Follow Us
Level Up; Gamify Your Customer Journeys
Marietta:
Welcome to Velti’s webinar, broadcasted from The Netherlands & Greece. After many great comments from YOU, we are here with our 6th webinar. I’m GLAD you’re all watching. Today we will be talking about all things GAMIFICATION.
And I am sure.. YOU have all heard the term already – It’s NOT a new trend, but it’s still gaining momentum, its market growing with incredible speed. As more and more companies start applying some level of gamification – let’s see how it could help YOUR business:
How can YOU take your customer journeys – to the next level – applying gamified tactics? We will answer this in today’s webinar.
We have divided the webinar into 4 parts. First, I will tell you more about VELTI, who we are and what we do.
Then we will tune in to Velti Greece, where my colleagues, Andreas Petropoulos, our Customer Retention & Loyalty Director and Migena Panavija, Senior Client Success Manager will share more insights on gamification principles, business goals influenced by gamification, as well as success stories with Velti’s clients. We also host Thomas Tsopanakis Head of User Experience at National Bank of Greece, sharing his experience with working with Velti.
Alternative → speaking about why he believes gamification to be an inseparable part of the customer journey, along with insights from gamified campaigns ran in cooperation with Velti.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to type them below and we will come back to it during the Webinar if time allows, otherwise after the Webinar in writing. My name is: Mariëtta Robbé Groskamp, Business Development Director Europe.
And let’s dive in!
Let me start with a brief overview of our company. Velti was founded in the year 2000 and has more than 20 years of experience in the Mobile Marketing area. The main solutions that we offer can be classified into: CVM, Marketing Automation, Gamification, Loyalty, Permission Marketing, WebApps. Today, we are going to talk about Gamification and Gamified Campaigns – a marketing tool that our clients USE extensively, to engage and reward their customers. The Velti family is ever growing, currently we have 130 employees – 50% of which are software engineers ensuring that we are using the latest trends and technologies. The main offices of Velti are in Athens (where you also find the HQ and the development center), Dusseldorf and Dubai. We also have 5 additional sales offices in Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
In the next slide you see an overview of Velti’s footprint which is something we are extremely proud of. Here is an overview of the main clients we are working with. More than 300 clients representing 70 countries, from Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Clients such as Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone to Etisalat and Pepsi and many more. This is something we are really proud of. If you would like to know more about a specific case study, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Before we talk to my colleague Migena from the Velti Athens office, let me share some more information about Gamification, first. You have already heard the term from me about 10 times, but what actually is Gamification? There are many different expressions that try and describe the same phenomenon –
Gameful thinking, Playful design, Everyday Games and so on, with many working definitions as well.
For our webinar, we’ll continue using the term ‘Gamification’ and define it as ‘the use of game-design elements and game principles in non-game context’ to encourage customer action. Let’s see a little bit the evolution and origins of this practice.
One of the earliest examples is considered the S&H Green stamps that started 125 years ago and then really picked up in the 1930-1960s – retailers gave out the stamps to their consumers at an agreed rate, and people collected them in small books to later exchange them for goods and premiums from a catalogue – much like today’s loyalty reward catalogues. The term ‘Gamification’ which we’re now using, was born in 2002, coined by Nick Pelling (a British computer game developer) and by the second half of the 2010s (Twenty-tens) became a buzz-word and a world-wide phenomenon exceeding expectations and exponentially growing in market value.
It is projected that by 2027 the global Gamification market will exceed 35Billion dollars. Some interesting stats that may help explain this rapid growth on the left side here, since Gamification is largely being used in online environments: Today, there are over 4,32 BILLION unique mobile internet users – that’s more than half of Earth’s total population! Mind-blowing, isn’t it? Now, an average internet user spends more than 6,5 hours online each day – which is, according to a recent study, more than how much they actually sleep!! Consider also that 90% of this online time is spent in apps, and voilà – we can immediately see the potential for Gamification reach here.
Not only that, but Gamification is proven to increase customer interactions by 40%; it also contributes to employee motivation and sense of purpose; It can also boost browsing time by 30% when used to gamify a website. You may be asking now, okay, but how do I do that? What do I need to do, to leverage this huge potential myself, to make my business grow by using Gamification? We will answer that and many other questions in the next sections of our webinar.
