Should Email & SMS Marketing Notifications For Gambling Products Be Banned?
All companies want to find ways to get in touch with customers. The more direct manner of doing so that they can find, the better. For this reason, it is extremely popular for companies to send you promotional messages via e-mail and SMS, which they are able to do because they have been able to take your e-mail addresses and phone number during the sign-up process.
Unless you have specifically said that you do not want a company to send you marketing, they are then allowed to use the information to get in touch with you. Some people even get marketing send to the in the post.
In the world of gambling, issues such as shirt sponsorship and TV adverts get huge amounts of coverage, with many complaining about them. Few people talk or write about the deluge of texts and emails that get sent to people by betting sites that are hoping to get them to sign up to their services, or login to their accounts to place bets.
Given the fact that you are opted in to receive such messages by default, should this be a much bigger talking point? Is this the sort of thing that campaigners and regulators alike should be taking a closer look at?
What We’re Talking About
If you have signed up with a betting or gambling site then there is a good chance that you will have received at least a few emails or text messages from said site at some point or another.
They can involve encouraging you to place a bet on a specific sporting event, say, or inform you about promotions that are in place at the time that they were sent. The reason behind them is clear enough: to get you to logon to your betting account and place a wager. The more people they can get to do this, the more money they’re likely to make.
E-mails tend to be more information-based, for the simple reason that they’ve got the space to tell you about offers and promotions in detail. Text messages, meanwhile, will often be much shorter and to-the-point, usually offering only enough space to tell a customer about one thing and including a link to the website.
Regardless, both methods of getting in touch with punters are direct, giving such companies the chance to put their wares front and centre for customers to click on and be taken straight to where they can spend more money.
Why It’s A Problem
In a lot of cases, the receiving of text messages or e-mails will be the main reason why someone has decided to login to their account at an unscheduled or unexpected time.
Punters tend to know what it is that they want to bet on, heading to betting sites in order to do just that at the right time. When someone receives a text message or email telling them about a promotion or offer, they will then often head to their betting site of choice and place bets that they weren’t intending to place. This is obviously problematic for a wealth of reasons.
Whilst gambling companies advertising on the shirts or sports teams or having an advert on TV is obviously a way of them letting customers know about what it is that they offer, in some ways such things have become background noise to a lot of people. Receiving an e-mail or an SMS, meanwhile, is much more personal.
Most of us still get surprised when we receive such a message, encouraging us to look at it it closer and even to act upon it in a way that we wouldn’t with a shirt sponsor or television advert. After all, most adverts on TV don’t have a link you can click on to take you to a betting site directly.
Should It Be More Restricted?
It is possible for every punters to opt-out of receiving e-mails and text messages. This is an option that betting sites are legally required to offer to people. The problem is that you need to do just that, physically having to log onto your account in order to choose to opt-out of receiving something.
For a lot of people, it isn’t clear how to do this, especially older people that are not as au fait with using technology as their younger counterparts. Given the determination in a lot of quarters to move to limit the influence of adverts and shirt sponsorships by betting companies, is this not something that should be looked at?
If companies were to be forced to opt people out of receiving such marketing in the first place, requiring them to make a definite choice to receive them, this would make a huge difference. Even just a limit on how many texts or e-mails a company can send over a period of time would be an improvement.
At the moment, companies will often bombard their customers with notifications, especially around big events such as the World Cup or the Cheltenham Festival. Limiting how many notifications can be sent is the minimum that we should expect from the gambling authorities.
On top of this there are also unscrupulous people that send unsolicited, often illegal text messages. Take the example in the image at the top of this section. This is a message about signing up to a UK licensed brand but it isn’t from the brand themselves, it comes from a marketing partner. The thing is the message is firstly not appropriate because you didn’t ask for these messages and secondly it does not comply with the relevant compliance rules, e.g. no terms and conditions for the offer.
The White Paper Presents An Opportunity
At the time of writing, the government’s white paper looking at changes to gambling legislation has yet to be published. It is widely accepted that the Gambling Act of 2005 is no longer fit for purpose, being put in place before the internet became anything like the behemoth that it is today.
The resignation of various Tory Prime Ministers means that gambling legislation is a can that has been repeatedly kicked down the road, allowing the likes of text message and e-mail notifications to continue unabated. The white paper presents an opportunity to curb such excesses.
Whether it will actually do so remains to be seen, but it is certainly something that most anti-gambling campaigners should be hoping happens. The obvious things will be dealt with as a natural part of any major reform, so it is the likes of SMS messages and e-mails that should be campaigned on ahead of the white paper’s release.
It is a chance for something to be done about the worst parts of gambling, which could make the biggest different to those that fall foul of the likes of constant contact and intrusive advertisements.
