Create your own online scratch card: Step-by-step guide

The scratch card is a well known staple of modern existence. You can buy them in almost every supermarket, newsagent, or petrol station, with prizes ranging from winning a fiver to thousands, or winning a trip, or X, Y, or Z prize – but did you also know you can now customise your own digital version for business use?

Whether to promote products, reward customers, or as part of employee experience campaigns (EX), the digital scratch card is nearly universally understood as a concept and mechanism, and now easy to make for any business.

In this article, we’ll run through how to create your own online scratch card, and how to adapt it to your audience engagement goals.

Why create an online scratch card?

Achieving almost any goal in business comes down to engagement and motivation, and nothing is more engaging and motivating than a chance to win a prize.

This is where the scratch card can adapt to different ideas and concepts to become a best-in-class digital tool.

Benefits for user engagement

The scratch card is engaging because it works on two major levels.

Firstly, it’s a highly visual instant win mechanism. It presents an overlay – ideally a work of graphic design that draws the eye, for participants to scratch away to potentially reveal a prize.

This “potential” to win a prize is the second major level. The overlay image delays the gratification – or possible gratification – of victory. While the overlay is still there, the grand prize, the lure that’s inspired them to participate, could be theirs. It creates a real user journey.

Ideal for promotions and giveaways

This is an ideal prize-distribution mechanism, as you can quite literally pack digital scratch cards to the rafters with prizes. Think about it – a prize wheel, if overloaded, can start to look visually busy, but the scratch card looks the same whether it’s filled with quantities of 100 distinct prize varieties or just one.

If you’re creating yours on an enterprise-grade digital scratch card builder, such as the Drimify gamification platform, you will also be able to manage and monitor all the numbers and conditions for winning from a single place.

Steps to online scratch card creation

The first step is to identify the most appropriate online scratch card platform for your needs.

We think we’ve built the best in the game, so we will be running through instructions based around that, but these instructions will still apply regardless of what software you use to create your scratch card game.

Step 1: Define your goal and prize structure

Before you start thinking about animation, opacity, a dark scheme or a light scheme, you need to decide what the goal of your online scratch card is, and what the quid pro quo of it all is for your audience.

• Gamification – be it via a digital scratch card or some other experience – is about adding game elements for the purposes of achieving something. Not just entertaining people and giving stuff away. You might:
• Want to get more email signups for your newsletter
• Need to incentivise participation in a survey
• Be looking to add a layer of interactivity to your loyalty app
• Be trying to promote a new product going to market

Whatever the “why” is can be considered your starting point. The rest of your scratch card, from the prize, to the design, follows suit.

Talking of the prize – that’s a fairly major component of your scratch card! You’re not distributing a scratch card out of the goodness of your heart, and people aren’t just playing for the joy of scratching.

The prize could be the bright shiny object you’re using to lure participation, or it could be a mechanism of your overall campaign. For example, if you were promoting a new product, you could be distributing promo codes through your scratch card to incentivise purchases at a special price.

Pro tip: If you’re not interested in collecting data, and want to maximise your KPIs, the Drimify scratch card template allows you to only collect data conditionally – such as if they’ve won a prize. This way there’s no form to fill out – which can be a blocker – and if people win, why wouldn’t they then fill out a form to claim their prize?

Step 2: Add your branding to your scratch card

It’s a business tool, so it should be branded to your business.

On Drimify, you can set your logo and set your background to be global features of your scratch card, by which we mean they will appear on every screen of your experience. They’ll form the foundation of your start screen, your data collection form, your winning or losing screen, as well as any intermediate screens if you include them.

You can also customise font styles, button styles, define if you want a light theme or dark theme (as well as adjusting the opacity applied by the theme), and other graphic assets to suit your business’s aesthetic.

Step 3: Set the scene in your scratch card’s start screen

Choose the right image or video, and be economical with your copy. People don’t pay attention, so tease the potential pay off quickly to get people started.

If your project requires more content, you can incorporate intermediate content screens between your start screen and the experience, or between your experience and the end screen.

However, the start screen needs to grab their attention, fast.

Step 4: Customise your scratch overlay and underlay

This IS your scratch card. Win or lose, you scratch the overlay to reveal the underlay.

Upload your own designs for both, to deliver the scratch card experience your business goals require.

You can put in a default underlay image, or attach specific underlays for different prizes.

Step 5: Configure prizes, prize volumes, and promotional codes

This is where the digital scratch card’s advantages over more traditional scratch cards really show their worth.

From within your Drimify dashboard, you can add your prizes, set your prize volumes, and define the end screen content – the copy and the image or video – participants will see if they win that prize (as well as the same for the losing screen).

You can also decide which dates each prize is available for – for example, prize X could only be available in week one of your campaign, prize Y in week two, and so on.

Scratch card promotional codes

The Drimify scratch card builder gives you multiple promo code options. You can either upload a list of unique codes, if it’s a finite prize, or natively create a generic promotional code inside the game on your dashboard.

If you’re looking to incentivise conversations, something like a generic 10% promo code, set to be awarded to every participant, is the way to go.

Prize management of your digital scratch card

Here you have a couple of options to control how prizes are awarded. You could set it to give everyone who participates a prize, or leave it to the algorithm to distribute prizes randomly.

You can also limit how many prizes a single player can win according to information you get through the data collection form.

Step 6: Test and optimise the user experience of your scratch card

This bit is incredibly important. You can put all the best media and copy together, and think you have your intermediate screens all synced to do exactly what you want, but until you’ve run a few tests to get a real handle on the user experience (UX), you just don’t know.

Your copy might be too long, your images might be too heavy and slow down the loading, and have you tested the online scratch card on the kind of device you’re anticipating them to play it on?

It could look different on a mobile and on your computer, so really dive into the weeds in the testing phase to fix things before you go live.

Using scratch cards to support your next project

As already mentioned, the scratch card is near universally understood as a concept, and is associated with some sort of reward, so it comes with a certain heritage that motivates people to take part and see what’s in it for them.

It’s also a highly visual digital tool, so creates a real opportunity to use branded design in your messaging, while rewarding and motivating your audience.

(On the off chance you were planning on making a physical scratch card for your campaign, please, we beg you, put down the card, the scissors, and the acrylic paint – we promise you, this is better, and much less messy.)

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