Bonuses have played a central role in the growth of online sports betting.
Free bets, deposit matches, odds boosts, parlay insurance and risk-free mechanics have helped operators acquire customers, enter new markets and stimulate activity around major sporting events.
The model is easy to understand.
The operator offers immediate value. The customer registers, deposits and places a bet. The business records a first-time depositor and begins the process of turning that customer into a longer-term relationship.
The problem begins when the incentive remains the strongest reason to return.
When every visit requires another offer, acquisition has not created loyalty. It has created a recurring cost.
The next stage of sportsbook growth will depend on how effectively operators move from buying activity to earning preference.
The bonus is useful. Dependency is expensive.
Promotions serve legitimate strategic purposes.
They can reduce the perceived risk of trying a new brand, introduce a new feature, reactivate a dormant customer or create additional excitement around a tournament.
However, bonus-led acquisition becomes structurally weak when:
- Customers are acquired primarily for the financial offer.
- The product provides little reason to remain after the offer ends.
- Marketing generosity is required to sustain normal activity.
- Customer value is measured without the full cost of incentives.
- CRM optimises short-term turnover rather than long-term economics.
- Competitors can acquire the same customer with a slightly larger reward.
This creates a market in which operators frequently rent attention rather than build preference.
Customers maintain several accounts, compare the latest offers and move their activity to whichever operator provides the strongest immediate value.
The operator may continue growing registrations while the quality of acquired customers deteriorates.
Regulation is accelerating the change
Promotional design is also becoming more constrained.
Since January 19, 2026, licensed operators in Great Britain may no longer combine multiple gambling product types within one incentive. An offer cannot, for example, link a sports-betting reward with casino play through shared conditions. (UK Gambling Commission)
The Gambling Commission has also identified high wagering requirements as a source of complexity and potential harm. Its consultation work cited evidence that complex play-through conditions can increase gambling intensity and consumer confusion. (UK Gambling Commission)
These developments point toward a broader direction.
Promotions will need to become simpler, more transparent and more closely aligned with the customer’s chosen product.
Operators that depend on complexity or aggressive cross-product incentives will face increasing strategic pressure.
A more sustainable sportsbook growth model is therefore commercially sensible and increasingly compatible with the direction of regulation.
Growth should be decomposed into four separate problems
Sportsbook growth is often treated as one objective.
In practice, it contains four different challenges:
- Acquisition: Can the operator attract an appropriate new customer?
- Activation: Does that customer reach the first valuable experience quickly?
- Retention: Does the customer return without requiring constant financial stimulation?
- Expansion: Does the relationship become more valuable through stronger relevance, trust and engagement?
Bonuses can support acquisition and activation.
They are far less effective at solving the deeper causes of retention and expansion.
A customer who cannot find relevant markets will not become loyal because of another free bet. A user who experiences slow bet acceptance will not trust the platform because of an odds boost. A casual fan who finds the product overwhelming will not suddenly understand it because more markets are available.
The growth system must address the reasons behind customer behaviour.
What recent operator performance suggests
BetMGM’s 2025 results offer a useful example of growth driven through a combination of product, targeting and customer management.
The company reported that online sports net revenue increased by 63% during 2025, while sportsbook handle increased by 16%. Average monthly actives across the wider business increased by 4%. BetMGM also reported a 26% increase in handle per online-sports active and a 77% increase in net gaming revenue per active. (Entain)
Sports results and hold contributed to those numbers, so they should not be interpreted as a pure product case study.
The relationship between the metrics is still important.
Activity and revenue grew much faster than the number of active customers. BetMGM attributed the improvement partly to refined player targeting, tailored marketing, stronger retention, better market discovery, live same-game parlays and improvements to the bet slip and in-play experience. (Entain)
The lesson is not that operators should copy a specific set of features.
It is that better customer economics can come from improving the quality of engagement rather than maximising the number of customers reached with the same proposition.
The six growth engines beyond bonuses
1. Product relevance
A customer should reach something meaningful quickly.
That requires the sportsbook to understand context:
- Which sport brought the customer into the app?
- Is there a live event underway?
- Does the user follow a particular team?
- Are they an experienced bettor or still learning the product?
- Which markets have previously been useful to them?
- Is the customer researching, watching or ready to place a bet?
A generic homepage transfers the discovery burden to the customer.
A relevant product reduces the distance between opening the app and finding a genuinely interesting sporting decision.
2. A stronger first experience
The first deposit is not the true activation event.
The meaningful activation event occurs when the customer completes a journey that demonstrates why the sportsbook deserves another visit.
That journey might be:
- Building and following a first same-game parlay.
- Receiving a clear explanation of a market.
- Tracking a live bet through the event.
- Finding a local league that competitors treat as secondary.
- Experiencing fast settlement and withdrawal.
- Using a feature that makes following sport more enjoyable.
Operators should identify which early experiences correlate with longer-term retention.
The onboarding journey can then be designed around reaching those moments, instead of pushing the customer immediately toward the largest possible first deposit.
3. Sports-led retention
Sportsbook retention follows the sporting calendar.
Customers return because their team is playing, a tournament is approaching or a particular narrative has become relevant.
This makes sportsbook retention fundamentally different from a generic CRM programme.
The strongest retention model connects customer interests to sporting moments:
- A favourite team reaches a decisive fixture.
- A player returns from injury.
- A rivalry resumes.
