Adding Gamification To Your Loyalty Programs – Here’s Everything You Need to Know

What if I tell you that by tapping into the competitive spirit and reward-seeking nature of your customers, you can do wonders for your business and change the course of how your brand interacts with your customers? 

The key to tapping into this competitive edge of your customers is gamifying your loyalty program. 

And by adding fun gamified elements to your loyalty programs, you can boost its effectiveness, increase brand awareness, and grow customer loyalty over time. In fact, a recent study indicated that 60% of customers are more likely to purchase from your brand if it has gamified elements. Studies have also revealed that gamification can increase customer engagement by 48%. 

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the integration of game-like elements, such as competition, rewards, and challenges, to enhance customer engagement. The goal of gamification is to motivate and engage individuals, encouraging desired behaviors and actions by tapping into intrinsic human desires, such as achievement, recognition, progression, and competition.

Benefits of Adding Gamification to Your Loyalty Program

Data acquisition: Gamification facilitates the collection of valuable customer data, which can be leveraged to personalize marketing initiatives and tailor offerings to individual preferences.

Insightful customer understanding: Gamification is a valuable tool for gaining insights into customers’ preferences, behaviors, and product choices, thus enabling more targeted marketing efforts.

Enhanced customer experience: Incorporating elements of fun and competition into loyalty programs elevates the overall customer experience, making it more enjoyable and memorable.

Promotion of recurring behaviors: Gamification strategically incentivizes targeted actions and behaviors, propelling customers to interact with the brand in meaningful ways beyond mere transactions. 

Appealing to the current generation of shoppers: Gen Z is the current generation of shoppers and they are accustomed to seamless digital experiences. They are particularly receptive to gamified interactions, making it an effective strategy for targeting these demographics.

Also Read: Comprehensive Guide to Gamification in Loyalty Programs

3 Dynamic Gamification Modules For Customer Delight

1. Badges

Badges are a type of visual recognition used in loyalty programs to reward customers for their progress, specific actions, or achievements. Badges awarded for different actions make customers feel recognized and appreciated for the effort that they put in, and their loyalty towards the same brand.  

Based on your specific industry vertical, you can create badges that appeal to your customers. You can pick badges for your loyalty program from a set of catalogs like the one provided by Capillary’s Badges module. For example, if the vertical is Fuel and Retail, the brand can pick from the following badges available in the Capillary Badges module. 

Based on your brand’s identity and the goals of your loyalty program, you can customize your badges with Capillary’s module, making sure that your customers keep coming back for you.

2. Milestones

Milestones are a way of giving incentives to increase customer engagement and encourage preferred behaviors. On each ‘milestone’ (custom events that a brand can set up), customers receive more/ better incentives than the previous milestone. Upon reaching these milestones, customers are rewarded with more special incentives. 

You can choose any attribute that best suits your loyalty program. At Capillary, we provide brands with 100s of attributes to choose from. It can be based on the number of store visits, number of purchases and amount spent at purchase, referrals the customers bring, and so on.

You can set a fixed timeframe for unlocking these milestones. Let’s take the example of the fuel retailer again. Below are some examples of the milestones tasks based on different attributes:

• Buy fuel worth INR 2000 in 1 month and get a voucher for Rs. 100/- (A monthly target)
• Buy 5 Coffees and get 6th one free (For targeting Non-Fuel Retail)
• Get 10% off for every X Ltr of fuel bought (A custom target)

Based on your brand, you can customize the milestones that align with your customers’ behavior. With each milestone, customers are progressing in their journey and increasing their emotional commitment to a brand with time. 

Milestone-based loyalty programs are very popular among Capillary’s customer base spread across different verticals. One of our Middle Eastern fashion retail clients saw a 22% increase in their loyalty-driven sales with Capillary’s milestones-based loyalty program. Connect with us and we would be happy to share more about it. 

3. Games

Games offer a highly interactive and entertaining way to engage customers within a loyalty program. Customers love games because:

• They are engaging and entertaining
• Rewards earned entice customers to play more
• Creates a deeper level of connection with the brands

From spin-the-wheel games to trivia quizzes or interactive quizzes, games provide users with immersive experiences that keep them coming back for more. Based on the demographics of your audience, your industry, and considering other factors, you can get innovative. 

We have worked with several of our clients to create engaging, innovative games that not only delight the customers but also give them an immersive experience. We have over 20+ games in our product suite with 200+ variations of these games. 

You can create the right rewards for your games, configure the number of times a customer plays them, personalize them, and track the engagement to see how well your customers are hooked. With Capillary’s Games module, all these and more can be done effortlessly. 

How to Pick the Right Gamification Strategy

Identifying Your Objectives

Clearly define your objectives and desired outcomes. Determine what specific behaviors or actions you want to encourage among your customers. Whether it’s increasing sales, boosting customer engagement, or improving brand loyalty. 

• If your objective is to create an enriching customer experience, you can pick games. 
• If you want to create brand awareness and improve emotional loyalty, badges would be a great choice.  
• If you are looking to create a progression in your customers’ journey, milestones would be a great option to choose.

Understanding your target audience

What are the demographics of your target audience? What behavior motivates them? Once you can answer these questions, you can get a more nuanced picture of how to structure your gamification strategy. If you have a younger customer base, games would be a great way to keep them engaged. 

When and where you want to add gamification

At what stage of your customer’s journey do you want to add gamification? Do you want to add gamification during the festival seasons? All these will help you understand what type of feature to go for to strengthen your gamification strategy. Middle Eastern company, Al-Futtaim Group introduced seasonal games like FIFA World Cup games and Santa’s Blue Cookie to their loyalty program Blue Rewards to take advantage of hype around the festival and the tournament.

Budget

Adding gamification to your loyalty program comes at a cost. A clear understanding of your budget plan can help you fine-tune your gamification strategy.

Picking the right platform

Having the right loyalty program partner forms the crux of creating a strong gamification strategy for your loyalty program. Your loyalty partner should have the right technological capabilities, robust insights, and customization options to tailor to your needs. 

And that’s where Capillary’s platform stands out!

We provide a wide array of gamification options for our customers to choose from which helps them strengthen their loyalty program and drive expected results. We would be more than happy to give you a demo of our platform capabilities. 

Get in touch with our experts now. 

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With a knack for creating engaging content and crafting effective social media campaigns, Anjali wants to make it her mission to leverage the power of content as a strategic marketing tool for businesses. While she is not working, she is either binging movies or writing about them on her blog.