Sportsbooks have been talking about personalisation for years.
In practice, much of what is described as personalisation remains a form of campaign targeting.
A customer supports a particular team, so they receive an offer connected to that team. They regularly place accumulator bets, so they are shown an accumulator promotion. They have not opened the app recently, so CRM sends them a free bet.
The communication may be personalised.
The sportsbook usually is not.
When the customer returns, they often see the same homepage, navigation, events, market hierarchy and product complexity as everybody else.
This creates a gap between what the operator knows about the customer and what the product does with that knowledge.
True sportsbook personalisation should not begin with the question:
Which promotion should this customer receive?
It should begin with a more fundamental one:
What would make this sportsbook more relevant, understandable and useful to this customer right now?
CRM personalisation happens outside the core experience
Traditional CRM personalisation is built around communication.
The operator decides who should receive a message, which offer should be included, when it should be delivered, which channel should be used and whether the customer is likely to respond.
These capabilities are valuable. The problem is that the experience frequently resets when the customer enters the product.
The message may reference Arsenal, Luka Dončić or Formula 1. The sportsbook homepage still opens with the same generic promotional carousel and competition structure shown to every other user.
This is not a data problem.
The operator may already know the customer’s preferred teams, sports, betting frequency, market types, usual session times and previous product interactions.
It is an orchestration problem.
The information sits across CRM, analytics, trading, content and account systems without being converted into a coherent product decision.
Product personalisation changes the experience itself
A genuinely personalised sportsbook could adapt several layers of the customer journey.
Discovery
The product can prioritise relevant teams, leagues, players and sporting moments instead of asking every customer to navigate the complete inventory.
A customer who regularly follows the Croatian national team should not need to rediscover it through the same competition hierarchy before every match.
Market presentation
Different customers need different levels of complexity.
An experienced bettor may want rapid access to prices, alternative lines and deeper markets. A less experienced customer may benefit from fewer options, clearer language and additional context.
Personalisation does not always mean showing more.
Sometimes it means removing irrelevant complexity.
Content and context
Statistics, form, injuries, line-ups, visualisations and editorial information can be adapted to the customer’s interests and intended action.
FanDuel’s AceAI illustrates how research and betting construction can be brought into a single contextual journey. Customers can use natural language to explore structured player and team data, test an idea and construct a bet without moving between separate product areas. (Flutter)
Journey timing
The relevant experience changes before, during and after an event.
Before the match, the customer may want research and predictions. During the match, they may prioritise live data, bet tracking and rapidly changing markets. Afterwards, they may want settlement, highlights and a review of what happened.
A static homepage cannot reflect all three states effectively.
Customer control
Personalisation should also help customers understand and control their activity.
Flutter reported that 52.1% of FanDuel customers used its My Spend dashboard during 2025. The feature provides information about spending patterns and routes customers toward deposit, wager and loss limits. (Flutter)
That is also personalisation: using an individual customer’s activity to create greater transparency and control rather than another promotional opportunity.
Recommendations are not enough
Many operators will respond to this challenge by introducing recommended bets.
That can improve discovery, but recommendations are only one part of the experience.
A recommendation engine can still create a poor product when the suggested market has no explanation, the price has already moved, the market is frequently suspended, the customer cannot understand why it was recommended, every recommendation is designed to increase activity, the same logic is applied regardless of the customer’s experience level or the recommendation does not fit the sporting moment.
The objective should not be to maximise the number of recommended betting opportunities.
It should be to improve the quality of the customer’s decision journey.
Personalisation requires trading and product to work together
A product team cannot personalise markets that the trading operation cannot consistently price, expose or manage.
Trading cannot create a personalised proposition without understanding how the market will be discovered and presented.
CRM cannot communicate a product that does not exist reliably.
This is why sportsbook personalisation is an operating-model challenge.
It requires coordination across customer data, identity, product, trading, risk, content, CRM, responsible gambling, analytics and technology.
The customer sees one application. The organisation often sees ten separate functions.
Personalisation fails in the space between them.
What BetMGM’s recent development suggests
BetMGM linked its 2025 online-sports improvements to a combination of tailored marketing, refined player management and product development.
The operator reported improvements to market discovery, contextual statistics, the bet slip, live same-game parlays and in-play functionality. It also reported a 26% year-on-year increase in handle per online-sports active and a 77% increase in net gaming revenue per active, although financial outcomes were also affected by hold and sports results. (Entain)
The important lesson is not that personalisation alone caused those results.
It is that customer management, product quality and discovery were developed together.
Targeting becomes more valuable when the customer enters a product that has also improved.
A practical maturity model
Sportsbook personalisation can be assessed through four levels.
Level 1: Campaign personalisation
Customers receive different emails, offers and push notifications.
The core sportsbook remains largely identical.
Level 2: Content personalisation
Teams, competitions, banners and editorial content are reordered according to interests and past behaviour.
The betting journeys remain mostly static.
Level 3: Journey personalisation
Discovery, navigation, market presentation, explanations and notifications adapt to the customer and sporting context.
Level 4: System personalisation
Product, trading, CRM, loyalty, customer protection and service decisions operate through a shared understanding of the customer.
The experience adapts while remaining transparent, controlled and responsible.
Most operators are somewhere between the first two levels.
The commercial opportunity sits in moving toward the third without losing customer trust.
Five questions for sportsbook leaders
Leadership teams should ask:
- What changes inside the product when we learn something new about a customer?
- Are we personalising relevance or merely personalising promotional pressure?
- Can customers understand why content or markets are being shown?
- Does personalisation simplify the experience as well as expand it?
- Are responsible-gambling decisions part of the same customer model?
The answers reveal whether personalisation is a strategic capability or simply a more efficient CRM function.
The Adria Nexus view
The future of sportsbook personalisation is not a different bonus for every customer.
It is a different route through the same underlying sportsbook.
The strongest products will understand the customer’s sport, intention, experience level and current context. They will use that understanding to reduce friction, improve discovery and create more relevant journeys.
CRM may bring the customer back.
The product must prove that returning was worthwhile.
Frequently asked questions
What is sportsbook personalisation?
Sportsbook personalisation is the use of customer data and context to adapt content, navigation, market discovery, communication and product journeys.
How is personalisation different from CRM segmentation?
CRM segmentation usually determines which communication or promotion a customer receives. Product personalisation changes the sportsbook experience itself.
Can sportsbook personalisation support responsible gambling?
Yes. Personalisation can improve spending transparency, surface control tools and adjust communications when additional promotional pressure would be inappropriate.
What data is needed for sportsbook personalisation?
Useful signals include sporting interests, product interactions, market preferences, session behaviour, communication choices and responsible-gambling indicators.