Promoted feature: A scalable future

With every period of change comes opportunity. John F Kennedy once said, “Change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” The last year has brought quite a few changes and challenges, and while it’s certainly been a difficult time for us all, there’s now a world of opportunity for our industry.

As we all mark our one-year anniversary of living in the new normal, it has, from many perspectives, given us a chance to look at our lives and businesses through a new lens. A chance to adjust to changes, to accept new challenges, and to step out of a comfort zone that might well have been holding us back before. For Enteractive, we’re looking towards a future with global scalability for our business model as a direct benefit of the changes we’ve experienced. There are certainly positives to see for the future.

From small beginnings we have grown tall

When I started Enteractive in 2009, we were a small but unique CRM start-up. Now, in 2021, we’re a global leader in anti-churn and activation for the gaming industry. Despite the pandemic, the last year has been our most successful ever, with revenues growing almost 80% YoY from 2019. Thanks to our (Re)Activation Cloud platform, we’ve delivered impressive results for our operator partners, with 2020 seeing over 100,000 new depositing players across all our clients. Add to that all the players we have previously acquired for our clients over the years who we continue to nurture and retain loyalty.

Our most successful year ever. During a time of global uncertainty with regional lockdowns and restrictions adding to the confusion.

The most important factor for me, though, is not that we have kept our growth strong during a period of chaos. It’s more that it has opened our eyes to new perspectives, new ways of working, and a new vision for the future.

The US is a big opportunity for the igaming sector right now

In 2021, we’re expanding our operations for the US markets. This is a key part of the company’s roadmap, but our approach to scalability of our offering has been hastened along by remote working protocols. As a consequence, we’re able to see the future more clearly.

Naturally, as a CEO, I’m always looking to the next success marker for our business – how we grow, and what we need to grow. We’re expanding quickly, into new markets, new languages, new sectors. We’re excited about opportunities in the US. But for many in this position, there can also be the uncertainty of new procedures, logistics and scalability in general.

For us, the last year, with remote working as a new standard, has provided an opportunity to test run the scenario and we’ve seen how efficiently it can be done. How our teams stay connected and motivated even while working remotely. It changes our perspective on how a business can be run.

The challenges we’ve all faced have offered a strange promise – you will have to see things differently and you will have to do things differently. A scary prospect for many, but for those who are able to get excited by this shaking up of the status quo, there’s opportunity. Ways to make things better, to work smarter and to see business from a new perspective. On a local level. On a global scale. At the same time. That’s a big positive that I’m seeing.

Our heritage means that progress is in our DNA

Entertactive is a Swedish company. We built our business in Malta, alongside fellow Swedish igaming success stories such as Betsson, Kindred and ComeOn Group, who over the last 15 years revived the igaming sector to what it is today. Offering our unique acquisition and retention services and helping in our partners’ growing success, we grew quickly and made new friends. We worked across more operator brands in new markets in Europe, and then Latam, Asia Pacific and North America. We took larger offices to grow the company and then larger offices still.

In 2021, Enteractive maintains an upward trajectory. We have state-of-the-art technology, we have great teams and moving to a remote working environment has offered us a challenge in scalability that we met head on. Like so many other companies in the same position, we had to adapt quickly. What we learnt was that changing and being able to scale seamlessly was not only achievable, but that we were already set for it due to our investment in technology and IT infrastructure.

We’re already building for the future

Our (Re)Activation Cloud platform, launched in 2017, is a technology solution that we are constantly improving and see as the powerful engine for our core business of getting operators’ lapsed players back in the game. Our API software integrates partner databases securely at the touch of a button, and our personalised outreach campaigns can begin within a day, keeping responsible gambling at the forefront of our approach. It’s designed to be a scalable platform and to streamline the whole process of personalised player engagement while also allowing our certified teams to act as first responders for problem gambling issues. It’s this specialised approach to customer relationships that breeds trust with the players and delivers better conversion rates than digital CRM models.

From the moment it launched, our clients have seen the benefits, making it even simpler to transform their dormant player accounts back into revenue generators, and growing our business exponentially, as our numbers have shown.

Soon we will return to our office environment, enjoying the buzz of our workspace once again. But our approach will be different, being able to work and be productive both remotely as well as in the workplace. So, our company is no longer only as big as our office space.

The unknowns of scalability in 2019 have become the Zoom meetings of 2021. In the new normal, we can adapt quickly, adjust easily and scale seamlessly. I think that’s a pretty good start for us in the current times, where, as we all know, the future can only get better.

Mikael Hansson is the founder and CEO of Enteractive. He graduated from LIU, Sweden, with a Masters of Science in Industrial Engineering and Management, and previously held the position of CFO for a large Swedish company. Living in Malta since 2009, he set up Enteractive to support player retention and reactivation for the growing igaming sector. As a champion for sustainability and longevity in the sector, he is instrumental in promoting personalisation alongside responsible gambling measures for players.