Christmas is Coming

Christmas is Coming: How Seasonal Gamification Drives Customer Engagement

The holiday season is a time of excitement for many customers and it’s also an exciting time for businesses too. With customers looking to buy gifts, spend more, and find the best deals, businesses have the perfect opportunity to set themselves apart from the competition and deepen their customer loyalties by enhancing their customer engagement. One of the most effective ways to do this is through gamification. By transforming the traditional interactions that are predicated on a transactional basis, into enjoyable and rewarding experiences, businesses are better placed to enhance their connections to their customers and foster a greater sense of loyalty. In this blog, we’ll explore how gamification can be applied to boost engagement throughout the holiday season and how to create meaningful interactions that encourage your customers to keep on coming back for more, even long after Christmas has passed.

What is Gamification?

Gamification refers to the practice of integrating game-like features, such as spin the wheel, scratch to win and advent calendars, into non-gaming environments to drive engagement and influence consumer behaviour. By leveraging the natural human inclination for achievement and rewards, businesses can create interactions that feel more enjoyable and engaging. These game elements connect with people on a psychological level, making customer experiences more immersive and memorable.

At its core, gamification taps into intrinsic motivations, like the desire for accomplishment, or the satisfaction of earning rewards, by offering playful, yet meaningful, experiences. With gamification, businesses can guide their customers toward desired outcomes, whether that’s to make a purchase, sign up for a service, or complete a survey, the key to success is that the interaction not only fulfils a business objective but also rewards the customer for their engagement.

This approach has found success across various industries, including marketing, education, healthcare, and retail, there’s not an industry out there that hasn’t been transformed by the gamification process, underscoring its effectiveness as a tool for deepening customer engagement.

Benefits of Gamification in Seasonal Campaigns

The festive period is an excellent opportunity to introduce gamification into your marketing strategies as Christmas-themed games and rewards not only engage your customers effectively but also work well to capitalise on the sense of excitement and anticipation that Christmas generates. At Loyalty Works, we have many success stories for our Christmas and seasonal campaigns and throughout them all here are the main benefits we have found your business can receive when implementing a successful gamification strategy:

Customer Retention: Gamification is perfectly placed to encourage repeat interactions by driving customers back to the next stage of the game, to reveal new prizes, or simply for the enjoyment of participating. A successful seasonal campaign that rewards customers through encouraged interactions provides the groundwork for a successful loyalty programme and research has shown that 75% of customers are more likely to stay loyal to brands with well-structured loyalty programmes. Further to this 60% of customers are more likely to purchase from a company they regularly engage with and feel a kinship towards. So by offering holiday-themed rewards through a well-structured gamification programme, then you can inspire your customers to return to you and place yourself as the brand that 60% of customers want to return to.~
Boost Engagement: Every interaction is a moment of engagement. Engagement provides data to you and an opportunity to provide for your customers. By utilising successful engagement methods such as spin-the-wheel contests, daily advent calendar prizes or Christmas-themed games around the holiday season you can drive customers to your brand and increase the engagement your customers have with your business. Every interaction provides the opportunity to showcase why your brand is better than your competitors, and with gamification helping customers to step over that threshold from disengagement to engagement it provides the perfect basis to kick-start a successful Christmas marketing strategy.
Tailored Customer Experiences: When designed correctly, a gamified experience can be personalised to meet the needs of the target audience ensuring both the elements of the gamified process, as well as the rewards on offer, both work together to capture and retain your customers. By analysing customer data, both prior to implementing the gamification strategy and as it unfolds, businesses can tailor the rewards and challenges to the individual interests of their customers and provide through this a unique and customer-centric experience.
Creating Anticipation: Anticipation and excitement are two of the main emotions buzzing around Christmas time as customers eagerly enjoy the process of buying gifts, finding deals, and anticipating what joys they might receive for Christmas themselves. That feeling of building up to something can be inherently leveraged and increased through a successful gamification programme. A simple one is the idea of using digital advent calendars that customers can open either through a dedicated app or webpage where each day a new prize is revealed behind the digital door. As the event unfolds, prizes can increase along with the anticipation building up to a final deal or discount tailored directly to those customers. By incorporating gamification elements that create a sense of daily ritual you create the perfect driving force that pulls customers back to your brand regularly throughout the holiday season.
Strengthen Brand Perception: Through engaging and interactive campaigns that offer meaningful rewards and prizes, gamification enhances your brand's perception in the eyes of your customers. They come to see you as a brand that provides fun and interactive engagement that rewards them meaningfully for their interactions with your brand and business. Couple that with rewards tailored to the customer and encouraging further purchases by receiving discounts for utilising the gamification platforms, then those positive experiences all amount to dedication and loyalty to the brand that provides them. When customers feel that personal connection to your brand, they are much more likely to share that experience with friends and family which can expand your reach even further.

