Online scratch card ideas and examples for better campaigns
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Online scratch cards are now a bona fide marketing and communications tool.
They’re one of the easiest to intuit, most widely recognised forms of instant win game, and businesses of all sizes can now make their own branded custom scratchers within a few hours through modern gamification platforms to motivate and reward audiences.
But is it that easy? Is it really a case of if you build it, they will scratch?
Like anything worth doing, a digital scratch card is worth doing well, so we’re going to run through some scratch card examples and use cases you can take as jumping off points for creating your own custom digital scratch offs, and talk about design best-practices and highlight potential pitfalls as we go.
The principles of a good online scratch card idea
Your custom online scratch card boils down to four key aspects:
- A start screen that captures attention and explains why people should interact with your scratch card – or go to the trouble of filling out your data collection form and “scratching”
- Compelling visual design that specifically optimises the overlays and underlays of the scratchcard against its background
- Suitable prizes (What’s an instant win game without a prize? We’ll get into that later!)
- An optimised data collection form screen that’s short enough to not be a deterrent to participation, but comprehensive enough that you can track down winners (It’s not like they’ll have physical evidence of their win unless they’re cognisant enough to screenshot their winning screen.)
Understanding the role of prizes and rewards
Gamification experiences like a Pacman game or a puzzle have some value just in the act of playing them, but an instant win game like a scratch card really hinges on the destination.
You need a prize your target audience will want, or could use, or could see tangible benefit from, but it also has to be a prize that keeps within your budget and supports your goal.
For example, in a product promotion campaign, a custom scratch card giving away a limited run of your products as a grand prize, and distributing a promo code or virtual coupon to be able to purchase said product at a special price to everyone else, could work very, very well.
The chance to win the big prize is a compelling reason for people to scratch and see. Even getting a promo code, particularly if this is in conjunction with content hyping up the product, could be the tipping point to me going out to make a purchase.
A formula for a visually appealing user journey
Unlike with your wheel of fortune or spin the wheel game mechanisms, the custom digital scratch off card follows a fairly linear story. It goes from the overlay – or what people will actually scratch, to the underlay – or what people will see when they win or lose.
The rules to follow in the digital scratch card graphic design, in order, go:
- Make sure both your overlay and underlay look good against your game’s background
- Make sure they’re visually consistent, or at least communicate in the same visual language
- If possible, use this medium, and these customisation options, to tell a story – you’re literally going from one picture to another, almost like two frames of a comic book
Online scratch card ideas for marketing and external audiences
This is a very short list of opportunities to achieve better business results with online scratch cards, but it’s just to illustrate some of the possibilities in different industries and different business functions
Fundamentally, if you’re trying to reward and motivate your audience to take desired actions, the scratch card can be a powerful digital tool to aid your campaign.
Scratchers as part of a loyalty programme
Whether it’s for an airline, a cafe, or even an energy company, loyalty is important. The adage may be overused but it’s undeniable: it’s cheaper to retain customers than to go out and get new ones.
The scratch card can be a clutch addition to your loyalty programme, as it adds interactivity and a very visual experience of excitement. It could be an experience participants take part in at the till or when they pay to “win” their meal instead, or to get a free dessert, or it could be integrated into a loyalty app for an upgrade or some free merch or something else that would be useful and add value.
To take the airline example, they could scratch away an overlay of a busy departure lounge with an image of the more peaceful, more premium looking first class lounge in all its glory, indicating that they’ve won a first class flight at economy class prices, redeemable on their next trip.
Using scratch cards to promote technology products
The scratch card might sound like almost an old-fashioned concept to promote, say, a new state-of-the-art television or home cinema system, but once again, it lends itself to exceptional visual storytelling.
The overlay could be an old-fashioned television showing the old pre-programming visual of “Test Card F” or equivalent, or even static, which could then be scratched away to show the brand new television – colour and action dripping out its screen.
You could apply this to almost any tech company, but it’s perhaps most fitting with anything featuring a screen – a perfect marketing tool representing a window into the future.
Online scratch card ideas for internal communications
Employee engagement (EX) is an essential component of any business’s human resources (HR) strategy, and scratch cards can play as vital a role here as they can in communications with external audiences.
Scratchers to reward employees
For morale and retention, it’s necessary to sometimes have prizes or giveaways, but the size of a workforce can make these difficult to manage.
Building a digital scratch card on the Drimify platform, you can quite literally load it up with as many prizes as you need, and distribute it across any size of workforce.
For example, you could theme a scratch card around a major sporting event that’s likely to inspire and unite your teams, and distribute prizes related to said event – if your company is one of the corporate partners, even better, and even more opportunity to tie it to your brand.
Creating scratch cards as part of larger employee engagement campaigns
Over key time periods, such as countdowns to important events, or December in the build up to Christmas, longer gamified employee experiences in the form of digital calendars can become extremely powerful internal communications tools.
Regularly distributing prizes through instant win games like online scratch cards is a way to regularly inject some excitement based on the chance to win a prize. While you could have a grand prize draw from the top performers, regular scratch cards make it more inclusive and raise the averages for participation and completion.
The scratch off could also be used as a visual storytelling device for corporate social responsibility initiatives. The mechanism takes the employee from one image to another, something negative to something positive due to the business’s actions, then the end screen could elaborate and educate on what’s been done.
Good scratch card ideas mean nothing if nobody knows they exist
If you actually went the DIY scratch card route, and busted out the acrylic paint, packing tape, and the rest of your leftover high school stationary to make 2,000 physical scratch cards (or more realistically, shelled out for a professional printing company to make the scratch offs for you), what kind of engagement do you think you’d get?
How would you even track it?
Now imagine you don’t distribute them, and they sit in their boxes past the campaign date. How is the engagement now?
The same thing applies with your custom digital scratch cards. You need to market them to the right people to get engagement. Put them in your email newsletter by hyperlinking them in a button. Put the QR code all over any physical assets you have. Link them in your email and social media banners and give them life.
It’s a lot easier to promote digital scratch cards because they’re accessible through any modern device (which pretty much all people have in their pockets), so don’t let your good online scratch card ideas go to waste!
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