It’s time to tune in to the Velti office in Athens and talk to my colleague Migena. She is a Senior Client Success Manager, coming from the Telecommunications industry and putting her expertise to great use in Velti’s Client Success Team for the past couple of years.Hello Migena, greetings from The Netherlands! How are you today?
Migena:
Hi Marietta, I’m doing well thank you! a sunny day today, something quite common for Athens and I am excited to join you and talk a bit about how we treat Gamification at Velti and what would the potential benefits be to our audience.And how are you doing?
Marietta:
Good, good, thank you very much! It’s great to have you here today, I look forward to learning more about game principles, and the business goals influenced by Gamification. The floor is yours!
Migena:
Thank you Marietta! Before we dive deeper though, I have a question for you! Do you remember when we first used our mobiles for something other than chatting or texting? Like, playing a game for example?
Marietta:
Hmm, let me think – was it perhaps …no, I remember, it was the SNAKE – what was it, a NOKIA 3210? We used to play it aaall the time!
Migena:
That’s right, the SNAKE! You were fast though. I must admit I was completely addicted to it J, but I shouldn’t have been alone. It was the late 90’s, the dawn of an era when the mobile phone could no longer be used only to call or text anymore. Nokia’s Snake wasn’t the first game introduced on a phone, but it is the one we all remember and probably all our generation has played with one version or another. That’s what the mobile gaming era started with, a very simple and very addictive game that was so much more than just a game! It is an early example of a gamified customer experience, providing a completely new, fun element to something as boring as a phone motivating customers to buy a Nokia just to play the game.
Let’s take a look at our preferred definition of Gamification again. The use of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts to improve user experience and engagement. So what exactly does this mean? Let’s look at the parts separately, starting with game-design elements and principles.
Games, in itself, need to have structure, RULES and common elements that appear in most of them and make a game a game.They have a certain GOAL or OBJECTIVE that the players work towards. Their journey can be marked by POINTS they collect along the way and advance further through different LEVELS.
They may involve knowledge, skill, perhaps luck as well – that are reflected in various MISSIONS, QUESTS, CHALLENGES that players need to overcome;
INTERACTIVITY and FEEDBACK is really important so the player is aware how they’re doing in the game – their ACHIEVEMENTS may be tagged by BADGES, MILESTONES
In some games – not all, though – COMPETITION can be an important factor: appearing high on a LEADERBOARD can fuel some players’ social recognition
Lastly – but not least, REWARDS play a big role too: they can be both intrinsic (that affect the internal motivation of a player, or so-called ‘core drives’) and extrinsic with actual, physical rewards the players receive as a prize for meeting milestones and reaching the goal
Of course, there are many more elements that can be applied – we only listed the most commonly used ones here. The main idea behind using all these game principles and elements is, that they “produce states of desirable experience, and motivate users to remain engaged in an activity with exceptional intensity and duration” which is exactly what we want when customers engage with our products and services. Let’s see the non-game context part now.
This time the main goal of the game is NOT to PLAY, but to:
increase time spent and pages visited on a specific website
educate customers about new products, services
drive up- and cross sell
grow awareness and penetration of an existing service
Or encourage customer self-service, like the use of digital channels, or finding certain answers online instead of dialing the call center.
The game elements and principles used, tend to:
motivate users to participate and engage with your product / service
They raise the users’ interest and also keep it high throughout their journey
And finally, they add an element of fun to a potentially boring and not very enjoyable activity.
So, where exactly can Gamification be applied? The short answer is everywhere. From work environment – onboarding new employees or engaging and motivating existing ones; through education and training; every area of business from marketing to sales & finance; to even Banking, Insurance and Government objectives, the list is endless. Today, we’ll be focusing on Business – and what are the potential benefits of Gamification:
Gamified campaigns (like Recruitment, Reactivation, CVM) can maximize response rates
By using game elements, you can encourage digital channel usage, APP downloads and returns – through forming new habits
When you gamify it, you can re-position something perceived as boring, into fun, innovative and enjoyable
You can also design a full Gamification program for certain goals – like customer self service,
Finally, Gamification can increase Customer Loyalty as well – it adds interactivity to the conversation so the customer feels appreciated, listened-to and more connected to your brand.
