Valentine’s Day is not a celebration for lovers. It’s also a commercial festival that has become a key date in the marketing calendar for brands. In 2024, Valentine’s Day spending in the UK reached significant levels, with an estimated total of over £1.5 billion, according to a study by Finder. This total reflects a notable increase in spending over the years, largely driven by around 65% of Brits who celebrate the day and have an average planned spend of £50 per person.

Valentine’s Day is actually one of the most important commercial holiday in UK, with Christmas and Halloween. It’s therefore an opportunity for brands to capitalise on consumers’ purchase intentions by offering them romantic gift ideas to give to their significant other.

To stand out from the crowd during this highly competitive time of the year your business can rely on a powerful marketing tool: gamification. By incorporating interactive mechanics into your audience’s attention and encourage them to purchase their gift from your brand.

In this article, we share 3 examples of gamified Valentine’s Day campaigns. You can draw inspiration from them to enhance your communication, engage your target audience more effectively, and boost your sales during this key commercial period.

SUMMARY

• What goals should you aim in for your Valentine’s Day marketing campaign
• 3 Examples of gamification marketing campaigns for Valentine’s Day

Even though it remains the ultimate romantic holiday, Valentine’s Day is also an opportunity for brands to promote their offerings. This commercial holiday serves as a prime showcase for businesses that sell potential gifts for couples in love.

Of course, we think of the traditional bouquets of flowers. Industry professionals expect over a million flowers to be sold for Valentine’s Day this year, with two-thirds being red roses. However, florists are not the only merchants celebrating Valentine’s Day. Fashion, beauty, culture, hospitality… Many sectors are involved in Valentine’s Day marketing.

Don’t forget about singles, who are also targeted by brands during this key commercial period. On dating apps, the annual peak of activity tends to occur at the beginning of the year. Singles often make New Year’s resolutions, and apps like Happn see an increase of over 20% in their sign-ups during the month of February.

The main objective pursued by companies in their Valentine’s Day marketing is therefore to increase sales and revenue. The goal of the campaigns implemented is to raise consumer awareness of their offerings and encourage them to buy their Valentine’s Day gifts in-store (physical or digital).

But beyond the conversion objective, brands can also design their Valentine’s Day campaigns around other strategic goals.

Increase brand awareness

Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to gain visibility with a new audience. The aim of the campaign will be to boost brand awareness among couples (or singles) by leveraging viral marketing strategies (such as marketing contests, influencers collaborations, or co-branding).

Engage your customer community

After a quiet January following the holiday season, the marketing calendar kicks off with a bang thanks to Valentine’s Day. Businesses can take advantage of this key period to engage their audience. The idea is to increase interactions with the brand, particularly through gamification mechanics.

Contests, for example, encourage users to be creative and allow businesses to create user-generated content (UGC).

Collect data

Customer knowledge is also a significant aspect of Valentine’s Day marketing. Brands can leverage interactions with their audience to collect relevant data, particularly regarding product preferences, as well as opt-ins for their future communication campaigns. This information can be used throughout the year to better segment their clientele and send personalized content and offers.

Foster loyalty and strengthen brand attachment

By offering attractive rewards centered around love (such as romantic gateways, gift boxes, etc.), brands can boost customer retention. Marketing games can be offered post-purchase (to encourage repeat buying) or reserved for members of a VIP program to enhance loyalty. By rewarding its best customers, the company can strengthen brand attachment and secure significant revenue.

To stand out from their competitors and boost the performance of their Valentine’s Day marketing strategy, an increasing number of companies are betting on gamification. Here are 3 inspiring campaigns to achieve commercial goals and engage their audience more effectively.

1. Electrolux: a Memory game to enrich their database during Valentine’s Day

On the occasion of Valentine’s Day, Electrolux launched a campaign aimed at enriching its database, specifically encouraging product registrations. Through an engaging game mechanic, the Memory, the brand was able to collect opt-in very effectively while showcasing its Duos product range.

Electrolux’s campaign generated significant enthusiasm, showcasing an excellent engagement rate (31K users and an average of 2 minutes per game session) and very good results in lead qualification. This campaign allowed the brand to retarget and retain acquired leads, highlighting the ability of a gamification marketing campaign to create meaningful interactions while achieving notable results in qualification.

Del Arte: a Shooter game to generate new leads

As every year, the Del Arte brand celebrates lovers on Valentine’s Day. The interactive campaign invites participants to play a Shooter game. They are then redirected to an instant-win opportunity to win particularly attractive prizes for the target audience (gift vouchers, Interflora bouquets, trips to Paris, etc)

The campaign primarily enabled the company to generate over 40k new sign-ups to its mailing list and opt-ins. These leads were then reactivated throughout the year through strategic marketing campaigns for the brand.