- A major tournament begins.
- A league enters its final round.
- A customer’s previous bet becomes part of a wider story.
Communication should help the customer re-enter the sports experience.
The financial incentive can support that journey. It should not always be the journey.
4. Better discovery and explanation
Most sportsbooks already have enough markets.
The customer problem is finding and understanding them.
Bet builder and player props demonstrate how behaviour changes when markets are packaged around familiar narratives. Across Kambi’s network, almost half of all pre-match bets on Super Bowl LIX used Bet Builder, while 88% of pre-match Bet Builder bets included a player prop. (Kambi)
Customers increasingly engage with players, combinations and stories rather than isolated traditional markets.
The opportunity is to improve market naming, contextual statistics, search, suggested combinations, explanations, live tracking, visual presentation and relevant sequencing.
More inventory without discovery produces complexity. Better packaging turns existing inventory into a stronger customer proposition.
5. Personalised value
Personalised marketing often means selecting which promotion a customer receives.
The larger opportunity is to personalise the value proposition itself.
One customer may value early prices and market depth. Another may value simplicity. A third may care about local football, player statistics or social betting experiences. A high-frequency customer may prioritise speed and bet acceptance.
The operator should determine which content is shown first, which leagues are prioritised, how much complexity the interface introduces, which product capabilities are explained, when communication is appropriate and when no additional prompt should be delivered.
The objective is to create a more useful sportsbook for each customer, within transparent and responsible boundaries.
6. Trust and operational quality
Customers rarely describe operational reliability as a reason for choosing a sportsbook.
They notice immediately when it disappears.
Trust is built through accurate balances, clear bet status, consistent settlement, fast withdrawals, stable applications, transparent rules, available markets, responsive support and fair handling of disputes.
These capabilities do not usually appear in acquisition campaigns. They strongly influence whether the customer remains after the campaign has ended.
Moving from campaign economics to customer economics
Bonus-led organisations frequently evaluate performance at campaign level.
How many customers registered? How many deposited? How much turnover was generated? What was the immediate return?
Sustainable growth requires a broader customer-level view.
Operators should understand acquisition cost after bonuses, media and affiliate payments; contribution after incentives and payment costs; retention by acquisition source; product adoption after the initial promotion; organic versus incentive-driven activity; cost to reactivate; frequency of support and payment issues; value concentration among customer segments; responsible-gambling indicators; and long-term customer contribution.
The objective is not to eliminate promotional spending.
It is to identify where promotions create incremental value and where they merely subsidise behaviour that would have occurred anyway.
A practical bonus-dependency diagnostic
An operator can begin by examining five questions.
1. What happens when promotional intensity is reduced?
If activity collapses immediately across the entire customer base, the underlying proposition may be too weak.
2. Which customers return organically?
Identify the sports, features, experiences and moments associated with non-incentivised return visits.
3. Are promotions changing behaviour?
An offer should introduce a valuable behaviour, product or market. Simply paying for another version of existing activity has limited strategic value.
4. Does CRM reflect sports context?
The customer should receive communication connected to their interests and the calendar, not only the operator’s need to generate short-term turnover.
5. Is retention owned across the organisation?
Retention is influenced by product, pricing, risk, payments, customer service, marketing and trading. Assigning it solely to CRM limits what the business can improve.
Acquisition still matters
Moving beyond bonus dependency does not mean retreating from customer acquisition.
Flutter reported that Betnacional’s average monthly player base grew by more than 40% year on year after investment across product enhancements, trading capabilities and customer acquisition ahead of the 2026 World Cup. (Flutter)
The relevant point is the combination.
Customer acquisition worked alongside a stronger platform, deeper markets, faster bet placement, fewer in-play suspensions and local market expertise.
Marketing brought customers into a proposition that was simultaneously being improved.
That is a healthier model than using marketing to compensate for an unchanged product.
The next sportsbook growth model
The future growth model will combine five disciplines:
- Acquisition that targets customers with a realistic strategic fit.
- Product that helps them reach value quickly.
- Trading that supports the experiences the proposition promises.
- CRM that connects the brand to relevant sporting moments.
- Operations that build trust over the entire relationship.
Promotions remain one instrument within this model.
They should introduce, accelerate and reward valuable experiences. They should not become the core experience.
The Adria Nexus view
The most important sportsbook growth question is no longer how much activity an operator can buy.
It is how much customer preference the business can earn.
A bonus can create the first visit. Product relevance, trust, sports understanding and operational quality determine whether there will be a hundredth.
Operators that make that transition will build stronger customer economics and a more defensible position.
Those that remain dependent on promotional intensity will continue paying to reacquire customers they never truly retained.
Frequently asked questions
Are sportsbook bonuses still effective?
Yes. Bonuses can support acquisition, activation, reactivation and the launch of new products. Their effectiveness depends on whether they create incremental, sustainable behaviour rather than temporary activity.
What is bonus-led acquisition?
Bonus-led acquisition is a customer-acquisition model in which financial incentives are the primary reason for registration, deposit or initial betting activity.
How can a sportsbook reduce bonus dependency?
Operators can improve product relevance, onboarding, market discovery, personalisation, CRM, withdrawals, customer support and the overall reliability of the betting experience.
Which metrics should replace first-time depositor growth?
First-time depositors remain useful, but operators should also measure contribution after incentives, organic retention, product adoption, handle per active customer, customer-support friction and long-term value.