Custom scratch off cards: 6 ways improve your marketing

If you want to make big wins with your marketing campaigns, you need to always be looking for an edge over your competitors.

With the marketing landscape seemingly blowing up and becoming unrecognisable with advancements in mobile technology and emerging trends every six months, it’s harder than ever to break through the noise and capture attention.

Can you speak to the algorithm? Can you convince your targets not to keep scrolling? To not unsubscribe? To not block the sender?

Can you get them to open an email, to stay on your video, to follow your call to action (CTA) and listen to whatever it is your campaign’s got to say?

This is where gamification comes into play, and an especially simple and intuitive form of gamification is the custom online scratch card, and that’s what we’re going to discuss in this article.

Why custom scratch off cards are a powerful marketing tool

Everyone knows what a scratch card is, and everyone knows what a digital scratch card is. As a concept, it occupies a space inside the collective consciousness.

It’s kind of like how everyone knows what a ladder or a door is. These are all things that do their jobs so well they don’t need to be improved upon.

You climb up and down a ladder to get to higher places you need to reach, and doors are like walls you can open or close to enter or leave a building.

A scratch card is an interactive game of chance designed to deliver a near instant result that originated as a way for grocery stores to reward customers, and evolved into a digital tool for businesses to reward and engage different target segments..

Interactive customer experiences and the psychology of engagement

The same reason we wrap presents is the same reason there’s a scratch area on a scratch card. People like to do things, they like to interact and perform tasks. They like an element of mystery.

Why are engagement rings housed in ornamental boxes and not bubble wrapped? Why does pass the parcel work as a kids’ game? The answers are all the same.

Interactivity and compelling visuals engage human brains. It doesn’t need to be anything overly complex, just a functional interactivity – doing one thing to lead to another, whether you’re scratching off an opaque covering from a physical scratch card, or swiping away at a virtual scratch area.

Scratch card games deliver delayed gratification, and simultaneously, an instant reward. It’s almost an oxymoron manifested in a gamification experience, but it’s so true to human psychology.

Yes, the destination is important, but so too is the journey. With scratch card games, that journey is hope and possibility – when you scratch away that covering, you might be better off than you were before.

It’s a small ask for potentially enormous gain.

Top 7 proven ways custom scratch off cards can boost your marketing

So that’s why scratch off games work, but let’s talk more about how they can work for you.

1. Increase customer engagement in promotional material

When you build your digital scratch card using Drimify, you are able to put intermediate screens before and after the scratch and win part of your experience.

Remember, participant attention is already heightened because they’re playing a scratch card and they know what it could mean – therefore they’re going to be more receptive to your promotional material. This could be text and an image, or it could be a video with some text.

However you construct it, you have an activated user who is concentrating and taking things in. This isn’t passive marketing like a social media video or a newspaper ad – they’re taking an action.

2. Drive conversion rates through promo code distribution

To build on use case one, let’s say you’re promoting a new product.

You could customise the overlay (or scratch area) and underlay visuals to show the product off, offer up a limited number of said products as the grand prizes to act as a huge incentive to participate, but then attach a generic promotional code for 10 or 15% off for a limited time to the losing screen.

• This way, lots of people will enter to try and win
• Some participants will have the big win experience
• Everyone will receive an extra incentive to make a purchase

What’s more, if you’ve used intermediate screens to your advantage (such as in use case one), all those participants with a promo code will now want the product more than ever before.

3. Create phygital experiences in-store

If you truly want to make the most of all of your assets in an omnichannel retail setting, gamification is an exceptionally useful tool – particularly through scratch card games when it comes to dealing out digital prizes to create excitement and encourage discovery.

For example:

• You could put QR codes for specially created digital scratch cards on different locations and key bits of signage to encourage customers to discover different areas
• You could use scratch cards on social media to distribute in-store promo codes and in-store offers as part of a “drive-to-store” campaign
• You could create a treasure hunt that creates an optimised customer journey to collect pin numbers that unlock digital scratch cards on terminals located around your premises
• You could sell retail advertising space to other companies using digital scratch cards to increase revenue

In today’s physical retail environment, you need to find ways to deliver something more than what people can find online. Shopping in a store needs to be an experience or a day out. It needs to justify the trip.

4. Enhance email campaigns

We all have inboxes. We all delete a certain number of marketing emails almost as soon as they come in.

But, “Win £100 of prizes with the scratch of a card!” or in a B2B setting, “Free consultation? Scratch & win!” Now you might open it and take a look.

The headline with the big potential win gets them into the email, then the button to the scratch card takes them into the heart of the desired user journey. Now you’re back to use case one – you’ve got them in your branded environment, where you can hit them with intermediate content screens and your branded story.

5. Increase social media engagement with shareable campaigns

Social media has become an incredibly crowded space full of passive consumption. Opportunities to win can cut through the multitudes of content, such as through digital scratch cards, and can be shared in posts, or on links in bios, depending on the platform.

They inject a dose of excitement, can be instantly share-able, and when paired with the right copy – grab people’s attention.

It’s all about tailoring how you promote the scratch card game for the medium. For example, if it’s B2B, make sure you’re targeting LinkedIn, if it’s a specific subculture within a demographic, make sure you’re researching what social media sites they’re most active on.

6. Improve loyalty app engagement

Last, but by no means least – the loyalty app is an area where the scratch card game really shines.

Scratch card games customised through Drimify can easily be integrated within your loyalty app to offer your valued, qualified, bought-in customers regular chances to win and receive rewards,

They also offer an interactive mechanism to really engage them and earn their concentration to hit them with key branded messaging (again, refer to use-case one).

Double down on customer loyalty: In addition to embedding scratchers within loyalty apps, you can also use such games across social media and in physical locations through QR codes to actually market your loyalty app and drive app adoption.

You can link the page where they can download your app in a CTA at the end of your experience where they can redeem a prize, or make it a two-part gamification experience: play part one online, part-two (with a bigger potential prize) in the app.

Supercharge your marketing with custom scratch off cards

Fundamentally, scratch cards are one of the most well-recognised forms of instant win mechanisms, and offer simple but extensive customisation options, so you really can tailor them to any project.

Whether you play with a minimalist design for a cleaner, more polished aesthetic, or experiment with the journey from scratchable area to prize underlay, few digital tools are more widely understood, and as such applicable, to such wide target audiences when it comes to improving engagement across marketing campaigns.

Gamification platforms like Drimify offer scratch card builders to help you customise your scratchers easily, so this business superpower has never been more accessible.

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