Create innovative loyalty programmes with gamification

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Games and gamified content are an excellent way to increase customer engagement and customer satisfaction, and are an easy way to incentivise customer participation in loyalty programmes. Because modern marketing games are fun, easy to use, and bring an extra experience to the customer journey, they can add a lot of value to your loyalty programme, and your broader marketing strategy.

Why bother with a loyalty programme? I hear you ask. Why add all the bells and whistles to it? Isn’t stamping their card enough any more? Well, quite frankly, no. From a matter of practicality, it’s not uncommon in the modern world for customers to only carry a mobile phone as a means of payment. With a significant proportion of potential customers not carrying a wallet or purse, or something suitable to carry a traditional stamp card (like for takeaway joints and coffee shops), your loyalty programme needs to be digital, such as in the form of an app.

From the perspective of being competitive, be cognisant that everyone has some kind of loyalty scheme. Every business knows it costs more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. Having the best loyalty programmes with the most innovative engagement techniques will allow you to not only solidify and lock down your existing customer base, but potentially act as an incentive in themselves to attract customers to your brand. The examples of different ways businesses promote and foster loyalty, including gamified approaches, are countless, so make studying those, both within and outside your niche, a part of your research.

Top 6 tips for adding gamification to your loyalty programme

Using your gamification strategy to support your loyalty programme can help you stand out from your competitors, and offer your clients a more creative and innovative reward system. Here are our 6 top tips for implementing gamification and gamified content into an innovative loyalty programme.

1. Establish clear objectives and know your clients

Before developing any marketing strategy, you should first ask yourself a simple question: what’s my goal? What am I hoping to achieve? Is my loyalty programme aimed at existing customers, or am I looking to broaden my target audience?

To do this you must analyse your target customers to gain a better understanding of their needs and desires. If you’re to reflect their demand in your products and services, and your loyalty schemes, research is key. You can actually start to gamify your approach to your loyalty programme before you’ve even defined it, as game engines on the Drimify platform like the Survey can be easily customised to your needs to get a measure of what your customers like in loyalty programmes. You could share it on your business’s social media pages to get a measure of what your existing followers think. You could run through features similar to what competitors offer on their loyalty programmes, and float new ideas, to get an idea of preferences, and also things to avoid.

By seeking feedback from your customers in the first place, customising your gamified programme will start on more structurally sound foundations, and will allow you to offer tailored solutions which will better satisfy customer demand. By adding value to the customer journey, and creating that sense of community by inviting their input, your loyalty programme will be more successful, and you will ultimately do more business.

Pro tips:

• If you are targeting existing clients, opt for a loyalty programme that is only accessible when they have logged into their online or mobile customer account. This encourages them to sign into your platform, and could potentially lead to purchases.
• If you are targeting a wider group, then you can ensure there is a simplified version of the game available to the general public. This will invite them to sign in to their customer account (or create one) to access the full experience, and potentially win better rewards.

Determining which game mechanisms to use is an important step in ensuring your loyalty programme is successful. The rewards must also be clearly defined according to your target audience and the objectives you hope to achieve.

2. Make games that appeal to the average user, and reflect the average user’s appetite in the prizes

It is important to find a happy medium between a game that’s too complicated and a game that’s too simple. Finding that happy medium, or appealing to that Goldilocks sweet spot of the middle ground, keeps the experience enjoyable and valuable for the target customer. The odds are, you’re not specifically trying to appeal to super geniuses or village idiots, you need to play to the gallery, to the typical user you’re targeting.

Setting up a programme with numerous accessible and intuitive games will make people want to participate and come back for more. They need to feel like they have a chance of mastering, completing, or winning at the gamified experience, otherwise they’ll become discouraged.

To make your loyalty programme appealing, also consider instant win games to reward new customers from their very first purchase. A purchasing experience which offers instant rewards is effective in quickly securing your loyalty, and also helps to draw clients in, as when the prizes are good, it just makes more sense to buy item X with you if they can spin a wheel or a push a button for a shot at also getting item Y in the bargain.

3. Use social media to share your idea and your game

This one should be a no-brainer. At this point, businesses and their projects are either on social media or they don’t exist.

Social media is an excellent tool for creating an active community and encouraging the sharing of your marketing game, as well as promoting your loyalty programme. Circulating your games on social media platforms, with included calls to action to sign up to your loyalty programme, is a very effective way of attracting new signups. Including leaderboards, say for a well-designed customised Quiz, allows players to share their score, and make others within their social group want to take part. This is tapping into both your target customer’s competitiveness, and also their desire for social interaction and activity.

Beyond simple loyalty, online competitions also make compelling content to give your social media accounts a boost. As well as motivating new customers to sign up to your loyalty programme, if a game gets shared and posted a lot, you will likely attract more followers. Be sure to take every opportunity to interact with your growing online community by responding to questions or comments. A brand that’s present and responsive on social media is a brand people will naturally gravitate towards using. It can give your business a voice and a personal touch which can sometimes be missing from the digital space.

4. Display and keep track of progress

It is important to allow your customers to see their progress and development in your loyalty programme. They must be kept up to date on their progression, and particularly how far away they are from their next reward.

Think about including content or messaging that can communicate with your clients what they have to do to reach the remaining levels. If the programme is available on their customer account, you can display their progress on their profile, or have a space dedicated to the gamified elements with a progress summary.

It could be as simple as sending personalised emails which update your loyalty programme members on their progress. You can also come up with a badge system which gives clients a visual representation of their progress. All of these details gamify the client experience and give extra motivation to move to the next level, and by extension, remain a loyal customer.

5. Collect and analyse customer data

Regularly updated customer data is the key to a successful loyalty programme. The data collected from your loyalty app can be combined with the data you will receive through any marketing game created on the Drimify gamification platform.

By analysing all this combined data, you can continually adapt your loyalty programme, and the integrated gamified apps, to continue striving for the best results possible, or alter your strategy if your goals change. This information helps to improve your programme, allows you to adapt the rewards based on your customer preferences, and measure customer satisfaction.

Knowing your audience better not only allows you to improve their customer experience with your company, their user experience through your loyalty app, but also allows you to improve it, and attract new customers in turn. When you look after your existing customers, it will attract new business.

6. Subvert customer expectation with a twist

Another component that you can bring to your loyalty programme is the element of surprise (it works in battle, it works in storytelling, and so too does it work in marketing). Random rewards are a great way to encourage clients to take advantage of your offers and take part in your programme.

For example, if you used the Dynamic Path™ format on Drimify (which allows you to create multi-level playable experiences) to create a gamified loyalty programme, you can ensure that users accumulate points over multiple games. Without explicitly telling users, you could surprise them by converting their points into a voucher or promo code at the end of a defined period of time. Because they weren’t expecting it, or playing for it, the impact on customer loyalty can be greater – almost like a gift.

Work with the gamification experts to create your tailor-made loyalty programme. Drimify’s team of experts support you in the creation of your loyalty programme to add a new dimension to your project thanks to gamification.

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