World Cup Betting Campaigns: Why Most of Them Underperform

An operator reached out to me after a France-Norway match. They'd blown their own deliverability and wanted a fix, plus a way to actually get results next time. What they'd done was almost a playbook of what not to do, and I understood why. Pressure from management, the temptation of a major event, the same pattern I've seen on other projects and been part of myself.

Here's what happened. They pulled the whole betting-relevant segment and sent it in one blast a few hours before kickoff.

It doesn't work that way.

Traffic in a gambling project is not stable to begin with. Part of the base opens emails regularly, part doesn't engage for months, and overall CTR usually runs low. When you add a sharp spike on top of that, sending to everyone at once right before the match, mailbox providers see a domain that jumped from its normal volume to three or four times more in a couple of hours. That pattern looks exactly like spam behavior to them. So deliverability gets cut. A single blast like that lands overall open rate around 4-7%, with a meaningfully sharper drop on Gmail specifically compared to a regular campaign. Open rate here is a measure of how much of the email actually reached the inbox rather than the spam folder.

Honestly, it may not affect your most engaged contacts much, they open and click constantly, and the email lands regardless. But those are a minority. The majority, low-engagement contacts and depositors with little to no engagement, get hit hard, and that's where most of the volume ends up in spam.

This is a lack of proper segmentation.

Do Two Waves, Not One

Split by engagement first, then send in two separate waves instead of one.

Wave one goes to low engagement. That's players who clicked 90 to 180 days ago, opened 30 to 90 days ago, people who interacted a while back but not recently. Doesn't matter if they're depositors or subscribers who never deposited, you can split further into those groups if you want more clarity and control. Send this wave early, at least a full week before the event, with a generic betting offer or something loosely tied to it. The purpose is spreading traffic out and warming the domain up before the main push.

First wave runs 12-27% open rate with low click rate. That's fine, that's expected, this is the low-engagement segment doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

There's a volume target worth keeping in mind too. This first wave should lift your normal weekly traffic by 30 to 40%, not more. Then the main campaign, closer to the event, adds another 40 to 50% on top of that already-raised number, not on top of the original baseline. That way the provider sees a curve building up, not a wall.

Wave two is high engagement and VIPs. These are players with a real click history, recent opens, depositors who consistently interact with your emails. VIPs belong here regardless of their engagement score. Send this one right before the event, specific, personalized, maximum urgency.

Second wave should run 48-65% open rate with high click rate. That high engagement is what boosts inbox landing for VIPs and depositors with little to no engagement who are included in this wave.

Real numbers, names, and events are under NDA and can't be disclosed.

Why the Order Matters

The mechanism here is simple. When a provider sees opens and clicks coming from people who interact with a domain all the time, that changes how it interprets a spike in volume. It stops reading as suspicious and starts reading as expected behavior for an engaged list.

Wave one does the warm-up work. Wave two does the conversion work, right at the moment bets actually need to go in. Sending wave one first doesn't cost you anything on the main campaign, if anything it sets it up better.

But there is one rule that can't be broken. Don't put unreacted contacts into either wave, not unless they're depositors or VIPs. And don't touch old, dead contacts at all.

I've seen what happens when someone ignores this, unsubscribes spike, complaint rates climb, and the entire event campaign gets crushed with it.

The approach itself is simple and straightforward. But there are often nuances a retention team runs into that undermine that simplicity.