Improve Your Loyalty Program with Gamification
Brierley | A Capillary Services Company
Consult with Loyalty Experts | Drive Customer Engagement | Create Profitable Programs
Brands are racing to capture their market and are looking at innovative ways to boost customer engagement and sales. One such innovation is Gamification. By introducing gaming elements into driving customer engagement and retention strategies, today's loyalty programs are nothing short of being robust.
Gamification not only creates a more engaging loyalty experience, but also offers enterprises the ability to collect data to better understand their consumers. This facilitates the creation of an even more optimized loyalty program.
How to Gamify a Loyalty Program
Gamification involves incorporating common elements from video games into your loyalty program. Specifically, gamified loyalty programs include game features designed to keep players engaged. Gamification could take the form of:
By including game mechanics such as those listed above in your loyalty program, one can see an increase in customer engagement, improved brand loyalty, and growth in sales and revenue.
Loyalty Programs and Leaderboards
Leaderboards are one of the most common and most effective tactics for loyalty program gamification. Leaderboards aren't new; since the game Space Invaders arrived at arcades in 1978, there have been leaderboards featuring the players or participants with the highest score.
Leaderboards and 'high scores' went far beyond just arcade machines, and even beyond newer and next-gen video games. Online services like Xbox Live, mobile games like Candy Crush, and even real-life games like Top Golf all have leaderboards to keep track of the best-performing players. Applied to loyalty programs, leaderboards can inspire that same aspiration, boosting customer engagement and repeat sales.
Types of Customer Loyalty ‘Gamers’
Not every type of gamer — or consumer participating in a gamified loyalty program— is the same. Richard Bartle, the father of multiplayer online games, grouped gamers into four key groups to help better understand their actions and play style. The four groups of gamers include:
Looking at the types of gamers, it makes sense that leaderboards tie in well with gamer segments and why they are an important part of gamification.
Who are leaderboards most effective with? Leaderboards may appeal to most of these gamers, but they will resonate most with the Achievers and Killers. You can drive greater loyalty engagement with your Achievers. Achievers are looking for successes, and aspects of your loyalty program like leaderboards and earning badges can give them an aspiration. You can also use gamification to drive improved retention with your Killers. These gamers will keep returning to your loyalty program to see if someone outranked them, and they’ll do what it takes to regain their top position.
Best Practices for Loyalty Program Leaderboards
Leaderboards work best when rankings are attainable. Resetting scores regularly for certain metrics make sense, or even offering a variety of leader metrics that can be ranked. Imagine you have a leaderboard for your coffee shop that shows who has the most loyalty check-ins or other visits. If this were a lifetime score, no new customers could win and whoever was in the top ten would likely remain indefinitely. This would be much better as a weekly or monthly score, allowing for new names to surface on the leaderboard. You want members to feel they have the ability to make the list. If it is always out of reach, they will become disinterested and disengage.
Consider how you can use a leaderboard to keep your members excited about the ongoing activities they have. Whether you are a coffee shop or an auto parts store, if you’re looking for ways to grow engagement or bump up your retention with some of your most passionate members even further, a leaderboard is a great start.
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Loyalty Programs and Badges (Badgification)
Let’s look at another form of gamification to keep your loyalty members excited, with a little more longevity for impact: Badges (or Badgification).
Badges are a meaningful way to reward someone for activities, including some that may be outside of their normal comfort zone.
Brands can leverage badges to motivate loyalty members and can even personalize the experience with unique, targeted activities that get members out of their comfort zones. Incorporating badges into your consumer loyalty experience can provide countless opportunities, including having members try a variety of product lines or categories, making visits at a designated cadence within a certain timeframe, or even engaging with you in new channels.
Best Practices for Loyalty Program Badges
Just like leaderboards, badges can be reset or refreshed regularly to help drive activity. For example, Facebook’s “Top Fan” badge is a temporary badge for members who have recently engaged at a high level, showing you the most brand loyalty. Facebook’s algorithm continuously updates the badges to award them to new “Top Fans”, motivating users continue engaging while offering the reward to a greater audience.
Larger badges that can reside in a member’s profile or wallet for repeat are also valuable. This digital trophy case creates little souvenirs of the work they have done in the past. You want this array of badges to be attainable and meaningful, also with a variety of difficulties.
Loyalty Programs and Game-Like Tutorials
A useful loyalty gamification strategy is the program 'tutorial'. Every video game teaches the player how to play, whether using a tutorial, guide, or trial and error in a controlled environment. Game designers know that players will invest more time and money into the game if they guide the player at the beginning of the journey and ensure early successes. The same gamification tactic can be applied to loyalty programs.
Improving stickiness, engagement, and retention requires teaching your new members how to play and win in your loyalty program. The best way is by incorporating a video-game-like tutorial for your loyalty program.
Best Practices for Loyalty Program Tutorials
Most games have a well-thought-out, intentional method of guiding new players through the basics of how to play the game. This structured tutorial is intended to show players how to progress, how to earn, and how to win the game. Compare that to most loyalty program’s approach of only a welcome email, and you can quickly see that video games know the importance of the ‘early game’ better than many loyalty program developers.
To develop your loyalty program’s ‘tutorial’, here are some best practices you can follow:
Creating a successful tutorial-like onboarding experience for your loyalty program will increase the likelihood of continued engagement and the overall success of your customer loyalty solution.
Conclusion
As seen earlier, loyalty program gamification isn’t a new concept. Game mechanics like leaderboards and badges have been around for decades and used in a wide variety of ways. It is relatively new in the world of marketing and customer loyalty. The possibilities are only endless with gamification.