Let’s move to the second part of this section and explore some more specific business goals and how they can be influenced by Gamification. When designing a Gamified campaign or program, our first goal is to optimize customer value, encourage return purchases, and reduce dropout rates.
From the many elements that could be used here, we are presenting you a customer cockpit with a range of missions, and a leaderboard of participants which already hint at other tactics in use as well. By carefully crafting a selection of missions you may guide the customer throughout the entire lifecycle. Missions like subscribing to a newsletter; completing a customer profile; trying new services for discounted price; – these can all contribute to the optimum value. You can apply different missions and quests to every segment – and once a mission is completed, the customer is awarded with points, and moves higher across levels or tiers to unlock different perks and rewards. Adding a leaderboard to appeal to the competitive side of your customers may encourage them to grow their points even further. You can also introduce draws and exclusive prizes for the top scorers as an extrinsic motivation.
Our next business goal, would be to encourage user action by motivating and rewarding your customers. As mentioned previously, when you combine internal and external motivational factors such as challenge, competition, achievement with meaningful and tangible prizes, that’s when you get your customers to take the desired action – whether to read the newest article on your blog, or sign up for a service trial. Tag customer achievements with badges that they can show off to their friends. Show them how far they’ve already come, and what it requires to conquer the next level. And at the same time offer real rewards that appeal to your target group.
You can as well introduce time-sensitive or limited quantity offers, instant rewards and draws, seasonal & thematic rewards catalogues or a mix of all these at different points of the customer journey. Gamification has the power to induce behavioral change – whether you’d like your customers to interact with your brand on a new channel, or increase the frequency of visits in an existing one – Gamification can do all that. With the tactics shown on this slide you can increase customer tenure and build habits, to achieve long-term engagement.
You want your customers to visit your APP instead of the website? Then offer an incentive in return for the desired behavior, like double or triple points when they interact with your App. Hand out daily bonuses for consecutive logins. Enable them to unlock new and exclusive content after reaching a milestone – it will keep your customers’ interest high, and make them want to come back for more. When you’d like to reinforce the positive relationship between your brand and your customers – that’s when all the small things come into play. Make your customers feel loved and appreciated, going from simple users to advocates by giving them a little bit of extra! Mark their anniversaries and birthdays with small surprises; offer welcome bonuses, or exclusive prizes to your most loyal oness – reward them simply for being YOUR customers. On top of that, personalized content is key, nobody likes to receive unwanted messages! And finally, give your customers a voice! Ask them to give ratings, opinions, answer surveys about your products, and invite them to share their experience on social media and spread the word among friends.
They say, gamification is 25% technology and 75% psychology *
It’s great to have your tech right, but it’s time to get to know your customers so you can create highly personalized and relevant content which they would want to engage with. This requires a lot of data, and much of it is personal which you have to collect in a fun and enjoyable way. According to a Global Survey ran by RedPoint in 2019, 54% of customers would be willing to share personal data if it is used to create a tailored experience for them. On the other hand, 88% would likely switch brands if this data is compromised. So you need to be very clear how the collected data is used and very protective of it not being breached Once you collect data, create customer personas and personalize their journey.
On top of it all, provide a selection of channels and monitor which ones your users prefer – if 90% of customers engage with your site from mobile, but your communication is optimized for desktop, investing into a mobile optimized website will quickly return. Approaching the end of this section, I think you already came to the same conclusion, that Gamification is literally everywhere! As more and more companies start to experiment with it, there is a good chance your brand will also use it by 2027 – if you’re not already J
Let’s sum up what we talked about for the last 15 minutes in a few quick key takeaways:
When you gamify your customer journeys, you make something potentially boring into fun and enjoyable
Gamification can encourage behavioral change, it increases adoption of new channels, services & achieves long-term customer engagement
Making customers feel connected and appreciated while enjoying themselves, will result in increased brand stickiness
And finally, make use of different mechanics to make the data collection entertaining, and be transparent so customers know how you will use it
Well Marietta, I hope the insights shared were useful for our audience today and if you would like to know more on how such principles can be applied in real life, my colleague Andreas will share with you some really successful case studies. Back to you, Marietta!
Marietta: Wow, Migena, this was a really nice summary of how Gamification can help businesses achieve long-term, active engagement of their customers!