Gamification Platforms for Christmas Campaigns

When considering the type of gamification platform to use for your Christmas campaign then your creativity is the only limit. However, at Loyalty Works, we have provided success for many businesses through our gamification strategies and below we highlight some of our favourites that have been tried and tested and provided the results both we and our customers were after:

Christmas-themed Leaderboards: Friendly competition can be fostered fairly easily through the implementation of a leaderboard. Around Christmas time we can couple this with Christmas-themed offers and interactions. For every interaction a customer engages with, such as interacting with social media posts or making purchases, then points are added to their customer score and their rankings on the leaderboard are increased. This allows customers to compete over who is most loyal, whilst receiving a sense of recognition and reward for interacting with the brand. This sense of friendly competition can do wonders to drive engagement, repeat interactions, and boost loyalty in the eyes of customers.
Advent Calendar: As we mentioned previously the advent calendar is another wonderful tried and tested method that works really well thematically with the holiday season. By integrating this into your dedicated loyalty app or webpage you can provide a daily prize for your customers that slowly builds anticipation and reveals greater prizes as the days go on.
Spin the Wheel: Spin-to-win games are an age-old favourite; they provide opportunities and a range of prizes to be won. Of course, the best prizes have the smallest chance of coming up but the smallest of chances is enough to entice many of us especially when it costs us nothing to participate. Prizes can range from small discounts and free products, extra points on your loyalty account, to exclusive holiday experiences for those elusive and high-end prizes.
Scratch and Win (Or Pull a Cracker!): Scratch and win games are another variation of gamification elements that provide a sense of mystery and anticipation in-built into the game’s mechanics. By revealing what’s behind the ‘scratch’ on the digital (or physical) card, there is a sense of anticipation and joy at what might be revealed. A suitable Christmas theme for this is to ‘pull a cracker’ utilising digital crackers that can be ‘pulled’ open to reveal prizes inside. It can apply the same mystery element and chance for high and low prizes respectively, but happily fits in with the Christmas theme too.
Tile Matching Games: Some games can be more interactive and require a challenge to solve and become eligible for the prizes that will be revealed. Tile matching games are a simple version of this that is accessible to most people and so allow us to target a broader audience. The added challenge and requirement of some thought process to complete the game provides an extra sense of achievement and a feeling that the customer has won and earned their prizes.

Drive Better Customer Engagement with Gamification This Christmas

The Christmas season offers a unique opportunity to connect with customers on a deeper level and reach them at their core by joining in on something that matters to them. As evidenced in our ’12 Days of Christmas Campaign’, Loyalty Works has the strategies and processes that can craft a well-executed gamification strategy that leads to not only achieving the results set out for us but exceeding them too!

We know first-hand just how effective a good gamification strategy is and how it can increase customer loyalty, improve engagement, and enhance brand awareness for the better. During the festive period, your customers are already engaged in the mindset of giving and celebrating and this makes them more receptive to interactive and rewarding experiences that join in on the holiday excitement.

With the right gamification strategies, businesses can turn this festive spirit into long-lasting relationships that allow brands to stand out from the crowd.

By utilising successful strategies such as advent calendars, spin-to-win, or Christmas-themed leaderboards, businesses can incorporate gamification elements into their seasonal campaigns and boost customer engagement, increase brand loyalty, and develop deeper connections with their customers.

If you’re ready to boost your customer engagement this Christmas, partner with Loyalty Works for your Christmas campaign and discover how our team of experts can drive sales and increase customer interaction with bespoke gamification experiences tailored directly to you and your customers.