Having the data needed to personalize your customer journey is essential for brands in today’s competitive digital landscape. But how do you incentivize consumers to provide that high-quality data? This is where gamification comes in.
Demystifying Gamification
Gamification means introducing game mechanics into non-game environments. Using the psychology behind gaming, such as point scoring or badge earning, can bring a powerful advantage to your brand engagement. It can be harnessed to build awareness in new audiences, engage people in otherwise unappealing tasks, or find out more about individuals so that you can provide them with a better service. Ultimately, marketers should consider gamification as an effective way to engage with consumers on their terms.
How to Get Started
As with any consumer-focused campaign, identify the business objective you are looking to solve and consider the most effective touchpoint to reach prospective customers. The most effective activations will propose a clear reward in exchange for an individual’s first-party data.
We’ve lined up a few examples of gamification in action to get your creativity flowing. And since the holiday season may still be fresh in our minds, we’ll start with a festive theme.
Capturing Customer Data with an Advent Calendar
A leading global pet care company was looking to increase the detail and quality of their customer data to increase the personalization of their consumer communications.
3radical created a pet-themed interactive advent calendar in time for the holiday season. In return for completing the initial survey, customers could receive tailored rewards and offers, personalized using the recently shared data. Customers opened a new door each day across 12 days to reveal and claim a new reward.
This gamified approach encouraged repeat engagement and showed clear and immediate value in exchange for providing zero-party data. The initial survey was not mandatory, yet 63% of participants still completed it, showing that they saw the value in doing so. The information and insight that was subsequently captured could then be used to deliver future personalized and engaging consumer communications.
Encouraging Professional Advocacy with a Scratch Card Game
Professional advice and expertise go a long way when customers purchase eyewear. Knowing this, Essilor Group was looking for a way to encourage eye care experts to recommend their new product.
Essilor worked with 3radical to create an engagement solution that incentivized eye care professionals to recommend a newly launched product for their patients. Whenever the new product was purchased, practitioners received a unique code that could be used to play a virtual scratch card game. During the promotional period, they would receive instant rewards for referrals and sales of Essilor products.
With this strategy, Essilor fostered and encouraged loyalty between its brand and the practitioners. In addition, experiential interactions, such as this interactive scratch card game, drive memorable longevity, encourage repeat engagement, and increase awareness for both practitioners and customers.
Capturing Customer Intent with a Personality Quiz
Similar to the global pet care company, the tourist board, VisitScotland, was looking to add detail to their customer profiles. Gaining essential information meant targeting prospective travelers with highly personalized communications and relevant travel ideas or itineraries.
Existing contacts and new website visitors were encouraged to complete an interactive quiz featuring trivia and profiling questions. The potential reward? A dream trip to Scotland. This quiz also served the participant a personality profile (such as ‘city breaker’ or ‘nature lover’) based on their responses. Users could also earn additional entries into the prize draw by sharing the quiz on social media.
Thousands of users engaged with this gamified mechanic providing valuable insights into their holiday style preferences and travel planning status. This detailed insight was used in follow-up communications with targeted and personalized messaging.
Encouraging Repeat Engagement with a Digital Board Game
The highly competitive hospitality industry is crowded with competitive offers and discounts. So the restaurant chain, Zizzi, was looking to stand out and encourage consideration by increasing engagement frequency.
Using its audience engagement platform, Voco, 3radical created an interactive ‘board game’ mechanic in which players could receive dice rolls in exchange for positive actions. This could be completing a quiz, providing first-party data, or sharing the game on social media. The quizzes were designed to capture customers’ demographic and behavioral preferences and analyze preferred rewards and levels of loyalty to the restaurant.
Earning this new data, shared directly with the restaurant by the customer, allowed Zizzi to gain a keen insight into their audience’s demographics and preferences. It also brought in new audiences with 27,000 survey completions – 22,000 from new marketing prospects. In addition, this gamified approach to data capture meant that Zizzi could follow up with highly personalized communications and experiences for the new prospects.
Training Staff with an Interactive Training Journey
Gamification isn’t just for brands and their customers. National Australia Bank (NAB) wanted to increase awareness and drive adoption of their digital services by engaging and training their employees.
To do this, NAB worked with 3radical to create the Digifit program. A personalized, interactive training journey of bite-size sessions centered on the bank’s digital offering and best practices. By engaging with these sessions, employees gained confidence in conversing with customers about their digital services. The employees were also rewarded with badges on their Achievement Wall, and entries into prize draws.
The Digifit program had a 96% completion rate showing that this method of training employees was highly effective compared to more traditional approaches. The results of the training were also evident with a decrease in face-to-face consumer transactions and better uptake of NAB’s digital offering with its customers. This also created stronger and more trusting relationships between employees and customers.
All of these examples were created using 3radical’s Voco audience engagement software. This powerful tool presents the perfect solution to create compelling experiences and engagement strategies, designed with our Earned Data approach to data collection. If you consider gamification in your future brand strategy, don’t hesitate to contact us.