Gamify Your Coupon System to Engage and Retain Customers
Add that extra spark to your coupon campaign!
By Elayne Law
Coupons are one of the best ways to entice customers to shop from you. After all, who wouldn’t want to save on a few dollars?
But what does that mean for you as a business? Would you believe that this also leads to more sales, more customers, and more revenue for you?
Benefits of a Coupon Campaign
89% of millennial shoppers would try a new brand if it offered a coupon, and 69% of consumers love receiving coupons. Coupons can entice new customers, even people who have never heard of you before, to buy from you.
If they like your products, you could end up with repeat buyers, if you play the customer engagement game right.
Moreover, online coupon users spend 24% more than regular shoppers. This usually arises via cross-selling or upselling. In a bid to use the full value of the coupon, customers could end up buying more, or purchasing a more expensive item, than intended.
In addition, Blippr has found that 87% of consumers cite discounts and coupons as the top reason for increased purchase frequency.
Finally, 68% of customers believe that coupons generate loyalty. Coupons are a great gift for your most loyal customers, to show them how much you appreciate their patronage.
This makes your customers feel loved, and they would most certainly come back to a brand that values them.
How to Make It More Enticing?
The value of digital coupon redemption would most likely hit $91 billion by 2022. Moreover, the number of U.S. digital coupon users reached 145.3 million by 2021.
That only means that the coupon market is saturated. Brands everywhere are using coupons to appeal to customers.
Because of that, you need to stand out from the crowd. One way to accomplish this is through gamification.
How Can Gamification Help?
Gamification refers to the implementation of gaming elements into non-gaming environments. Games, even minigames, have a tendency to inspire excitement and competitiveness in people.
Games can include anything from Catch the Falling Objects, to Lucky Gift Box, to Scratch Cards.
Gamification is said to increase new customer acquisition rates by 700%. Not only that, but it can also result in 63% lower customer attrition rates, and 55% higher share of wallet.
Clearly, gamification has some benefits of its own, but how do you implement a game into your marketing strategy?
1) Understanding Your Audience
Knowing the kind of game(s) your audience likes depends very much on how much you know their preferences. There are two steps that you can utilise to implement the best game for your target audience.
The first is to conduct surveys. Ask your customers what they’d want to see in your game, such as the genre, gamification elements like point bars or leader boards. You can even provide an open-ended section for them to ask for specific games.
This can help you to create the game that suits their preferences the most. For instance, consumers of a fashion brand could prefer milder, simpler games. Consumers of a sporting brand may prefer more exciting ones.
The second is to do A/B testing. Once you have come up with the general idea for your game, you can release several versions of it to your customers.
Use this chance to measure their success — how much are customers interacting with it, if they are at all? How long are customers spending on it? What parts of it don’t they like, and what parts do they like?
By compiling the feedback you get from customers of each version, you can come up with one that is more likely to satisfy their wants in a game. This way, you can improve on your game that would appeal to the greatest segment of your customer base.
2) Invest in Market Research
Of course, A/B testing can be bypassed if you already know what works, and what doesn’t. This means that you need to do in-depth research into what your competitors have come up with, and their own test results.
If your competitors have tried something before, like a Stamp Card, you could observe how their customers responded to it. If it’s a generally negative response, you might not want to go down that route. Or, you could find a way to make it even better than your rival’s.
The only downside to this is that you would be an industry follower instead of a leader. You would be deemed to be a copycat instead of the business that came up with it first.
3) Make it Intuitive
Customers should know how to play the game as soon as they lay their eyes on its interface. For instance, with Spin-the-Wheel and Fortune Cookie, you wouldn’t need a dialogue box to teach you how to play it.
Basically, you need to design your game so that your customers know how to play it with minimal instruction. They don’t have all the time in the world to understand how to play your game. Particularly since they can spend their precious time doing something else.
If your game is too complicated, your customers will abandon it, and you wouldn’t want that. It defeats the whole purpose of your gamification campaign.
4) Unclutter Your Design
When you design your game’s interface, you’d want to keep it neat and tidy. You should add embellishments to give it that extra sparkle, but you should not add so many that the screen becomes cluttered.
With a cluttered screen, you may be confusing your customers. They may find the aesthetics of the game displeasing and leave.
Again, this is not what you want for your customers. You want them to enjoy the game and be more engaged with your brand.
Ensure that you screen does not have too many things when designing it. Details are good, but use them in moderation.
Conclusion
Gamification can certainly help you a long way if you do it right. Draw attention to your coupon campaign by using your coupons as a prize they can win in those games. This helps you to attract new customers, retain existing customers, and give everyone a good time.
If you are interested in a gamification system, then look no further than Vouchermatic! We boast a variety of games that you can choose from, for both events and minigames. With our API-first platform, we can integrate our games into your own web page or app.
Moreover, you don’t have to worry about learning to use our software. We can handle the technical side of things for you. Just focus on carrying out your marketing campaign, and drafting up the designs to be used in your game.
Not only that, but we can integrate our own voucher management system with your game. These two can also be incorporated into a Google Form to collect customer data!
Contact us here to discuss your gamification marketing strategies with us today! Our friendly staff is dedicated to answering your questions and even providing a free demo!
Originally published on https://inventrik.com.
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