Creating a positive, and fun marketing experience is easier than you think
Remember playing your favorite video game?
Breaking through the boring daily routine with your favorite past-time. Feeling the dopamine rushing through your brain after winning.
This is exactly how gamification works in digital marketing. It boosts user interactions by getting them excited about your campaigns and encouraging them to play. Websites with gamification experience a 29% increase in site actions.
Let’s dig deeper into how you can use gamification for instant engagement and ROI.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is the use of adding gaming elements to your website, app, email, and social media campaigns.
Gamification tactics encourage higher user interactions by tapping into their competitive spirit and desire to win. It’s a win-win scenario for the brand as well as its consumers. Essentially, it offers a reward to consumers for acting on the CTA.
For example, you can ask a user to download an e-book in exchange for subscribing to the newsletter. Or if you are hosting a podcast, you can ask users to share the hashtag for the podcast on Twitter. Whoever tweets the hashtag the most gets a free pass to the next Live Marketing Conference.
Gamification made Volkswagen China’s crowdsourcing project go viral. They garnered over 33 million hits and nearly 120,000 ideas submitted.
Why Should You Add Gamification to Your Next Campaign?
- You want to improve customer engagement.
- Your target audience is mainly Gen Z.
- You want to create brand awareness and brand loyalty.
- You want to increase conversion rates and revenue.
- You want to create buzz for your new launch.
- You want to collect useful customer data in exchange for a reward.
- You want to educate the consumer about your products or services.
- You want to make promotional offers more interesting and stand out from the competition.
Why Should You Avoid Gamification in Your Next Campaign?
- You might invoke a negative emotion or promote unhealthy competition.
- You are adding gamification elements for the sake of the game, not the activity itself.
- Your target audience doesn’t identify with it ( Boomers and Gen X).
- You need to make complex changes to implementing gamification elements.
6 Exciting Ways to Gamify Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
1. Contests
Everybody likes to win. Contests are a fun way to attract your users and their friends.
A hit contest will bring higher brand visibility and massive customer interaction. It’s best to divide the game into small activities that customers learn about instead of setting up a complicated gaming contest.
Bulletproof coffee asked its contestants to tag a friend in the comment section to enter their giveaway.
2. Spin the Wheel
Interactive spin the wheel games are proven to instantly multiply sales and conversions. You can create a timed pop-up on your website that appears 10 seconds after a visitor visits it or you can create an exit pop-up.
This gives you a chance to turn abandoned visitors into newsletter subscribers or paying customers.
A site visitor can enter the email address and spin the wheel by clicking the “Spin” button. As the wheel stops, the visitor wins a prize, usually a discount code, which they use at check out to claim their reward.
This also works best in emails during the Holiday season especially Black Friday and Christmas.
Bobbi Brown cosmetics promoted a spin it to win it campaign in their newsletter and announced discounts to encourage purchase.
3. Loyalty or Reward Program
Customer loyalty is your most cherished possession as a brand. Everything else falls into place if you have loyal customers. So why not reward them for it?
Loyalty programs are your perfect starter kit for growth and engagement. They let you turn your one-time customers into lifetime customers. You can reward your customers with points for every purchase they make. As customers spend more their points accumulate and they can claim them while making the next purchase.
Starbucks uses its loyalty program to grow sales and engagement. The customers can check their gift card balance, points, and mobile orders via phone, website, in-store, or on their user-friendly app.
4. Scratch and Win
All of us love to scratch and win vouchers. It gets us excited to scratch those coupons and win money off on our favorite food items. Not a better feeling in the world. Now take that and make it digital. Enter, digital scratch cards.
Users can scratch the spaces using their mobile phones or computer cursors. They have to enter their email address and use the scratch card in exchange for a gift. This is best for a reward or incentive digital campaign. You can also Scratch and win campaigns to offer discounts and prizes to build a strong customer base.
Another creative use is to offer an Upsell to your clients and customers. Offer them exclusive incentives. If you are in B2B, you can offer a high ticket product through scratch the card game.
KFC uses a scratch-and-win campaign to add fun and excitement to the loyalty program.
5. Knowledge Quiz
Whether it's a music pop quiz or little-known history facts - everyone has a favorite hot topic they know the ins and outs of. You can challenge your audiences to a knowledge quiz that offers a score after the final answer.
Offer prizes to customers who get all answers correct or you can choose a winner from multiple correct entries.
Mint.com a financial management app uses the quiz to help users plan their finances better.
10. Scavenger Hunt
Take the fun a notch up by adding quests and moving parts for a scavenger hunt. It also helps you increase website traffic as well as create awareness of your business offerings.
This is how you can create a playful scavenger hunt - create clues leading your visitors to different pages of your website. When they find a clue on the web page, the participant clicks on an image or link to uncover an entry form. Make it longer, shorter, offer different clues daily or weekly, or do a traditional drawing. Scavenger hunts are also best used for announcing teasers of new products.
Magnum launched a pleasure hunt campaign by integrating the playing field across different pages on the internet. The players could select from several playing themes to collect “bonbons” in order to increase their ranks on a leaderboard. This campaign helped them advertise their product and provided exposure to its partner brands, guaranteeing them advertising.
8 Best Practices to Gamify your Digital Marketing strategy
Get the right support: hire developers to create a smooth and hassle-free game. Give your audiences a simple and fun experience
Reward every action: give people a badge, a gold star, or simply a digital sticker to reward every action they take.
Don’t complicate it: simplicity is key here. And people like to interact with brands that are clear on what they want their customers to do.
Provide multiple ways for people to participate: If people can’t participate in your pop quiz let them take part in a different contest on your site.
Hype it up: Before you launch a contest, get people interested and excited about it through social media announcements, emails, blogs, etc.
Following up: This is important to keep the memento high and celebrate wins. Follow up with the winner and share pictures on your social networks. This is also good for creating hype about the next event.
Shake things up: Don’t let boring games kill the vibe. Roll out exciting elements like bonuses to active subscribers or “double points”
Measuring the results: Finally, you should test out what’s working and what’s not. A/B test your campaigns. Run an ad with gamification and others without it to two halves of your audience. Monitor which one has a higher click-through and conversion rate.
You should measure the success of your gamification Ad by tracking other social media metrics as well.
As always, if you need support with your marketing strategy in Japan, you can have a look at our different services or contact us directly if you are already convinced Krows Digital can help you!
