Herd Gaming, wanted to use the World Cup to create a campaign that would keep players engaged across both sports and casino throughout the tournament.
With a focus on delivering the right offer at the right time, the campaign used progressive missions, daily streaks and evolving challenges to give players new reasons to return from the group stages through to the final.
By combining Flows with player-facing experiences through FlowsWave, Herd Gaming created a branded campaign that encouraged participation across the tournament, increased activity across sports and casino and reduced the manual work that would otherwise have been required to manage a campaign of this scale.
Creating engagement throughout the World Cup
Major sporting events play an important role in Herd Gaming’s wider campaign strategy, creating natural moments to deliver relevant offers, engage players around key matches and introduce them to different products and features.
For the World Cup, Herd Gaming wanted to increase sports activity while encouraging players to try features including Bet Builder, combo bets and different betting markets. The campaign would also provide opportunities to introduce sports players to casino slots.
Rather than running a traditional tournament promotion, Herd Gaming chose a progressive missions format, with players completing different steps as the World Cup moved from one stage to the next.
This meant engagement could continue across the competition rather than players completing everything at once. It also allowed Herd Gaming to create an experience for its wider player database rather than focusing only on VIP players.
A player journey that evolved with the tournament
The campaign was structured around a three-stage journey, with new missions becoming available as the World Cup progressed.
The missions evolved too. Challenges became harder and different mechanics were introduced at each stage, moving from basic single bets earlier in the competition to more complex Bet Builders and casino cross-sells later on.
This gave players new milestones to work towards while allowing Herd Gaming to adapt the experience around different stages and matches.
Bringing the campaign to life
Herd Gaming used the Flows orchestration engine alongside FlowsWave, our front-end solution for creating interactive player experiences, to bring the campaign setup and player-facing experience together.
Almost everything originally planned for the missions was implemented as part of the final campaign, with only a small number of mechanics removed because of limitations in the available data. The finished experience was also in line with Herd Gaming’s brand style and expectations around user experience.
Setting up and testing a campaign of this complexity took slightly longer than originally planned, particularly with the introduction of new mechanics. However, the overall turnaround remained flexible and manageable.
The campaign was ready to launch a few days before the World Cup kicked off, giving Herd Gaming time to identify and resolve any issues ahead of the tournament.
Reducing the operational work behind the campaign
Without this setup, Herd Gaming would have had to manage the missions manually using static lists, adding considerably more operational work and ongoing tracking.
The Herd Gaming and Flows teams worked closely throughout the project, with regular weekly meetings helping to keep communication smooth and transparent.
As the campaign developed, the Flows team remained open and flexible to new ideas and provided the technical support needed to bring Herd Gaming’s original vision to life.
Driving daily participation across sports and casino
The campaign delivered strong player participation, with mission completions demonstrating continued engagement as players moved through each stage.
Herd Gaming also saw increased mission completion around key matches for its market. The group stages generated the highest number of completed missions, as expected given that this was the longest period of the competition.
Importantly, players were actively trying to complete missions across both sports and casino, translating into increased turnover and cross-selling between the two products.
Players also responded positively to the experience, with feedback showing that they enjoyed completing the missions alongside the progression of the World Cup.
Turning tournament engagement into a daily habit
For Herd Gaming, the campaign showed how interactive missions can turn a major sporting event into an experience that gives players a reason to keep coming back.
The missions became a daily habit for players, encouraged greater use of sports features such as Bet Builder and made cross-selling between sports and casino easier.
The campaign also demonstrated the value of being able to create and run this type of experience without the level of ongoing operational work that a manual approach would have required.
Special thanks to Sofia Lehtonen and the Herd Gaming team for taking the time to share their experience and the results from the World Cup missions campaign.
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