Optimising customer relations requires careful attention at every stage of the sales funnel. From discovery to conversion, not forgetting retention, brands need to multiply the points of contact with consumers and provide them with an impeccable service.

Gamification is an excellent way for brands to strengthen their relationship with their audience. By offering interactive, playable activities, they can give their customers a voice, promote their opinions and reward their interactions with personalized prizes.

In this article we invite you to discover 10 ideas for marketing games to improve customer relations. At each stage of your customer journey, you’ll find examples of effective animations that will increase buyers’ interest and boost their attachment to your brand.

SUMMARY

• 1. Discover the brand universe through immersive marketing games
• 2. Enhance the shopping experience with marketing games
• 3. Onboarding new customers with a marketing game
• 4. Collect preferences and feedback to improve customer relations
• 5. Reward the loyalty of your best customers with a gamified program

The customer relationship begins even before a person has made their first purchase from a brand. This is known as the discovery phase, during which the challenge for companies is to strengthen their branding. Consumers want to know more about the brand, its offering and the values it stands for.

At this stage of the customer journey, the company can allow prospects to discover its world by offering immersive marketing games. Trivia, for example, will enable consumers to find out more about the company’s history or become familiar with its product.

But other techniques can be used to make this discovery phase more interactive. The Puzzle or Word Scramble can be used to get participants to guess the company’s differentiating features, such as its commitment to solidarity or the innovative features offered by its products.

To encourage consumers to take an interest in the brand and its catalogue, the company can offer participants rewards. Vouchers or gifts will have the main advantage of encouraging prospects to extend their relationship with the brand and move up the sales funnel.

Marketing competitions can also consolidate customer relations at the time of the first purchase. At this stage of the customer journey, the key is to be able to recommend a selection of personalised products, thereby enhancing the shopping experience.

Brands can, for example, offer a personality test at the start of the purchasing process on their e-commerce site (or via an interactive game terminal in shop). By answering a series of questions, consumers can tell the company what their main interests or needs are. The company can then use this data to suggest items that match their expectations (or even offer them a discount voucher on a personalised selection of products).

Other interactive activities, all geared towards customer knowledge and collection of product preferences, can also be used at this stage in the relationship between buyer and brand. The Gift finder is particularly interesting during peak marketing periods for gift buying (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Christmas, etc.).

The Customizer is also an excellent marketing game idea to make the shopping experience more personalised. Shoppers can personalise their product (by changing the color, for example) and walk away with a unique item.

The onboarding phase is also crucial to improve customer relations. This is particularly the case for companies offering a service (or a digital product such as software, for example).

Retail chains are also sensitive to the issue of onboarding, as their customers are encouraged to create a personal account (via a dedicated application) to manage their purchases and loyalty program. The same goes for the banking sector, which offers a similar customer experience.

A marketing game such as Treasure Hunt can be proposed to simplify the creation of a customer account. The company can also improve the demonstration of its product or service to give users all the keys to the best way of using it.

But whatever the sector of activity, onboarding can also take place when people sign up to a brand newsletter. To reward new subscribers, and encourage them to become active customers, the company can incorporate an instant win into its e-mail address collection form. By launching a Wheel of Fortune or playing the Pinata game, new subscribers can win a promotional code, valid only on their first purchase (and for a limited time, which will boost the conversion rate of this marketing game).

Good customer relations also mean knowing your audience. Companies need to collect data on their audiences so that they can personalise their experience with the brand and offer them content that is better adapted to their expectations and needs.

Interactive mechanisms such as Polls, Quizzes and even Battles are highly effective for collecting feedback on the shopping experience itself or on the products marketed by brands. The latter can then use this to personalise future campaigns (emailing, for example).

But it can also use this feedback to make the e-commerce and in-store customer journey smoother. For example, an interactive survey shared on-site or by email once the order has been validated can identify any areas of friction that need to be improved (checkout taking too long, lack of information on delivery arrangements, etc.).

Generally speaking, consumers will be sensitive to the attention the brand pays to them and its desire to boost their satisfaction. But it may also be a good idea to reward this sharing of feedback by offering rewards (extra loyalty points, discounts) to customers who play along.

The main way for companies to prolong their customer relationship as long as possible (and thus boost the lifetime value of each buyer – or BLV) is to reward loyalty. To do this, they can create a gamified VIP program, offering marketing games exclusively reserved for their best customers. Each interactive activity (such as an instant win or a puzzle game like Memory) will earn new points and unique rewards.

Companies can also gamify their affiliation program to turn their customers into brand ambassadors. By creating a competition between each of them, the brand can encourage them to talk about its products or services around them in order to convert new customers. The best ambassadors will be able to unlock exclusives prizes or benefits (such as invitations to brand events, visits to the company’s premises, etc.).

Conclusion

Playable Marketing is an excellent way of improving customer relations. By offering animations at every stage of your sales funnel, you can create a unique bond with your audience, get to know them better and offer them a unique and personalised shopping experience. Multiply the points of contact with your customers thanks to our interactive marketing games !

The French are big fans of loyalty programs. Across all sectors of activity they are 76% are members of such a program, it’s more than 40 million people.

