The opening of your shop is a unique moment in a brand’s life. Whether it’s your first point of sale, or a shop in a new town/country. It’s not only a huge investment, but also a lot of work.
In a context where consumers are purchasing online, brands need to redouble creativity to attract them to the shop. This is true in the case of a shop opening.
Preparing to open a store is not to be taken lightly. On the contrary, it’s an event that you need to prepare and plan carefully to attract traffic to your shops.
In this article, we share with you some advice and strategies for opening a shop. We’ll be looking at gamification. This is the incorporation of playable elements into communication materials to boost the appeal for the audience!
The challenges of a store opening
The inauguration of a new shop represents an investment for a brand. While retail allows you to create a special bond with customers, it also means a significant budget (whether for the purchase of the doorstep, rent, furnishings, staff).
A first challenge when opening a store is to boost its visibility with the brand’s customers, but also of its target audience. This in a territory that is sometimes different from online clientele. The first objective is to ensure that the shop is well known to its target audience and to attract as many customers as possible.
But the inauguration of a store also presents specific challenges. It’s an opportunity for the company to boost its image by organising a unique event. During which prospects and customers can interact personally with the teams. The opening must also engage the target audience. Moreover, it build loyalty so that they want to make a purchase, but also to come back.
The company can take advantage of this opportunity to gather feedback and thus get to know their audience (with whom they have sometimes interacted online). By offering tools for collecting opinions and preferences, the company can then reactivate its customers by offering them content and offers that are likely to engage them!
How to gamify a store opening
Traditionally, gamification is an effective lever for boosting a brand’s drive to store strategy. By incorporating playable elements into their campaigns, companies can capture the attention of their audience, encouraging them to visit their shops and encourage them to make purchases.
Gamification is an interesting tool to mobilise as part of a shop opening. The interactivity and promise of attractive rewards are two powerful assets to encourage consumers to come to the inauguration (potentially with other potential customers) and to create a strong connection with the brand.
Here are 3 ways to gamify your shop opening
1. Create media hype around your online store opening
Digital marketing is a tool for extending the reach of your message and attracting a wider audience. Particularly if it is used creatively and strategically, notably through gamification. On social networks, brands can capture the interest of their audience and create a buzz around their store opening by organising an online competition. An instant win, such as a Wheel of Fortune, can be used to give away discount vouchers to be used on the day of the opening.
It’s also easier to make the most of consumer expectations with gamification. This is known as teasing, or the art of gradually revealing clues in order to capture and the attention of your audience. The brand can imagine a digital treasure hunt through which its community can guess the location of its future shop.
Gamification also enhances the effectiveness of other web marketing strategies. To create a media hype around your event. This is the case with influencer marketing. The brand teams up with a content creator to communicate about the opening and encourage consumers to attend (to meet the influencer in the flesh). It can gamify its campaign by offering rewards (such as an in-store personal shopping session, vouchers, backstage access with the designer).
2. Gamify your store opening to better engage and convert consumers
Once on site, gamification can enable the company to liven up the opening of its shop and effectively engage visitors. To make the event more interactive, it can install digital terminals where customers take part in marketing games. These activities make the inauguration dynamic and bring customers back into the shop, increasing the amount of time spent with the brand.
It’s also an effective way of converting more customers. Marketing games are a way of distributing coupons that encourage purchases by offering participants attractive discounts.
Interactive games can also be used to highlight products by presenting them (and their advantages) in an original and fun way. In this way, the brand can offer Quizzes to make it easier to discover its catalog and communicate its value proposition.
3. Collecting and exploiting customer feedback to boost loyalty
Finally, marketing games offered at shop openings are an effective way of collecting customer feedback and data. Before being able to access a marketing game (on an interactive terminal or after scanning a QR code on a label via Scan&Play), the customer will have to fill in a form. It enables the brand to find out about the customer’s demographic profile (and better identify its audience), but also to ask about their product preferences.
Customer data will enable them to create drive-to-store and conversion campaigns (online and physical) that are personalised and therefore effective. This is an essential step in building customer loyalty and ensuring stable, long-term revenues for your shop.
Conclusion
Gamification is a powerful lever for boosting traffic at shop openings. It can also be used to generate more sales and build loyalty among retail customers. To make your inauguration more interactive and engaging, discover our marketing games that are easy to deploy in-store.
