Comprehensive guide to online and digital scratch card games

Looking to motivate and reward customers, prospects, and employees? Need a versatile and visually engaging digital tool or marketing game?

There aren’t many challenges in this genre that an online scratch card can’t contribute to.

It’s an easy to understand, widely recognised prize distribution mechanism, and as it’s travelled from paper form to online, and become more accessible through gamification platforms with scratch card generators, its potential use cases for businesses – not just your lottery companies and casinos – has multiplied exponentially.

But where on earth did this concept come from? Why does it work?

That’s what this comprehensive guide to digital scratch cards is all about.

“From scratch” – scratch card origins

Whether you know it as a scratch card, a scratch off, a scratcher, a scratch and win, an instant lottery ticket, or even a scritchy,  we’re fundamentally talking about the same thing: a “card” people scratch to reveal something concealed, typically a prize.

For something so ingrained in our collective consciousness, the scratch card game is actually a fairly recent invention.

The patent for the scratch-off lottery ticket as we know it today was awarded to a company called Astro-Med, Inc. – a US-based data and tech company – in 1987, but this patent acknowledged that “instant-game tickets comprising a card having game-playing indicia imprinted on a window thereon and a removable opaque layer covering the window” were already widely available, and had been for some time.

In the early 1970s, scientist John Koza and retail promoter Daniel Bower of the Scientific Games Corporation were looking for a solution to what they considered a flaw in the lottery system – that entrants had to wait a week to find out if they’d won.

They created a computer-generated instant lottery game, and the very first lottery scratch cards went on sale in 1974 in Boston. Supposedly, the state lottery’s revenue doubled (or tripled depending on the source), and lines to purchase and play from stores went around the block.

However, even this wasn’t the real origin of the scratch card game, so much as the professionalisation of it.

Back in the 1960s, it was popular for small grocery stores to offer prize cards with a purchase – winning prize cards would contain a small amount of money concealed under a waxy strip, which needed to be peeled or “scratched” away at.

So while the exact origin of the scratch off game is unknown, this is as warm as the trail for the true scratch card inventor is ever going to get.

Advantages of online scratch cards over physical scratchers

Advanced mobile technology has made digital scratch card games possible. The same game mechanic, but available to play on a touchscreen device online.

The advantages for businesses are numerous, but to summarise:

Easier scratch off game creation

Traditional, physical format scratch cards required a lot of inputs. Primarily, there’s the additional moving pieces of the printers and the materials used. It would also, after a certain point, be impossible to adjust the design.

Digital scratch cards can now be made very quickly, and could feasibly be done to a very high standard by a single person in a few hours when using a gamification platform or online scratch card maker like Drimify.

Because this becomes a drag-and-drop, or fill-in-the-blanks sort of exercise, it’s also easy to edit and make changes to your online scratch card, whether that’s through user experience testing or due to changes in prizes or goals.

Faster and more agile distribution of scratch card(s)

Because online scratch cards are digital, there’s only really one scratch card that people are playing.

You don’t need to print off 10,000 and either have some left over (which are then useless), or have to order more and wait for them to be printed.

Depending on the platform you’re using, it should be as simple as adjusting or increasing your plan according to your needs. Then you’ll have enough views – or capacity – to meet the demand for people wanting to play.

Much more versatility for communicating branded messaging

Traditional scratch cards, while certainly utilised for marketing and other business objectives, were primarily a low cost lottery for people to play. You scratch the card and that’s kind of it.

With digital scratch cards, you have data collection forms to capture user information and encourage newsletter opt-ins, and on enterprise grade scratch card software, you can add intermediate content screens to get across your storytelling – for example, if you’re using your scratch card to promote a product.

The power of collecting data through online marketing games

This one’s a biggie. With physical scratch cards, to even know how successful a scratch card has been in terms of return on investment (ROI) requires a lot of waiting around, whereas the data collection functionality of online scratch cards works in real time (depending on your platform).

Say for example you sent out free physical scratch cards which would distribute promo codes to every participant. To have any idea of its success, you’d be waiting on codes to be redeemed on your point of sale (POS) system. Until then, you’d have no way of knowing if people were playing, or just throwing them out.

With a digital scratch card (at least with ones built using Drimify, or other enterprise grade scratch card makers), you’d be able to see how many people were playing your game, and how many people were completing it to receive the code, giving you an immediate idea of how it was being received.

Not convinced: The Drimify gamification platform comes with a free trial, so you can make a scratch card for free and test it to see for yourself.

How online scratch cards work

Users can access online scratch card games on any modern device, be it a phone, a computer, or a tablet, and then scratch or swipe away at the overlay with their cursors or their touch screen, then reveal the prize (or the losing screen).

This way you can distribute scratch cards with your loyalty app, website landing pages, email campaigns, and even QR codes, among other means.

Basic mechanics of digital scratch card games

When creating your scratch card, you have to concern yourself with four major components:

• Overlay visual: What the player will scratch at.
• Winning screen visuals: What they see if they win.
• Losing screen visuals: What they see if they lose.
• End screens: How the experience ends depending on their result.

And that’s essentially the experience. They scratch the overlay to reveal a win or a loss, then are taken to your end screen.

You can include a data collection form, or even multiple forms, before or after the game, and you can even make post-game forms conditional on a specific result.

You can also add intermediate screens before or after the game to convey more information.

Technology behind online scratch cards

Enterprise grade gamification platforms like Drimify use a random prize distribution algorithm that businesses can manage in certain ways.

You can adjust the dates of prizes and the algorithm will distribute the prizes randomly between the set dates. This means you could have different prizes available each week, and the algorithm will work to distribute all of the prize volumes (which you also set) by their end date(s).

Each time a participant wins a prize, probabilities are recalculated and smoothed over the remaining period.

You can also set the scratch card to be won by every person who plays, if for example, you were distributing promo codes, or even limit the number of times someone wins so you don’t have one person winning all the prizes.

Are digital scratch cards the missing piece of your next campaign?

If rewarding and motivating target audiences will help you in your business goals and you’re not already using online scratch card games, then yes – they are probably the missing piece of your next campaign.

Digital scratch cards for business are one of the best instant win mechanics for a lot of the reasons explained in this article, and can be adapted to almost any communications project, be it internal or external, marketing, loyalty, or employee experience.

They’re universally understood by audiences, and offer a lot of potential delivering a visually exciting user experience.

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