7 Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing With a Gamified Promotion

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Gamified promotions are typically associated with engagement: increasing time spent with brand messaging, driving website traffic, creating positive experiences etc.

But did you know there is a whole host of other marketing goals you can achieve with a gamified promotion? Goals that have a direct and positive impact on your company — and make you look really good to stakeholders who care more about their bottom line than how many “impressions” your latest contest got.

So instead of settling for a promotion that just, well, promotes, why not cut through the clutter, grab customers’ attention, and nurture them while they play?

It’s actually not as hard as you might think.

Here are seven marketing goals you should consider pursuing with your next gamified promotion.

1) Grow Your Email List

According to Campaign Monitor, every dollar spent on email marketing generates $38 in ROI. That’s pretty good as far as I’m concerned.

But to maximize your email marketing ROI, you’ll need to have a decent sized email list.

Getting people to join your email list can feel like an uphill battle, especially with more consumers taking defensive actions to protect their personal information.

So to grow your email list, you’ll need to provide consumers an incentive to join. This is easy to do within your gamified promotion. Just offer perks like extra game plays or chances to win for opting in.

2) Attract New Loyalty Members and Engage Current Ones

Member acquisition is a common challenge for loyalty marketers. But it’s actually pretty easy to encourage consumers to join from within a gamified promotion.

You can educate players about the perks of your program in the game — and award perks like extra game plays when they sign up.

Just remember that you don’t want to only focus on new members and forget to engage current ones. You don’t want your loyal customers to feel like they aren’t getting as good a deal as new members.

Offering loyalty points as prizes is a great way to engage current members. And this can also help drive acquisition as players will need to join the program to redeem their prizes.

3) Educate about Products

If people don’t know about your products, they aren’t going to buy them. But as you probably know, customers don’t tend to wait on bated breath for your next tweet or video.

In fact, for the most part they couldn’t care less about your messaging.

If you want consumers to learn about your products, there has to be something in it for them. You have to offer value for engaging with your brand.

That’s where gamified promotions come in.

Gamified promos reward consumers for learning more about your products. You can drive them to your product pages or feature trivia about your products within the game. Then give them perks like extra game plays or chances to win.

4) Drive Brand Engagement

Engaged consumers can have a significant impact on your bottom line. According to Gallup, brands that successfully engage consumers achieve a 63 percent lower customer attrition rate and a 55 percent higher share of wallet.

But engaging consumers can be hard. To capture your customers’ attention and keep it, there has to be something in it for them.

Gamified promotions drive brand engagement in two different ways. First they make it fun to interact with branded content, providing consumers value in the form of entertainment.

Then they offer prizes and rewards for playing, and drive extended engagement by offering more chances to win the more consumers play.

5) Drive In-Store Traffic

While e-commerce is definitely growing, the majority of sales still occur in-store. And that means getting more people into your stores can make a significant impact on your bottom line.

You can use gamified promotions to drive store traffic. Just offer rewards that are only redeemable in-store – like gift cards.

You can also drive store traffic by printing game codes on receipts or handing them out in-store. That way customers will need to visit your stores in order to earn more plays.

6) Increase Review Volume on Your Website

Consumer product reviews are hugely influential on purchase decisions. In fact, 67 percent of consumers say reviews influence what they buy. And, on average, having product reviews on your site results in an 18 percent increase in sales.

But to get those benefits, you need to have a decent review volume on your site. Generally getting consumers to review products is challenging — unless they really loved (or really hated) your product, there’s nothing in it for them to write a review.

Gamified promos can target review volume growth by making it worthwhile for customers to review products.

It’s actually a pretty simple concept: consumers write a review and earn perks like extra game plays or chances to win prizes.

7) Drive Sales

Digital marketing isn’t just about social shares and website traffic. Ultimately, it needs to drive sales.

There are a few different ways to tie your gamified promotion to sales — all of which require a bit of planning, so you’ll want to make sure you start planning your promo well in advance.

The most direct way to drive sales is by awarding game plays for purchases. You can do this by handing out PIN cards at cash, getting customers to take photos of their receipts, or integrating with your loyalty program.

You can also showcase discounts, offers, and product recommendations within the game experience to increase basket size.

The Bottom Line

The best gamified promotions embed your marketing goals into the user experience so that every action the player takes has a positive impact on what you want to achieve.

But that means you have to approach promotion planning with a list of goals in mind. They can’t be an afterthought. They should be the first thing you decide on — before game style, before branding, before anything else.

Otherwise, your gamified promotion might be fun for customers, but it won’t achieve anything at all.

Take the stress out of planning your next promotion. Click here to download our Comprehensive Planning Guide.

John Findlay
John is a founding partner of the digital engagement agency, Launchfire (est. 1999). In his too-many years in the business he's developed gamified digital engagement strategies & promotions for a mighty impressive list of leading marketers.

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