Daily Winners is Oz Lotteries’ free loyalty program designed to surprise, delight, and reward its most engaged players. With daily $500 prizes, $2,500 Friday jackpots, and monthly giveaways of up to $200,000, the program has grown to over 250,000 highly active members who are 1.5x more valuable than the average customer. I led the design from inception, continually optimising the experience and shaping it from a simple idea into a flagship engagement driver for Oz Lotteries.
Back in 2022, we looked at why habit loops are so important to Jumbo’s business model. One of our core growth habit loops is based on converting first-time players into recurring “engaged” customers. Based on the data we saw, this loop had a finite life span. This lifespan can be correlated to the number of wins a customer is exposed to. TLDR: customers who experience more wins will stick around for longer. So we were asked the question: HMW give customers a winning feeling when they lose? Increasing purchasing and retention on Oz Lotteries. This was the very inception of Daily Winners…
To better understand how we might introduce a ‘winning feeling’ to the platform, we first needed to understand why customers keep coming back to play (e.g. Was it entertainment? Was it the chance to be in it to win it? Or were they chasing the win big?). We could also leverage what motivators we could leverage to tighten the loop (e.g., rewards, incentives, gamification). The best way to find this information was to go directly to the source, our customers.
We conducted qualitative and quantitative research to better understand customer sentiment. We spoke to two cohorts: customers who had purchased within the past 60 days, won, and been active in the past 14 days and customers who had purchased within the past 60 days, hadn’t won, and had been active in the past 14 days.
We gained some excellent insights from this research piece, but one that stood out was that most customers played because they thought they would win (why play otherwise). When they came back to check their results, they were almost always disappointed. Which unfortunately brings the desired habit loop to an abrupt halt. So we then asked how we can add value for customers no matter the outcome of the draw?
In an early experimental phase we wanted to play with gamification. Leveraging extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, to pull customers back to the platform. We landed on releasing a game called ‘Wheel of Oz’. Which saw customers coming back daily to play a game of chance. Where they would spin a wheel and decide on if a number would be ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ than the number originally picked. The longer you lasted the higher your score. Pretty simple right.
Players were ranked on a state-wide leaderboard and were nudged to come back to play daily. Psychological nuggets were scattered throughout the game to keep customers engaged and vying for the best score.
We introduced ‘Wheel of Oz’ to a small cohort of engaged customers on Oz Lotteries. Measuring the following;
The hypothesis we were trying to prove was that by engaging with a free game, we could bring back customers to continue purchasing on Oz Lotteries. The results were no surprise: a large portion of customers came back daily to play and purchase. While we were running the experiment, we reached out to customers to conduct Jobs to be Done (JTBD) interviews to understand the switch event and what kept them coming back.
The initial phase of the experiment was conducted with a small group of engaged customers, primarily to gauge the impact of gamification. However, in line with our commitment to responsible gambling, we decided to sunset the feature due to concerns. Nevertheless, we carried forward the valuable insights gained from this phase into the next iteration.
In the next iteration, we moved our attention to loyalty. We had already explored short-term impacts by leveraging extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Now, we wanted to hone in on intrinsic motivations, focusing on loyalty as the carrot. This led us to our first attempt at a loyalty program on Oz Lotteries.
Initially, we looked at class-leading loyalty programs (e.g. Everyday Rewards, FlyBuys, XPLR Pass, Uber One, Qantas Frequent Flyer, etc.) to understand how they worked, how they were marketed, and how they rewarded customers. We also ran a brief experiment with our customers, measuring whether applying credits to an account would lead to a positive business impact.
We then undertook a round of user testing to gain clarity on the below. We targeted customers who had recently signed up to Oz Lotteries, were based in NSW, and had been active on the platform in the past 14 days.
Based on the results of this experiment, we decided on the below logic for Lotto Rewards. We also pivoted the name based on feedback, changing it from ‘Oz Lotteries Plus’ to ‘Lotto Rewards’.
We released Lotto Rewards to a small subset of engaged Oz Lotteries customers—approximately 10,000. We made the call to limit the program's initial reach to reduce the chance of negative customer feedback if we had to roll back the program.
Lotto Rewards was a huge success for Oz Lotteries. We went on to ramp up exposure to over 20,000 customers. Leveraging Amplitude experiments, we measured customer retention and TTV. Both in the baseline cohort (customers who weren’t exposed to Lotto Rewards), those who had seen Lotto Rewards but never opted in, and those who had opted into Lotto Rewards. We saw a noticeable positive gap in metrics for those who had opted into the program.
