What is a digital scratch card platform?

Scratch cards are great communications tools due to their visual nature and widely understood function. Everyone knows: “I scratch a card, I might win a prize.”

While they have their origins in gambling and contests, the format’s become a popular tool for businesses looking to incentivise and reward target segments – particularly since technology has paved the way for digital scratch cards. Now, instead of printing thousands of individual tickets – a huge blocker to any organisation save for a lottery company or similar – an online, trackable and controllable experience can be shared with customers or employees as part of a campaign.

While in the early 2000s these digital scratch card communications solutions were the reserve of huge corporations with near bottomless pits in resources for custom development, the technology has continued to evolve.

Now, online scratch card platforms have made this an accessible tool to all businesses. Your start-up and your small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) find themselves on the same footing as the big boys.

How does a digital scratch card platform work?

A digital scratch card platform, or online scratch off generator – whatever you want to call it – works by providing a blank scratch card template.

The mechanics of scratching away an overlay, or opaque covering, along with prizes, are all set up, with varying configurations. All you as the “maker” of the scratch card have to do is fill in the blanks and publish your digital scratch card.

Essentially, if you see a digital scratch off a competitor is using and you think, “It wish we could just have this but with our branding and prizes,” it’s very likely that they used a digital scratch card builder, and that you could use the same one to make your wish come true – and all in a morning’s work.

Benefits of using digital scratch card platforms

The major advantages for using digital scratch card platforms are fairly obvious, but for the sake of thoroughness, let’s go through the list:

• You’re saving on expensive development costs
• You’re benefiting from using a tried-and-tested digital solution that other businesses are successfully using (what are the odds of being the very first business to try a new SaaS platform?)
• You can make your virtual scratch off faster than going down the custom route
• If it’s a good gamification platform – which we’ll term “enterprise-grade” – the scratch off template should also have extensive configuration options to allow you to tailor the format to any campaign or project’s requirements

Choosing the right digital scratch card platform

This is where we talk about what makes a virtual scratch off platform or generator “enterprise-grade.”

When we say “enterprise-grade” we like to qualify it: it’s a platform that’s powerful enough and packs enough customisation features for you to customise tools that can really deliver on your business goals, be they driving conversions, promoting products, or adding some interactivity to your loyalty programme.

When choosing your platform, we recommend you look out for the following attributes:

Choose one that allows you to make (a lot) more than just scratch cards

Specialisation is a wonderful thing, but do you really want to create log-in details and master a platform that only allows you to make scratch offs? Or even just variations of instant win games?

Most scratch off makers or generators will be part of gamification platforms with more game mechanics available, but you’re making better business decisions when you base your pick on more than just its scratch card capabilities. Does it have:

• A broad range of customisable game mechanics?
• Different categories of games?
• Experience games that allow you to combine different apps that tell a longer branded story?

The more versatility your platform has across games, the more options you have for creating customer experience campaigns (CX) and employee experience campaigns (EX).

Look for extensive branding configurations on your scratch card games

You’re making a scratch card for business purposes, so it needs to represent your business visually. After all, what is a scratch card but a visual instant win mechanic? You rub away one image to reveal another.

At the minimum, you want your scratch card template to offer logo and background image control, as well as overlay and prize-specific underlay options. With the Drimify gamification platform, you can actually have a video background to deliver an even more dynamic instant win experience.

Think about the possibilities this creates for framing your scratch card: a spooky moving fog over a graveyard for a Halloween campaign; a stylised highlight reel of your team’s star player for engaging football fans; streaks of code in the backdrop of a scratch off that’s a rewarding part of an employee experience educating them around cyber threats.

Check the prize management options

It’s all about the prizes, right? It’s a prize distribution mechanism, so to be “enterprise-grade” the prize management set-up needs to be a winner.

For a benchmark when looking at this aspect, the Drimify gamification platform’s prize management options allow you to:

• Add as many prizes as you need
• Set dates for the prizes (so you could deliver prize X only one week, and prize Y only the next week, all on the same card)
• Limit how many prizes one player can win
• Attach promo codes
• Set the game to award every participant a prize

Detailed analytics on the back-end of the platform

One of the biggest advantages of making the scratch card digital is instantly having statistics to turn to, so make sure the back end of the gamification platform you use has real-time statistics as part of its dashboard.

With Drimify, you can see things like engagement rate and completion rate at a glance, and see how many of your prizes have been won, with quickly downloadable data sets available for more extensive analysis.

Who are digital scratch card platforms for

Gamification platforms offering templates to create your own custom scratch cards are ideal tools for businesses looking to take their communications to the next level.

Everything you do, every project, and every campaign, all boils down to engaging and motivating an audience. It could be for marketing, it could be for human resources (HR), and it could be to add interactivity to a rewards programme.

A good scratch off generator with plenty of other customisable gamification experiences will be an ideal addition to any business’s suite of tools, across industries.

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