It was really great to have you here today, thank you for introducing us to the basics of Gamification!
Migena:
Thank you, Marietta, for having me here. I also enjoyed it very much.
Marietta:
For the next section, let’s welcome Andreas, who is our very own Director of Loyalty and Retention, also overseeing our Gamification projects. Andreas has over 12 years experience in the field of Gamification, having designed and launched many of Velti’s current and past projects. Welcome, Andreas, lovely to have you with us today!
Andreas:
Hello Marietta, it’s a pleasure being here!
Marietta:
Andreas will show us some real examples, how you can put the theories presented in the previous section into practice, and level up your business game! We will also try and answer some of those questions decision makers, might face when thinking about implementing some level of gamification. Am I right?
Andreas: Yes Marietta, let’s see what some of these questions might be and try to answer them on the next slides.
Marietta:
Well some of the questions we often receive from Clients, and you may also be thinking them now – ok, this is very nice and all, but: will these gamification tactics grow our business? do games really impact our KPIs?
Andreas:
The short answer is yes, Gamification can really grow your business and increase your KPIs. If done well, Gamification has an unparalleled positive effect on customers engaging with your brand, strengthening the emotional connection and the sense of ‘belonging’, resulting in increased customer loyalty and ultimately longer tenure and higher revenues.
Marietta:
That sounds fairly impressive, but can gamification be relevant to my enterprise or vertical?
Andreas:
Gamification can easily be applied in any vertical and even in existing loyalty or CVM programs, while it can also be applied internally to improve employee loyalty, involvement and commitment to your brand.
Marietta:
What about the timing, can our brand also benefit from gamification, like many others did before? Isn’t it getting a bit ‘old’? And also, there must be limitations to what we can achieve with it?
Andreas:
The growth of the Gamification market has been exceptional in the last decade, and this growth doesn’t seem to stop, even accelerating with an estimated 30% increase each year at least until 2025. As our world shifts even more to the online sphere, there is also more demand for new, enjoyable ways of customer interaction and engagement that fuels this growth.
But please allow me to quickly jump into the next slide and show you a few KPIs from our projects working with clients from different verticals…
Velti has an impressive track record delivering gamification programs and this is what we have managed to achieve for our clients: Let’s take for example the MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS KPI, and the impressive 16% increase we have achieved for one of them. At the same time, we also increased by 42% the customer TRANSACTIONS during the campaign months. We also had a campaign dedicated to increase APP RATING, this one grew rating score by a whopping 23,5% in the first month. Our gamified campaigns typically have up to 37% RESPONSE RATES and between 70-90% PLAYBILITY RATES – only 10-30% of customers tend to skip the games when provided with the option, Finally, overall ENGAGEMENT RATE can go up to 47%. So the hypothesis stands, gamification can indeed impact business KPIs.
Now, let’s see through 2 real-life examples and show case how gamification worked for different enterprise organizations. Our fist case study is for a top FMCG brand with a family of home care products. These folks they had a portal available with quite rich content – including countless articles, tips on how to use their products, promotions, and much more, BUT they were also facing a number of challenges…
They had low volume of new registrations, and low % of returning users over the registered ones. There was a lack of awareness of this portal among their customers. The portal was also mainly a collection of information, but not interactive at all, therefore not really able to make use of the rich content. Some of the root causes for these challenges were obvious –like this veery long registration form you can see in this slide- but for some we had to dig deeper.
Our role was to eventually make the portal more gamified and appealing to the audience – let’s see how we did it. Let’s start with a challenge that to my personal view is the most important one. Our client was facing high drop out rates during the registration flow. To address this challenge, we created a brand new concept. Customer is not anymore registering to a content portal… He or she can now build a visual house, and unlock different rooms related to the different home care products offered by the brand. We swapped the long registration form to a quick and simple version putting the boring personal info in a more fun context: choose your dream house, name it and locate it, and finally tell us a few of your favorite things to include in your house. With this approach, not only we managed to increase the completion rate of the registration flow, but we managed to collect even more customer data facts than the ones asked before, which the Client was able to use to further optimize their offers and products.
