Consumers have grown weary of always being asked for something — data, time, money. This creates a real challenge for marketers. When no one wants to engage with your content — how do we get, keep, and grow our customer base? This is especially true as normal tactics are losing effectiveness.
To capture attention, marketers need to use fresh tactics and tools. One such way is employing game mechanics. Whether you want to acquire new customers, retain existing customers or wish to grow customer lifetime value, using game mechanics in your marketing efforts is proven to help you achieve strong business results.
Gamification = a business growth driver
The amount of time that the average person spends consuming content online has jumped to 6 hours and 59 minutes every day. Knowing this, how can we, as marketers, capture our audience’s attention? The answer is by creating gamification campaigns that engage and delight an audience, helping them stand out and cut through the noise in the minds of consumers.
Through gamification, you can create differentiation, leading to competitive advantage that will help you increase customer engagement, drive better performance throughout the customer journey, increase customer lifetime value, delivering better results, faster.
Critically, the use of game mechanics helps consumers actively choose to participate in an experience rather than being passive and simply being broadcast to. Gamified experiences can feel authentic and unique and can be personalised to that particular consumer, which can strengthen their desire to be involved and increase engagement.
Entice, don’t sell
The fashion brand Zizzi used gamification in marketing to great effect when launching a new swimwear collection. With the objective of increasing engagement and activating dormant social media followers, Zizzi used an online scratchcard at the centre of their campaign. Promoted primarily via organic social media activity and email marketing, Zizzi achieved some quite remarkable results.
They were able to capture 77,000 new email registrations, and converted almost 8,000 new club Zizzi members. They also drove a staggering €415,000 or £380,000 in sales in the first month of the activity.
“We can build campaigns ourselves, and the LeadFamly platform is so easy to use. We are so happy with the success of our campaigns. Because of how well they’ve performed, we will now make a lot more game campaigns for this year’s marketing strategy that we originally planned. The LeadFamly platform is for companies that want to gather new leads, delight current customers, and entice customers to spend valuable time interacting with your brand.” – Katja Vinding, Digital Marketing Coordinator, Zizzi.
Zizzi focused on customer experience first and created content that pulled their audience through a journey, rather than just pushing a message to the target audience. Intrigue created around the content made the consumer actively seek to spend time with the brand. This is a key competitive advantage that a tool like gamification provides.
As you can see, this campaign drove significant revenue, enabling marketing to demonstrate direct attribution between marketing activities and sales. In addition to increasing commercial efficiency, a gamification platform hands execution power back to the marketing team so they have full control over output and can test, evaluate and improve campaigns in-house.
Grow your audience throughout the customer journey
We see those brands that reap the greatest reward from gamification are using it across the full customer lifecycle to get, keep and grow their audience — brands like Coop (average spend increased 39% amongst customers who collected their prize), Masai (cost-per-lead reduction of 50%), and VERO MODA (10,000 clicks driven to brand website).
Whenever you use game mechanics, you have the opportunity to surprise and delight your audiences whilst also delivering tangible impact to your business.
Key takeaways
As marketers we need to understand what makes our customers tick and engage with them in the most effective way. What we are doing today isn’t working. Gamification can provide dynamic, highly engaging ways to communicate with our audiences across the whole of the customer lifecycle. Helping you get, keep and grow customers and providing everyday business impact.
