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Have you ever thought about how often we turn our lives into a game? It starts with a simple game of peek-a-boo, then moves to earning a nickel for every time we tie our shoelaces, and eventually, we’re trading A’s in math for a new PlayStation. We’re naturally hardwired to play games and gamify our everyday moments, more often than we might think!
When it comes to loyalty, gamification isn’t exactly new to marketers. But here’s the exciting part: with today’s access to real zero and first-party data and the ability to create seamless phygital (physical + digital) omnichannel experiences, gamification has taken on a whole new dimension. It’s no wonder then that brands are doubling down on reinventing gamification, harnessing its potential to convert everyday users into loyal customers and, ultimately, into brand advocates. Isn’t that a game-changer?
A gamified loyalty program is an advanced marketing strategy that weaves elements of game design into traditional loyalty schemes, enhancing the shopping experience and deepening customer loyalty to a brand. Customers engage by completing challenges or tasks, or by using tokens to enter contests with known prizes. This approach not only makes the interaction fun but also effectively encourages behaviors from app logins to product trials and social sharing. Gamification is used to create a strong and lasting brand impression in the minds of your customers.
Loyalty is not a once-and-for-all destination, where brands finally arrive never to look back and customers continue to stay on forever. How we wish it were! But a more realistic interpretation of loyalty would be ‘intimacy’.
“Loyalty is an ever-growing intimacy between a brand and its customers, where each is willing to put more at stake for the other. The more frequently and diversely customers are willing to engage with the brand, the deeper is the intimacy and greater the loyalty.”
Gamification in loyalty programs can help brands create loyalty differentiation through fun and uniqueness. Incorporating gamification into their customer engagement strategies, brands see a 47% rise in engagement, a 22% rise in brand loyalty, and a 15% rise in brand awareness.
By taking game elements like play, competition, transparency, rewards, and challenges, and applying them to non-game contexts, you can incentivize customers to engage with the brand in a desired manner. And with the right engagement, everything else follows.
Greater social media engagement, increased purchase frequency, more app downloads, new sign-ups, or nudging customers to move up the reward tiers – any brand objective can be gamified and become a precursor for loyalty.
Customer expectations and motivations differ at each point in the journey. Use these to identify which touch point syncs closely and can deliver maximum success in meeting the objective.
See what motivates your customers to take action. Then gamify and enable this motivation through tiers, rewards, redemption, feedback and social connect. Look to balance the customer effort with an equal reward for maximum engagement.
In an engagement economy like the one today, time and attention are increasingly scarce. So users gravitate to loyalty programs that are rewarding and provide opportunities to achieve, grow, and connect with others. Brands that recognize can leverage gamified experiences to build true intimacy with their customers.
If you have a Google account and contribute to the public data in any manner, you are automatically enrolled as a Local Guide.
Google’s Local Guide program has 10 different levels and 7 badges, awarded against points collected by contributing reviews, ratings, photos, responding to Q&As, and more. The collected points give benefits like early access to Google features and special rewards from partners.
As contributors move through the program and up the leaderboard, Google receives user-generated content, which it uses to improve SERP with better local insights.
Sweet Lounge, is a UK-based candy brand that makes gluten-free, plant-based candy for all. In addition to earning points for sign-up and purchases, customers also earn 50-75 Sweet Points for every time they engage with the brands on Facebook and Instagram, and 250 Sweet Points when they refer family and friends.
The redemption slabs have been purposely kept high – at 1000, 1500 & 3000 Sweet Points – a hard level for anyone to reach only through social media engagement. This encourages customers to refer more peers to the program, as it offers the most points and is the quickest way up the ladder.
7-Eleven delivered free offers to its app users on its 87th birthday. Each day for a week, coupons for different free items were featured on 7-Eleven’s smartphone app. Giveaways included free Slurpees, Hostess Twinkies, Snickers ice cream bars, Pillsbury cookies, and more.
To receive each day’s free offer, customers were required to download and register on the 7-Eleven app. Each offer had an associated barcode, which was shown at the checkout counter and redeemed immediately.
The rewards were heavily promoted on the brand’s social media pages and shared further by appreciative customers, which enabled 7-Eleven to earn countless app downloads and new customer sign-ups.
Domino’s Points-for-Pies let customers earn rewards points by simply clicking pictures ofany pizza!- whether it came from Domino’s, the grocery-store freezer, a neighborhood slice shop or anywhere else. Customers earned 10 points for a scan and received a free Domino’s pizza once they hit 60 points. But what did Domino’s gain from this? The pizza chain can segregate all this information by say location. Then use AI & machine learning to analyze the photos and deduce the pizza brands, size, topping, et all. Domino’s now has an exceptional understanding of each app user, their preferences, the brands they may be buying, location-wise winners and a lot more. And all this prime zero-party data comes from customers and as well as non-customers (who had downloaded the Domino’s app just to participate and get a free pizza).