And we didn’t stop there, we had to also address the low customer interactivity and the low content consumption that our client suffered. So, the customer after creating their dream house, they were invited to unlock the different rooms available in the house. Each room was practically a set of missions like quizzes, surveys and suggestions to read & rate articles already included in the portal. And all these missions were related to products that customer would use to clean this room, collecting even more data-facts about the consumer perception and use of the related products. And to drive further engagement, we used instant reward games to incentivize customers to unlock more and more rooms, and deepen their connection with the brand. And finally, we needed our solution to increase awareness and drive registered users to return to the portal.
We designed a dynamic and exciting, fully personalized account page for the users; where they can see their available missions, new contests and promotions, latest articles and tips. From their account page, they can also directly explore their house & unlock new rooms straight away!
The upgraded platform offered various activities, customers could:
Invite friends to visit their homes,
Or visit a ‘play-room’ and participate in mini-games, including AR games,
And receive tips and advice.
And with this I believe we fully covered our FMCG case study, but keep in mind that a similar approach could be followed for brands and enterprises of different verticals that may already have such content portals and face similar challenges. Now moving to our second case study, which is from the Banking sector.
Our Client faced quite a few challenges when they came to us, and safe to say the whole banking industry is battling similar ones: They had low awareness of new activities. They gave no incentives to customers for brand-interaction – and let’s be honest, doing our banking is not the most exciting thing – so their customers did not
really interact with the digital channels Customers did not fully understand the great app the Client built – so they did not use it very often, and it had an average rating in App stores. E- banking activities were perceived unattractive, their customers seemed to prefer physical PoS…and as a traditional bank, they also faced fierce competition with Online Banks.
So, how we supported here?
First of all, we designed a variety of mission templates that we were able to later on use them to launch multiple missions with the relevant content, as per the challenge that the bank wanted to address each time. Let me show you an example of Educational missions. In this case, our Client had a new product, the Express Loans issued directly from Mobile Banking. Their objective was to increase awareness, and also educate their customers about the different product features. The users were invited to watch a short video and then complete a quiz consisting of a few questions related to the video they just watched. Following the quiz, we added a fun mini-game that emphasizes the ‘express’ characteristic of the product: the customer needs to tap their screen as quickly as they can to unlock their reward.
I would say that this is the epitome of turning a boring awareness campaign into a fun experience. But let’s also check this campaign that incentivizes NFC payments – which is BTW my favorite payment option! We designed a quest that encouraged customers to perform a number of NFC payments within a defined time period, with the promise of an instant reward. The campaign went live during New Year’s Holiday season, when everyone is out on a shopping spree – no better timing for such a campaign! The landing page explained the challenge and also featured a visual representation of the remaining time available, in the form of a counter all the way down to New Year’s Eve.
Once the customer performed the final payment to complete the quest, they were presented with a thank you page inviting them to a scratch-card mini-game to find out their reward.
In the end, not only we manage to drive more customers to use NFC payments, but we also created a buzz in the social media scene! With that, we reached the end of this section, I hope we were able to show you some real, working gamification tactics that you could apply to your business as well. If you have any questions or would like to receive one of our case studies, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Marietta, back to you1
Marietta:
Andreas, this was very insightful! Such great examples that really show Gamification at work in very different verticals. I bet the Clients loved the new concepts!
Andreas:
Thank you Marietta, yes, the results speak for themselves – both of these case studies have been incredibly successful and very well received!
..and with this, our webinar already comes to an end:
As you can see, Gamification is so much more than just a buzzword – it can really help transform your relationship with your customers, and has a positive, measurable impact on various business goals. With Gamification, you can change unwanted customer behavior, increase brand-stickiness, tenure and loyalty – ultimately resulting in revenue increase and more repeat purchases. I hope you enjoyed learning about Gamification, seeing some of our successful case studies and hearing from our experts in the topic Migena and Andreas as well as Thomas from NBG! If there are any questions or you want to talk about any business opportunities or want to start with Gamification yourself!
Please don’t hesitate to drop us an email at: demo@velti.com
Where we also would like to offer you a FREE 1:1 consultation with the Velti experts. Just reach us by drop us an email at: demo@velti.com. And we are more than happy to help you to grow your business in value & loyalty!
For the latest news, more interesting webinars and blog posts please follow us to us to LinkedIn IG of FB or YouTube channel, or visit our website at Velti.com
See you on our next webinar!
For now: have a great day and goodbye.