Loyalty cards are nothing new. They have been used for many years to reward customers who buy regularly from a brand, in particular through a points system that unlocks exclusive benefits.

With loyalty programs becoming more and more widespread, it is becoming increasingly difficult for brands to stand out from the crowd. Especially as, in the current climate, it costs much less to retain a customer than to convert a prospect.

To boost your retention rate, you need to innovate and create a loyalty program that stands out from the crowd. Here’s our advice on how to create a loyalty program to boost your customers’ loyalty through more effective experiences and rewards.

SUMMARY

• What do French consumers expect from a loyalty program?
• How can you innovate to maximise the impact of your brand loyalty program?
• The key to an engaging loyalty program: test & learn
  

Before optimising your loyalty program, it’s important to understand what consumers want from it.

The primary purpose of a loyalty program is to enable customers to make savings. This is especially true in times of inflation. According to a recent study by YouGov, 68% of French people join a loyalty scheme to benefit from financial discounts and 58% to receive rewards or gifts.

Right after financial benefits comes personalisation. Loyalty programs must propose personalised offers for 38% of French consumers. 18% also want the brand to offer them products than other consumers with similar profiles have bought.

Practicalities: the French are still attached to the physical loyalty card (for 37% of them). But the digital version is attracting more and more consumers (28%), not least because it allows them to track their accumulated points in real time.

The points program, is still the most popular (54%). It is closely followed by:

• cashback (39%), which allows customers to obtain vouchers based on the value of their purchases,
• and premium loyalty programs such as Amazon Prime (21%), which unlock exclusive benefits in exchange for a fixed fee.

But to achieve these objectives, it is crucial to adopt a more innovative approach to loyalty. Here are 4 innovation levers to explore to make your loyalty program more effective.

1. Gamify your loyalty program

An excellent way of making your customer retention program more attractive is to focus on interactivity and gamification. As such, loyalty already includes gamification mechanisms, such as the points system and moving up to higher levels.

But brands can go even further by making the process of joining, collecting points and unlocking rewards even more fun. Galeries Lafayette, for example, uses Playable Marketing to encourage their program customers to buy from the brand again.

Loyalty program members were asked to enter a code they received post-purchase (by e-mail) to access an exclusive game and try to win gift vouchers. In addition to maximising customer engagement, the gamified marketing campaign also achieved its commercial objectives. More than 2 codes were entered per participant, and as many purchases were made in shop using the loyalty card.

2. Offer experiential reward

Rather than just offering discount coupons and vouchers, brands can build customer loyalty by offering unique experiences. New consumers, particularly those in the GenZ, are keen to have exclusive opportunities to create a more human link with their favorite brands.

In a recent report by Antavo, 65% of brands that do not yet offer experiential rewards say they plan to do so in the next 3 years. This is the case, for example, of the Marriott hotel group. Its loyalty program enables customers to take part in exclusive events (culinary, sporting, etc.) in cities where the company has hotels.

3. Align your loyalty program with a social or environmental cause

Consumers also prefer brands that are committed to major causes. They are 90% prefer to buy from committed companies. To stand out from the crowd with an innovative loyalty program, they can align themselves with a specific cause.

It’s an ingenious way of raising the profile of your VIP program while encouraging customers to get involved in the cause. The TOMS brand has created the Passport Rewards program. It allows its customers to accumulate points for each purchase, recommendation or review. These points can then be used to obtain discounts, or to make a donation to a charity.

Consumers who choose the latter option will be able to track the impact of their donation on the application. It’s a simple feature, but one that allows you to strengthen the connection with the brand and the feeling of having done something good thanks to it.

4. Incorporating new technologies to improve your marketing of waiting times

New technologies are also effective tools for boosting the performance of loyalty programs. In particular, they make it possible to offer a better user experience, make it more fun for customers to wait for a new launch, and offer personalised rewards.

The main technologies to be used as part of a loyalty program include:

• Mobile wallets make it easier to keep track of points accumulated and choose rewards. The advantage of a loyalty application is also that it makes the program more accessible and makes it an integral part of customers’ daily lives;
• The machine learning. Companies can use AI to analyse the performance of their programs and the demographic and behavioral data of their customers. This information will then enable them to offer personalised prizes that are more likely to win the loyalty of their customers.
• Segmentations tools can also enable companies to better understand their audience and offer them personalised rewards. They make it easier to collect data and then activate it, particularly via retargeting campaigns.

Regularly awarded as the best loyalty program, Starbucks Rewards is the perfect example of how companies can optimise their customer experience.

The coffee chain was one of the first to develop a mobile application reserved for its loyal customers. But the company is not resting on its laurels and continues to introduce innovative new features. For example, it offers new rewards, integrated games and committed campaigns (to promote reusable cups) to keep customers interested and enrich their experience.

So don’t be afraid to test new features and continually optimise your loyalty program to keep your audience engaged.

Adictiz can helps you design a more innovative loyalty program based on gamification. offer your most committed cusotmers a fun and interactive experience with our wide range of playable animations.

Watch the replay of our webinar on reenchanting your loyalty program.