Retail gamification: how to engage customers and boost loyalty

Gamification is everywhere.

And for good reason.

When activities or processes are infused with game-like features, we are more likely to complete them – and more likely to enjoy the experience.

Gamification turns everyday activities into adventures. Mundane tasks become quests to complete a sequence.

Elements of gamification appear in everything from discount codes and loyalty programs to weight-loss apps and social networks.

Even LinkedIn, the stuffiest of the social networks, encourages you to embellish your profile with a ‘map’ of your progress, as well as suggestions for tasks that would help you ‘complete’ your profile. Inverted commas there because LinkedIn’s idea of complete is quite different to mine.

Clearly, gamification is a useful way to get people engaged, in a way that they enjoy.

But what does gamification have to do with your stores?

How can retail gamification give people new reasons to enter your stores, and help you build stronger relationships with your customers?

In this article we’re going to look at the benefits of gamification, how it works in practice, and how you can leverage the power of retail gamification to enhance your stores.

First, let’s quickly cover the benefits.

Benefits of gamification in retail

The benefits of gamification are widely known and understood. But applying these principles to retail environments slightly less well known.

Advantages of using gamification to engage shoppers:

Conversion optimisation

Trying to get more customers to complete a process? Gamification can help by making the experience enjoyable and the goal desirable.

What are the elements of gamification?

Understanding the component of gamification can help you consider how and where this approach might find a home in your retail operations. While gamification has hundreds of elements (often overlapping) there are a few core components that we’ll touch on briefly here.

The four pillars of retail gamification:

1. Story
2. Challenge
3. Control
4. Achievement

Story

What’s the point? Ultimately that’s the question you need to answer. The story behind your game might be something epic, like a quest to save the world, or something more prosaic, like a mission to get a free coffee.

Whether it’s a big story or a little idea, your gamified experience should invite customers to position themselves as characters in your story. You build the world, devise the plot and define the rules. The customer is invited to insert themselves into the world of your story.

Challenge

At their heart, most stories are built around a problem. This is sometimes called an ‘inciting incident’ that starts the hero on a quest. It’s an invitation to adventure, and the first thing you have to provide is a challenge. Customers need a problem to solve, a wrong to right, a dragon to slay – or a free coffee to secure.

Providing challenges gives your customers something to overcome, and a reason to play.

Control

Having provided a challenge, you must give customers a way to take control and engineer a solution. This might mean taking control of a character, making decisions, or being given the tools to complete a task.

Without user control, you don’t have a game.

Achievement

Rewards, badges, trophies and levelling-up are all good markers of progress. These are essential for rewarding customer’s engagement, and making the game feel worthwhile. While some customers will play a game for the sake of playing a game, many more will feel frustrated if your game does not provide a sense of achievement.

How to bring gamification to your retail stores

Now that we’ve explored what gamification is, the benefits it offers, and the elements of a successful gamified experience, we need to think about making this a reality in your store.

Here are four examples of how you could add a gamified experience to your bricks-and-mortar store.

Offer rewards for desired behaviours. Want customer to explore your entire store? Offer special offers or exclusives for finding a code hidden in a less-popular corner of your stores. Or you could give rewards for providing feedback, signing up for emails or registering for a loyalty club.

Instead of simply creating these programmes in the usual way, incorporate the language of games so that customers feel a desire to complete the task and achieve the goal. This might be through the design of the related collateral (emails, flyers, posters etc), or through the copy (storytelling, an invitation to adventure).

Use digital experiences to connect offline to online. Customers are increasingly blind to the border between offline and online retail. What they expect is a joined-up experience, with seamless links between digital and in-store interactions, whether through purchases, returns, browsing or bargain hunting.

You might use gamification to encourage customers to use a code printed on their receipt to access online offers – or vice versa. Online shoppers could be encouraged to return items to stores with the offer of a free gift in-store.

How can you make these experiences feel more like games? The key is to understand the elements of gamification so you can recognise when to include them, and how to design processes around them. This might mean using a points-based system to reward customers who take part, or by positioning the task as a quest that is exclusive to them.

Provide in-store gamified experiences. While many gamified experiences aren’t overtly games – and customers may not realise they are playing – you can also engage customers with more direct game experiences. Using in-store screens is an effective way to catch attention and encourage customers to pause and play. The games themselves can be customised to your brand, so they play, design and rewards all help to reinforce your brand value and messaging. This can be done subtly so that customers focus on playing the game and earning the rewards, all while absorbing discreet messages about your products.

Gamified Experiences from Ksubaka

How do you engage shoppers, gather data and build a stronger retail environment? Our playSpot interactive screens provide an arresting in-store addition. Once loaded with your custom branded game, you can give shoppers additional rewards when they visit, such as discount codes, exclusive offers and additional content (such as style guides, recipes, articles or information). This is easy to achieve with QR codes or on-screen content that can be simply snapped with the customer’s camera.

Want to know more about using gamification to enhance your stores?

Contact our team today