How to Engage Customers With a Scratch Card Campaign

Easy-to-play, but difficult to get away.

7 min readJul 1, 2022

By Elayne Law

Surely you remember scratch cards — at least, the physical versions. Cards with a dull aluminium across its surface, which you need a coin to scratch off to reveal the prize hiding behind?

It was always a big deal for me whenever I received one as a child. After all, who didn’t like the anticipation of scratching the card, to see what sort of reward lay in store?

Now, that is the key to Scratch Cards’ success.

The Key to Success?

The thrill, the excitement, of trying to obtain the prize that lay beneath that bland layer of metal, is what appeals to people. It is the element of mystery that keeps them on their toes.

Soon, they’d grow addicted to that spurt of dopamine that rushes through their brains whenever they win a prize. They’d want to buy more to win more prizes.

But that aspect of excitement is not all that Scratch Cards are. All kinds of games award players when they win. However, what Scratch Cards has that helps it stand out from other games is that it is simple.

In this fast-paced world, many consumers are merely participants in a never-ending rat race. They are shunted to and from their work and home, with little attention for much else.

Scratch Cards have a simple core mechanic — all you have to do is to scratch the metal off. You don’t even need an instruction manual — the moment players see it, they intuitively understand what they have to do.

Going Digital — The New Age Scratch Cards

In this new digital age, when everything’s transferred into cyberspace, scratch cards have been recreated on mobile devices. This caters to people who don’t have time to catch a break. Who can be on their mobile phones twenty-four-seven.

The convenience and the accessibility of Scratch Cards now keeps this game alive. No longer will people need to search for a coin to scratch their cards, but they can do it anytime, anywhere.

The move to digitalisation also means that Scratch Cards can now be customised. They are not just static pieces of paper with generic designs about hitting the jackpot. With micro-animations, flashy fonts, and all new kinds of design elements, brands can focus on personalising their Scratch Cards for their customers.

Moreover, businesses can also design Scratch Cards based on their company image. Sticking brand logos in corners, using brand colours, and even having cute brand mascots dancing somewhere around the card can make for a delightful and unique customer experience.

How to Pull Off a Scratch Card Campaign

If you clicked on this article, you are probably interested in how you can hold a Scratch Card marketing campaign. Well, here are some tips that you should keep in mind when pushing out your digital Scratch Cards.

1) Simplicity Matters

As mentioned before, Scratch Cards are known for their simplicity. With digitalisation, all customers need to do is to swipe their fingers over their phone screen to obtain the prize.

When it comes to the design of the Scratch Cards, or the background, it would serve you well not to overdo it. Don’t fill it all up with intricate designs and motifs. Customers wouldn’t know where to look, and you will drown your Scratch Card in unnecessary decorations.

Your customer is here for the Scratch Card game, and the reward. Everything else is secondary. Ensure that you add just enough embellishments to enhance their experience, and not to make them confused.

2) Consistent Branding

Your Scratch Cards are another touchpoint along your customers’ journey that you can use to interact with them and build up your relationships with them. As such, it is important that your branding remains consistent.

That means that what you display to customers in your physical stores, you should show them the same thing when it comes to your Scratch Cards. By that, I don’t mean replicating the entire experience.

I mean that no matter which platform you are engaging with your customers on, your image should remain the same. Your values, your message, your colours, your logo… all should be unchanged.

Consistent branding lets customers know that you are sure of what you stand for. You aren’t a wishy-washy brand that does things willy-nilly. It also helps you to reinforce the delivery of your brand’s message to your audience.

Presenting a brand consistently can net you up to 23% more profits, and you are likely to enjoy up 3.5 times more brand visibility.

Interact with you enough, and your customers would remember what your brand is all about. You are creating a vision of your brand in your customers’ heads, which would remind them of you the next time they go out shopping.

3) Promote it Well!

Use every channel in your arsenal — within your budget — to market your Scratch Cards campaign. Email and SMS advertisements to your loyal customers, complete with a call-to-action link. Make sure that it is as easy as possible for your customers to obtain the Scratch Card.

Social media is another excellent way to get your campaign out there. With about 3.96 billion unique users across all platforms, you can be sure that your campaign would reach some curious souls.

Encouraging customers to share about your campaign is also made easier with social media. Most platforms have a share button that users can easily press. This enables you to reach out to a wider consumer base than you would have been able to usually. Additionally, social media users overwhelmingly trust other users’ recommendations of a certain product.

Don’t forget your brick-and-mortar stores too! Signages and posters work wonders, despite their unassuming nature. It all depends on where you place them. Make sure to put them where customers would see it — laminated and stuck to your cashier’s counter, or a large standee outside your store.

4) Make Participation and Redemption Easy

Ensure that your customers don’t have a hard time figuring out how to participate in your Scratch Cards campaign, nor do they have trouble redeeming their prize.

Once again, this information age has shortened attention spans and patience — customers prioritise speed and convenience above all else. 49% of consumers say that they would use vouchers and coupons more often if they can be more easily redeemed.

Make the entire process as easy as possible. Use QR codes that customers can scan to bring them to the game’s page. Use automation to send the won voucher directly to your customers’ inboxes. Use randomly-generated promotional codes that cashiers can easily input and the prizes be redeemed.

5) Leverage on Festivities

The holiday season is prime time for you to kickstart your Scratch Cards campaign. The spirit of celebration is high, with customers looking to treat either others or themselves. Google searches for gift cards spike around December, which just so happens to be the month of Christmas.

Design your cards around the holiday theme. Ketupats and splashes of green during Hari Raya, bright lanterns during Deepavali, and Christmas trees during, well, Christmas.

This shows your brand’s human side — after all, you are celebrating the holidays as well. This helps to deepen your relationship with your customer — they’re more willing to interact with a human than an inorganic brand.

Conclusion

Scratch Cards are still in vogue today. Digitalisation has brought about benefits such as convenience and accessibility. Furthermore, you can also design your Scratch Cards to better line up with your brand image and send them out to your customers more easily than before.

Want to start your very own Scratch Cards campaign? Vouchermatic is here to help you with that! We specialise in gamification, and we use an API-first platform for our software so it can be easily implemented into your existing web pages or apps.

Not only that, but you don’t have to learn to use our software. We will handle everything on the technological side, so your learning curve is gentle to none. We also allow you to design your own Scratch Cards, and we won’t put our brand logo over it either. It’s yours to use, and yours to keep.

Originally published at https://vouchermatic.app on May 11, 2021.
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