Treat Your E-commerce Customer Loyalty With Gamification Tricks.
Updated: Nov 23, 2023
“Trick-or-Treat?” Most of you are probably familiar with this saying and now that Halloween is here, it’s going to be flying all around on its magical broom.
And that’s not all. From Snapchat filters to social media to events, the Halloween vibe is here to knock at our doors and yesterday, it arrived at mine.
“Hey, you know what you can be? An evil queen!”, my friend said.
We were speaking of all the things I could be for an upcoming Halloween party and then we started searching for costume accessories.
“Halloween accessories”, I searched on Amazon and was surprised to see a plethora of options.
Wizard magic wands, masks, witch hats, pumpkin baskets, headbands, ghost gloves, you name it!
But what caught my eye were words like ‘Only 1 left in stock and Best seller’.
So I got curious and started checking customer reviews and soon realised that Halloween is quite a craze in India as well.
However, my marketing mind wasn’t convinced yet. Thence, I checked the search volume for keywords like Halloween costumes.
I went to Google Ads Keyword Planner and the volume ranged from 10K to 100K in India and obviously hiked up to 1M for the USA, UK, Australia etc.
Upon digging deeper, I next found out that Halloween spending is projected to hit a record $10.6 billion in 2022 with Millennials and Gen Z planning to spend the most.
“Clearly, Halloween has become a pop culture,” I said and thought it can be a perfect way to increase brand engagement and sales.
So I decided to brew a potion of Halloween campaign ideas for e-commerce brands with a special ingredient called gamification.
Yes, 60% of consumers admit that they would buy more from a brand if they offered some sort of appealing game. Moreover, studies have shown that the average customer needs to visit a website 6-7 times before they are ready to purchase. With gamification, you can increase customer visits, reduce the abandoned carts rate, gain repeat customers and increase brand visibility.
So how about this Halloween, you use gamification to create awesome campaigns? Let’s start the hunt!
3 Ways to Boost Customer Engagement This Halloween
1. Build a Haunted House
Your house is under attack! There’s been a Zombie Apocalypse and you see zombies swarming slowly towards your house.
You sigh in relief knowing that they are zombies which means you got some time in hand before you fight them. But how do you prepare for the incoming danger?
By turning your house into a haunted one! How? There are spooky characters in your home who are in hiding. All you’ve to do is spot and activate them.
‘Zombie War’ is a milestone-based game that your e-commerce customers can play. Here’s how you can go about building it.
You offer Halloween stamps to your customers such as wizards, witches, ghosts, vampires etc
Participants collect these cards by doing activities such as daily app check-in, purchases or content share
Once all spooky characters are spotted i.e all cards have been collected, the ‘Kill Zombie’ milestone is unlocked
Upon reaching this, participants win exciting rewards such as discounts/gift cards
Participants can also showcase the card they get on social media as well on their profile
This will increase your online store visits, engagement, and purchases and a daily shopping deal e-commerce site like Sneakpeeq is proof.
The brand integrated game mechanics into its business model by making users access to rewards and badges on 3 primary actions:
Peeq: Check a product and get access to its special discount price
Love: Love favourite items and display them on your profile
Share: Share a product on Facebook or Twitter
Sneakpeeq after incorporating gamification saw a 3000% lift in buy clicks, which translated into an 18% month-over-month growth in conversions.
2. Will You Get a Treat or Get Tricked?
This is one of the simplest and best ways to engage customers during Halloween. For this, I got 2 ideas.
Have an e-commerce brand that sells out Halloween products? Well, then put them on a wheel and offer customers discounts on products that they get on spinning.
Don’t have Halloween products? It’s still cool. Make a Trick-or-Treat wheel. Offer rewards every time a customer gets a Treat upon spinning and nothing on Trick.
While spinning the wheel is no one-in-a-million-dollar idea, it’s quite powerful. Clarins, a French cosmetics e-commerce brand used spin-the-wheel gamification called the Beauty Wheel.
Participants would spin the wheel to receive discounts on their favourite products. The game drove a huge boost in customer retention and Clarins achieved an impression-to-lead ratio of 45%.
Apart from spin the wheel game element, you can also use scratch cards to offer rewards.
Customers could get scratch cards on doing specific business goals relevant to the in-app activity
Upon scratching, they can get a reward if the scratch card says ‘Treat’
If the scratch card says ‘Trick’, they’d get nothing similar to ‘Better Luck Next Time’ in GPay.
3. Are You a Halloween Hulk?
If you are a Marvel movies fan, you’d know that Hulk is considered one of the strongest avengers.
But why am I talking about strength? Because my next Halloween gamification idea is around competition and speaking of competition, how can I not mention contests?
One of the efficient ways to engage customers is by holding a contest during festivities.
Contests serve as a gamification umbrella under which game mechanics like quizzes and leaderboards can take shelter.
Let’s design one below. You announce a 3-day Halloween contest.
On D1, participants have to log in to your e-commerce app and collect a pumpkin
On D2, they should take part in a quiz
On D3, they should follow your Instagram handle
On D4, they should share a Halloween look and tag you
Parallelly, participants see a point-based leaderboard and winners at the campaign end are rewarded with your brand or partner discounts.
Such milestone-based leaderboards have proved to be amazing when it comes to motivating customer participation.
For example, an e-commerce toy brand Step2 rewards customers via points on a Buzzboard (leaderboard) for writing/sharing reviews and more.
As a result of Buzzboard, Step2 saw a 135% increase in referral traffic from Facebook and a 600% increase in the number of videos/images uploaded to their site.
Build Spooktacular Customer Loyalty with Flyy
Wait, going already? I’m not done yet. What’d you think? I’d share great gamification ideas to build customer loyalty and then leave you all hanging in thoughts.
No way! Because I understand the kind of time, resources and team collaboration that goes into building something similar in-house.
That’s exactly why I want you to know that if you ever think of implementing these gamification techniques, you can think of Flyy - a gamified referral and loyalty rewards solution.
