the sporting narrative alive after the tournament, turning match-day energy into a recurring weekly habit. Once a player is comfortable with that second vertical, the third comes far more easily, instant games to fill the gap between fixtures, then casino if they choose. The goal isn’t to convert a sports bettor into a casino player overnight. It’s to habituate them, one accessible vertical at a time, until their engagement no longer depends on the fixture list.

Honoré Gaming operates a GGR-based B2B middleware model. How does that commercial structure influence the way you develop technology and measure success alongside your operator partners?

It puts our operators’ success at the centre of everything we build, because their success is literally how we get paid. A flat licence fee lets a vendor cash the cheque whether the operator thrives or fails. A GGR percentage doesn’t. We only win when they win, on the exact metric they care about, which makes their retention problem our retention problem and their churn our churn. That alignment shapes the whole roadmap.

We’re not rewarded for features that inflate registrations or deposits without producing lasting revenue, so we’re structurally biased toward the things that compound for the operator: retention, cross-sell, habit-forming product, personalisation. It also disciplines how we measure, net revenue after bonus cost rather than gross activity, cross-vertical engagement rather than single-product volume, lifetime value rather than day-one deposits. When you’re paid on what your partner actually keeps, you stop optimising for what looks good in a launch deck and start optimising for what survives the year.

Personalisation is often discussed in terms of bonuses, but is the future really about delivering the right experience at the right moment rather than simply offering bigger incentives?

It’s about intent, understanding what the player is actually there for and delivering that, rather than assuming a bigger bonus answers every question. Framing everything around the bonus size is a trap: it trains players to wait for the next, larger offer and tells you nothing about who they are. Real personalisation starts by reading intent. Why did this player open the app? What did they come for last time? What rhythm do they play at, which products do they gravitate to, what does their behaviour say they want before they’ve said it?

A returning player who lands on an experience matched to that intent converts far better than one who gets a generic homepage and a bigger deposit match. We treat the platform as the layer that figures the player out, building the intent picture from behaviour, and Smartico as the layer that acts on it at the right trigger. An incentive is a blunt instrument. Understanding intent is a precise one, and it’s usually the cheaper of the two.

As AI-driven analytics become more sophisticated, how accurately can operators now predict churn, and what interventions are proving most successful before a player is lost?

The most reliable churn signal is a change in habit, and the interventions that work are the ones that aren’t purely revenue-driven, for either side. A player whose session frequency drops, whose deposit gaps lengthen, who retreats from three products back to one, is changing their habit before they leave. That shift is visible early if you’re watching continuously rather than in monthly reporting cycles. The temptation is to answer it with a revenue lever, a desperate bonus, an aggressive offer, and that usually backfires, because it’s about your revenue, not the player’s experience.

The interventions that actually work give the player something genuinely valuable that isn’t a transaction: a relevant piece of content, a re-introduction to a product they enjoyed, a reason to re-engage that costs them nothing and asks nothing. When both sides get value that isn’t strictly monetary, the habit re-forms. When you only chase revenue at the moment of churn, you confirm to the player that the relationship was only ever transactional.

Beyond the World Cup, what lessons should operators carry into the next generation of major sporting events, and how will middleware platforms and CRM technology continue to evolve to support sustainable growth rather than short-term spikes?

The deepest lesson is that retention comes from connection, to the real world and to community, and a World Cup is the most powerful example of that connection there is. Players don’t solely come for the odds; they come because the match matters to the people around them. The operators who understood this treated the tournament as a shared, communal experience, not just a betting opportunity, and that’s what carries into the next generation of events.

The technology will evolve to support exactly that: middleware and CRM layers that connect the player not to a product but to a moment, a community, a real-world event unfolding live. Less isolated transaction, more shared ritual. The platforms that support sustainable growth rather than short-term spikes will be the ones that treat betting as part of how people experience sport together, and build the real-time, community-aware infrastructure to reinforce it. A tournament amplifies connection. The operators who build on that connection keep their players long after the final whistle.