3. M&M’s: A shuffler game to boost Valentine’s Day sales

On the occasion of Valentine’s Day, My M&M’s launched a game to attract new customers by showcasing its product range. Users had to form all the pairs within a set time to access a Shuffler and immediately discover if they won their Valentine’s Day gift box. This highly engaging mechanic allowed M&M’s to generate 30k new leads.

Conclusion

Consumers are particularly attentive to brand content around Valentine’s Day. Capitalize on their purchase intentions and engagement to achieve your strategic goals by launching a gamified marketing campaign. To enhance your communication and boost your results, all you need to do is customize one of our marketing game mechanics!

The Christmas holiday season is a crucial time for business profitability. During the last month of the year, they can achieve up to 20% of their annual sales.

One of the keys to engaging consumers during this sales period is to anticipate your campaign by multiplying contact points. Indeed, it takes an average of 8 interactions between a prospect and the brand before a sale is concluded.

In this article, we’ll take a look at a marketing mechanism that’s particularly relevant to Christmas campaigns. This is the Advent calendar, which allows you to multiply the number of interactions with your audience. Here we share tips for creating a memorable digital Advent calendar, as well as concrete examples to inspire you.

SUMMARY

• The mechanics of the Advent Calendar
• 3 tips to create a digital Advent Calendar
• 5 inspiring examples to create a digital Advent Calendar

The Advent Calendar is a particularly popular marketing tool during the Christmas season. It’s a simple principle: every day, participants discover a new animation through “boxes” to be opened. It can be a competition or an interactive animation such as an Instant Win, through which users can unlock free rewards and gifts.

Creating a digital advent calendar is a great way to boost your Christmas marketing campaign because, in the minds of consumers, this mechanism is directly associated with the end-of-year festivities. It’s also a great way to capture and hold your audience’s attention, by giving them a daily appointment and offering new surprises with each new slot.

What’s more, this marketing activity is ideal for animating and rewarding your customer community. During the Christmas period, consumers are on the lookout for good deals and discounts to save money on their gift purchases. By distributing discount vouchers and attractive gifts every day, the brand can build customer loyalty and convert new prospects, generating more sales.

The Advent Calendar is the perfect way to animate your community during the Christmas holidays and multiply the points of contact with your audience, but it also requires a great deal of planning. Here are a few tips to help you succeed and keep up the pace.

1. Plan your content for the 25 squares of the digital advent calendar

Brands that choose this marketing game for their Christmas marketing campaign will have to share interactive games and content every day, from December 1 to December 25. It’s therefore important to plan your content so as to diversify the animations, interactive mechanics and prizes shared with your community, in order to hold the attention of participants throughout the month of December.

2. Customize animations and prizes

The Advent Calendar will be more effective in achieving the strategic objectives the brand has set itself if it is personalized. This means, in advance of the Christmas campaign, refine its customer knowledge, for example by collecting data and product preferences. This will enable the company to offer targeted content and rewards that are more effective in engage audiences and generate sales.

3. Diversify distribution channels

To engage as many prospects and customers as possible, brands also need to think of their digital Advent Calendar as an omnichannel animation. The different Playable Marketing formats are particularly relevant in this context. The brand can engage its audience across all these channels with native animations that adapt to its website, shopping application or advertising campaigns (interactive ads).

Now let’s get down to business with 5 examples of brands that have created a digital Advent Calendar and leveraged this format to achieve a variety of business objectives.

1. Floa Advent Calendar

With its “Gift Box” operation, the Floa brand took advantage of the year’s most important event to raise its profile, while promoting its partners. The operation enabled the bank to recruit qualified leads to collect and retarget all year round.

With attractive prizes (Airpods, connected watch, smartphone, champagne), it attracted over 64K participants.

2. Galeries Lafayette Advent Calendar

Galeries Lafayette’s Advent Calendar game aimed to engage customers and prospects via a multi-channel campaign. By showcasing its famous Christmas windows on all its digital channels, the animation functioned as a sales generator. It also enabled the chain to capture customer data via a lead recruitment form. This data then enabled Galeries to effectively retarget its audience throughout the year.

3. Ouest France Advent Calendar

The digital Advent Calendar can also be used in culture and leisure marketing. Here, the objective is not to generate sales but to encourage its audience to create a Ouest France account. Indeed, only participants with an account could access the game and try to win attractive prizes (vacation stays, household appliances and high-tech, leisure activities, shopping vouchers).

The campaign enabled Ouest France to animate its audiences throughout December and recruit 81K subscribers.

3. Carrefour Advent Calendar

5. Kiabi Advent Calendar

Conclusion