A great example of phygital gamification comes from shoe retailer Stride Rite, with their campaign encouraging kids to ‘try on their shoes’. Shoppers would select a shoe in the store, try them on, and mimic dance moves on screen as accurately as possible. At the end of each game, the child would receive a score, which they could share online. Not only did this increase the amount of time children and their parents spent in-store, it also drove the sales conversion rate because shoppers felt positive about the shoes they had tried on. The families sharing dance scores on their social media accounts was an added bonus!
Meet the revolutionary online game that has gamified scientific research into citizen science and is crowdsourcing solutions. Through Foldit, players can contribute to advanced research on human health, cutting-edge bioengineering, and the inner workings of biology.
Foldit gamers solved a 15-year-old HIV enzyme riddle in just 3 weeks!The objective of Foldit is to fold (or solve) the structures of selected proteins as perfectly as possible, using tools provided in the game. As a protein structure is modified, a score is calculated based on how well-folded the protein is, and a list of high scores for each puzzle is maintained. The highest-scoring
solutions are analyzed by researchers, who determine whether this structure can have real-world applications. Scientists can then use these solutions to target and eradicate diseases and create biological innovations.
More recently, the platform introduced a puzzle to work on the protein code for Coronavirus in a bid to crowdsource a solution that helps scientists develop a working vaccine.
It is a given that a gamified experience should be fun for the player. But ‘fun’ is a rather hard concept to define and achieve. So can gamification rewards be designed for emotions? Can you make a player feel intrigued, curious, excited, joyful, and epic? By designing to evoke emotions, you also achieve fun as a spin-off.
The possibility of creating excitement is the highest with repetitive tasks performed every day. The more basic a task you gamify, the greater is the possibility of positive customer engagement and appreciation.
Go beyond earnings and savings rewards to create offerings of value to your customers. A reward can be a simple freebie, donating to a social cause for each sale, recognition, and a lot more. Brands that can innovate the right rewards for their audience are already halfway to receiving a great response.
Brands are catering to Boomers, GenXs, Millennials, and GenZs all at the same time. So you are required to understand how customers across segments engage with technology and what types of games they’re most likely to engage with. If some of your rewards program members love to interact on mobile, others on desktop, and others in-store, it only makes sense to ensure your customers can engage with the program (including its gamification) wherever they are.
While technology is enabling brands to create 1:1 personalization, it is also inspiring an ever-growing uniqueness in customers and preferences. We are experiencing the need to re-segment customers more frequently, to reveal micro-clusters with niche and dynamic demands. To respond, brands must go beyond 1:1 personalization and deliver 1:you omnichannel gamified engagement.
With an omnichannel execution you broadcast wide to reach all customers, with 1:you, you dive deep to serve personal preferences and the gamification bit, that’s for engagement and fun!
At Capillary, we’re all about reimagining loyalty for the long haul, through the power of data and tech. We dive deep into what drives your customers and craft gamified, omnichannel experiences that not only capture their attention but also foster lasting relationships. Curious to see how our AI-Driven Loyalty platform can revamp your loyalty strategy? Chat with our gamification gurus and discover what we can do for you!
A gamified loyalty program integrates game design elements into conventional loyalty strategies, enriching the shopping experience and strengthening brand loyalty. Customers participate by accomplishing tasks or challenges, or by utilizing tokens to enter contests with predetermined prizes.
Introducing gamification into loyalty programs offers brands a way to stand out by infusing fun and uniqueness into their strategies. By integrating gaming elements such as competition, rewards, and challenges into everyday interactions, brands can encourage customers to engage more deeply and consistently in the ways they desire.
At Capillary, we are dedicated to transforming the concept of loyalty into a sustainable, long-term strategy by leveraging AI & ML and cutting-edge data analytics. Our approach involves behavioral economics a deep exploration into the motivations and behaviors of your customers, allowing us to create tailored, gamified experiences across all channels. This isn’t just about grabbing their attention momentarily; it’s about building engagement that evolves into genuine relationships. By integrating elements of gamification, such as challenges and rewards, into omnichannel strategies, we ensure that every customer interaction with your brand is meaningful and rewarding. Our goal is to empower your brand to continuously captivate and retain customers, enhancing loyalty through personalized and dynamic experiences that resonate on every platform.
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