Light Up Your Diwali Campaign With 5 Gamification Ideas
Updated: Oct 27, 2022
With a spark of hope in her eyes sits a middle-aged woman selling Diwali lamps that she’s handcrafted with love, just outside a mall.
Her spark soon starts to seem dull in front of the shine of shops inside the mall, as everyone walks past her lamp collection.
But then her eyes light up again with hope as a little boy stops by and asks his mother, “Mom, lamps?”.
His mom shakes her head with a no and the woman sees them walk away only to see the boy come back again later to buy Diwali lamps from her. As the boy turns to leave, he looks back and says “Happy Diwali” with a huge smile. But his smile fades when he hears the woman reply, “It can’t really be a happy Diwali till all my lamps are sold”.
This time, the boy decides to bear the flag of her lost hope, clicks a picture of her and says, “Don’t worry, all your lamps will be sold.”
He reaches home, creates a flyer with her photo and a message that says ‘Make Amma’s Diwali Happy, Buy Lamps from Her’ and sticks them in the neighbourhood. Next day, the woman finds herself busy selling lamps to people from morning to late evening.
As she begins to wrap her day up, she hears a voice from behind,
“Amma, lamps?” and replies, “Oh, there isn’t a single lamp left” and hears the same voice say, “Told you, all your lamps will be sold.”
She realises that it’s the same little boy and immediately turns only to see him ride away in his bicycle and follows him.
But he’s gone and she’s left smiling with flyers he made, all around her.
This is the heart-warming video that I came across on the morning of 13th October.
HP India Lamp of Light Diwali Campaign
While working on my article on gamification ideas for Diwali campaigns, I somehow found this beautiful video that HP India released as part of its #GoLocal Diwali campaign in 2018. The campaign received 590K+ shares and 19+ million views.
I adored the video so much that I couldn’t help but share it with my colleague, Aadhi. She loved it too!
I remained mesmerised by the video’s warmth till it was time to get back to my laptop and fulfil the sole purpose of my work.
To help brands activate, engage, and retain users better with a gamified referral and loyalty rewards platform.
So I wondered, “How nice it’d be if users could be rewarded for watching a Diwali video like that of HP India” and immediately said, ‘Wait, why not?”.
That’s how I got the first gamification idea for a Diwali campaign and from here, it was only a path forward.
5 Gamification Ideas for Diwali Campaign
I personally love the whole concept of gamification as it makes both marketing and sales easier because honestly, I’ve been there.
Me, along with my marketing team in the past have tried to get organic engagement on our Diwali content such as newsletters/videos/cards but always got limited traction.
Now that I know of a magic wand called gamification, I wonder how helpful it could have been if my audience got something in return. That’d boost engagement, wouldn’t it?
Let’s find out how gamification can brighten up your Diwali campaigns.
1. Video Rewards
Say you’re playing a game and shoot! You’re out of energy. That’s exactly when a message appears that says watch a video and refill your energy bar. Been there? Well, I have and I’ve watched a video too. You see, video rewards are really powerful, especially when they are gamified.
Mintpro, an insurance app, saw a 4x increase in the number of unique users completing a video course/week after offering 10 IPL team stickers.
The participants could earn a sticker for completing a video-based Mintacademy course.
So if you’re planning to create a beautiful Diwali video, you can boost its performance by creating a gamified Diwali campaign.
For instance, you could offer Diwali themed scratch cards which your customers could redeem for rewards upon watching/sharing your video. Due to this,
1. The reward will attract both new and existing customers to your app
2. Video views/shares will increase and so will your brand awareness
2. Referral Program for Diwali
Festive campaigns call for offering rewards that will excite customers. Your customers could earn exciting brand discount coupons and gift cards that they could redeem while shopping online. To enhance your referral program and ensure maximum participation, you can further gamify it.
In November 2021, Mx TakaTak (short video community app) ran a Diwali campaign called #DiwaliHuiTakaTak where users could collect Diwali lamps daily to win big.
The more lamps users collected, the better rewards they could win. For this, Mx Takatak used gamification.
1. Users could maintain a 7-day daily streak and collect diyas by daily checking into the app
2. To collect more diyas, users could perform tasks such as inviting a max of 500 friends, linking their phone number etc.
3. Engagement Quiz
One of the things that’s most popular during the Diwali season is Amazon and Flipkart sales.
Just like most, I was recently browsing through Amazon and found this cool quiz on Diwali. It’s wonderful how Amazon has added a multiplayer gamified quiz to engage customers.
Under Amazon Funzone section, you can start the quiz by challenging a friend to take it with you and win upto ₹15,000.
Interactive quizzes are by far the best customer engagement medium. Brands like Buzzfeed are built on quizzes.
Duolingo, a language learning app, is another company that has built a $700 Million business on a gamified quiz concept.
So be it around Diwali or your brand, you can also add a quiz and make it further interesting by rewarding the participants.
4. Stamp Diwali Campaign
As a kid I used to love collecting Pokemon Tazos from munching on Cheetos and it used to feel so satisfying because I could show off my collection to my friends.
After some digging, I found out that it felt so good because of 3 variable rewards, as explained in the 3rd phase of the Hook Model by Nir Eyal.
1. Rewards of the tribe: I was collecting the tazos as part of social rewards, wanting to feel connected with my peers who were collecting it.
Businesses like Instagram and Twitter are driven by this type of variable reward methodology.
2. Rewards of the hunt: Search for different kinds of tazos with every Cheetos purchase made me excited.
3. Rewards of the self: Seeing my Pokemon tazo collection get bigger with every new addition gave me a sense of mastery and accomplishment.
GPay smartly tapped into all 3 variable rewards when they launched #StampsWaliDiwali campaign in 2019.
Users could collect all 5 Diwali stamps and get a cash reward of ₹251. The campaign got immense popularity especially because of the most difficult to find, Rangoli stamp.
If you want to learn how Google did it and how you can create a stamp Diwali campaign, there’s a detailed article written by our Co-Founder here.
Pharmarack, a B2B Healthcare platform has run a similar Diwali stamp collection campaign with our gamification platform.
5. Spin the Wheel Contest
Here comes my favourite game element for festive offers - Spin the wheel! Say you want to increase sales of a particular product during Diwali season. You see that 30% of your users visited that product page but didn’t really buy. What do you do next? Offer a discount on that product, put it on a wheel and ask those 20% customers to spin and win! Since those customers already showed interest in your product, they will come back to see if they can get a discount on it.
And since this isn’t like your other retargeting campaign but gamified via a spin the wheel element, engagement rate will be higher.
Spin the wheel contests are a shot worth taking and great spin to win marketing campaigns are proof.
Toyota Saudi Arabia created a 3-time spin the wheel offer to give back to their community on reaching 1 million likes on their Facebook Page.
Prizes included a brand new car which participants could redeem instantly upon winning. Result? The app got loads of with over 30K visits.
The reason that gamified mechanisms like that of spin and win work is because it’s satisfying, fun and triggers the ‘desire’ response in our brain.
As per Neuroscientists, our dopamine system works to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful response called desire.
This is exactly why we humans enjoy playing spin the wheel game, also the reason why I spend my 1000 CRED coins for 10 spins to see if I get cashback, coins or brand gift cards.
Celebrate this Diwali with Flyy
What if I told you that Flyy wants to make this Diwali special for your business? We understand that the festive season can get overwhelming for teams to do plenty of things in not-so-plenty of time.
How about we help you manage such bandwidth crunch by taking care of your referral and loyalty rewards program?
Our comprehensive gamification tool makes every Diwali campaign that you read above a possibility with its easy-to-integrate SDK. Click here to learn more about Flyy.
