Integrate games and gamification into your marketing automation strategy

With gamification, you can help improve lead generation, conversion rates, and customer retention, but have you considered integrating games and gamification into your marketing automation strategy? Because games and gamified content are powerful tools for increasing audience engagement, and can be tailored to deliver a compelling customer experience while simultaneously collecting data, and encouraging customers to perform desired actions, gamification can not only serve as a component of your marketing automation strategy, but be a key media asset in helping you improve it over time through its potential for data collection and analytics.

When we look at the common challenges businesses and marketers face when it comes to customer relationships, we know that generating leads and keeping customers engaged throughout their buying journey are still top priorities. Alongside these objectives, companies are finding themselves faced with an explosion of collected data, but can struggle to use it effectively.

Combining marketing automation with gamification can help overcome these challenges by putting data and games to work, both for the customer’s benefit, and to help you reach your business goals.

Defining gamification

First thing’s first. We’re talking about integrating gamification into our marketing automation strategy, but what exactly is gamification?

In short, gamification is using game mechanics to improve target audience engagement. Think about how much harder people work, and more motivated they are when they’re playing games. By making less fun, or obviously playful tasks like marketing into a game, you can tap into that enthusiasm and energy in your customers to get the best out of them.

Through modern marketing games, which can easily be customised thanks to accessible gamification platforms like Drimify, you can create interactive digital marketing experiences that grab the attention of customers, and engage them in a challenge, a competition, or an exciting task. By customising a game engine to your branding, you copy, your graphic design, and your messaging, you have what can basically be thought of as a playable, interactive advert, with the purpose being to drive your target customer to a purchase, or to give personal information like their email, or to subscribe to your email newsletter. The range of objectives gamification in marketing can be applied to is varied, and is only limited by imagination and creativity.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation broadly refers to the automation of repetitive marketing tasks, processes, and workflows, that can be triggered by a set of predefined conditions based on user behaviour. It is possible to automate many elements of marketing, including lead nurturing, lead scoring, landing page optimization, and lead management in the sales funnel. The most common use of marketing automation is for marketing campaigns: sending emails, SMS, the publication of content on social media networks, and even contact segmentation.

Modern marketing automation is a combination of software, strategies, and a client-centric approach. It allows you to nurture leads and prospects with highly personalised and useful content that helps convert them into happy and loyal customers.

Marketing automation and gamification are complementary

Marketing automation works with any target audience and for all industries, from retail and manufacturing, to healthcare and education. From business-to-business (B2B), to business-to-customer (B2C), and even direct-to-customer (D2C), whether you’re a startup looking to expand your reach, a small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) hoping to increase your conversion rate, or an established business trying to increase revenue, automation is extremely useful, and debatably at this point, essential in some form to be efficient and competitive as a business.

Effective marketing automation allows you to qualify the data that is important for your business, and allows you to deepen your knowledge of your customers. It’s also a great help for businesses to prioritise tasks and manage leads, so incoming questions are answered quickly. Data is collected, stored in your customer relationship management system (CRM), and used to deliver more relevant content and help to customers who get the same high quality experience, regardless of the channel through which they contact you.

All marketing departments can significantly increase their performance through automation, nearly all companies and marketers are already using marketing automation in some form, but adding gamification elements to your strategy can increase business efficiencies even further. To integrate marketing games into your marketing automation strategy in the right way, the first questions you need to ask yourself are: what needs to be automated in my strategy, and how should it be automated?

Create dynamic customer contact lists

By creating, segmenting, and managing your contact lists, you can significantly improve the engagement generated by your marketing campaigns. Organise contacts so that every customer action is recorded as another data point, and assigned to lists based on their behaviour. This will make your marketing game programme setup more efficient and relevant, as you can target more suitable gamified content to customers that will be more receptive to its messaging.

As soon as users open your website, you can invite them to complete a Product Recommendation Quiz or Personality Test to guide them through their purchase, better determine their needs, and ultimately suggest the right product or service. By creating dynamic lists, you can send more relevant content and create better engagement.

Integrate gamification into your email marketing strategy

You must provide automated and personalised emails that will send increasingly precise content through the conversion funnel to your leads. By triggering the sending of emails on specific actions, marketing automation allows you to address each of your contacts individually who have already expressed their interest, or when they are most receptive to buying.

The goal is to interest your leads enough that they want to learn more about your business by clicking on the links embedded in the emails themselves. This is how you convert them into real customers. This is where game mechanics and gamified content can kick in and add value to your automation strategy.

You do this by inserting gamified content as an additional element at the heart of a predefined scenario. You can set up a whole program of gamified emails that will be sent at different levels of the buying journey to enhance the customer experience:

1. A welcome email to new subscribers. This message serves to reinforce your value proposition, but also shows your contacts what they can expect from you. To capture their attention, you could offer them an instant win game to potentially benefit from a promotional code on their first purchase. You could use the Wheel of Fortune Game engine or the Scratch Card game engine, or a number of other easy to customise instant win game options available on the Drimify platform.
2. Subscription to your newsletter. You could customise a casual game engine or a Quiz that resonates with your audience, through which you can promote your offers and your gamified loyalty programme.
3. Offer a promotion for birthdays. If you have collected the birth dates of your contacts, you can easily send them an automatic email on their birthday with an instant win game to reward them for being loyal customers, and potentially generate sales.
4. Relaunch abandoned shopping carts. You could send an attention-grabbing follow-up email reminding customers of what they almost purchased, with the additional aspect of an instant-win game. This gives them the opportunity to win a gift or promo code.

Develop and boost your marketing automation strategy through games and call on the gamification experts to help you with your project. We passionately support small and large companies in the development of their gamification projects and commercial campaigns throughout the year.

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