This was a massive win for the team! But before we could release the program to all Oz Lotteries customers the business got cold feet. Specifically pertaining to two potential risks to program had;
Both of these risks could have been ironed out over time, but the business wanted to take a more subtle approach to a loyalty program that would fit between the outlined guardrails. My Product Manager and Engineering Manager went back to the drawing board to find a solution that would fit between the specified guardrails.
We decided to strip the program back, taking backend elements and repurposing them more generically. We had to create new UI elements for the frontend, but this was easy as we used the same styling and design language. We pivoted the program to run simple trade promotions for prizes such as (iPhones, holidays, and white goods to start with). This meant customers could join the loyalty program and gain access to many extra draws (more ways to win).
This was the beginning of Daily Winners final form. Before we launched anything to customers, we tested the waters with a fake door experiment to understand if this was a product customers would be willing to pay for. Essentially, we wanted to test to see if our program could be run for free or would customers be willing to pay for it (following a similar mechanic to the LMCT+)
As a ‘fake door experiment, ’ customers didn’t actually pay for the program, as we promoted them. It was an experiment once they had the intent to buy. It was purely to measure whether they would be interested.
In the meantime, we sunsetted Lotto Rewards, letting customers know that we would be back bigger and better soon — these customers were later added to Daily Winners in the beta launch.
We ran user interviews with customers from each flow (paid and free). The results were extremely interesting. The biggest callout was that ‘free customers’ thought the program was ‘too good to be true’ and that they thought it was a scam or would be charged in future months. Meanwhile, the ‘paid customers’ expectations were aligned with what was up for grabs, thanks to the price.
The business decided to go with the free tier option as it was seen as a gesture/reward to thank our customers for playing with Oz Lotteries. It was also had the least amount of red tape to get through.
Looking back now, this was a great move from a customer perspective as it allowed everyday people the chance to join for free — it couldn’t have come at a better time with the current cost of living crisis.
Before we launched the program we transitioned from giving away cars, iPhones, and white goods to giving away exclusive cash prizes in our major and daily giveaways. This came from customer interviews, that highlighted that cash was still king.
Customers were found to be very picky when it came to physical prizes. Cash was still considered king as holidays and EV cars divided opinion’s.
As Daily Winners is run as a trade promotion, we also offer all members a discount portal, making the program compliant legally. Entry is free for all customers as long as they have an “active” Oz Lotteries account.
The program was launched back in September 2023. We saw a huge uptick at first from customers who had been apart of our earlier experiments (i.e. Wheel of Oz, Lotto Rewards) which was great to see. We’ve worked closely with the business to ensure the program continues. Loyalty programs are incredibly tough to measure success in the short term. But we’ve already seen a noticeable increase in how valuable Daily Winners customers are to us as customers compared to traditional Oz Lotteries customers — 1.5x to be exact!
In my opinion, continuous discovery has been and still is the secret sauce to Daily Winners success. We use tools like Amplitude Session Replays, Braze IAMs, and Typeform to continuously reach out to our customers on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to ensure we are hitting the mark on customer satisfaction and experience.
We continue to work on Daily Winners on a regular basis, as it is now seen as a key differentiator against competitors. It offers our customers a chance of winning for free by simply playing with Oz Lotteries.
We recently released a feature that makes it easier for first-time players to opt in to Daily Winners and deposit/purchase a ticket. This was seen as a massive hurdle to overcome before we could start running paid ads and before we could introduce a referral aspect to the program.
We are also looking at building an entries ledger and promotion engine to enable bonus entries into giveaways. This will be linked to high-value activities across the site, such as verifying your account, purchasing into Lotto Party, and following us on social media, to name a few.
If I was a betting man, I’d put money on Oz Lotteries pivoting back to a paid/premium tier once the value of Daily Winners is too big to ignore. In my opinion, the free tier was the right call to build trust and scale, but the long game will almost certainly include a paid layer.
Challenging but rewarding: Working on this massive piece of work over the past two years while still managing a high-functioning design team was extremely difficult but a great experience for me as a product designer, manager, and person.
Continuous discovery is crucial: Keeping a finger on the pulse of your customers is pivotal to releasing a product that the masses can use.
Perfection is impossible: This one was/is hard for me, as I’m a self-confessed perfectionist. Even to this day, we are continuing to work on Daily Winners. As long as the business is making incremental improvements to the feature, we are progressing! Benchmark against where you are now, not perfection.
Be quick to adapt: Being quick to adapt and not holding designs close to your chest was important on this job as there were so many stakeholders to keep happy.
