Level Up Your Loyalty Program With Gamification

Loyalty programs are indispensable tools for brands aiming to harness customer data, drive revenue growth, and enhance the lifetime value of their customers. However, membership in these programs doesn't guarantee customers will remain actively engaged. According to Gartner research, 79 percent of customers who participate in loyalty programs say they do not actively use all of the loyalty programs they’ve joined. This inactivity often stems from a disconnect between brands and customer motivations.

Enter gamification — a potent yet underutilized strategy in the realm of digital marketing. By integrating game-like elements into loyalty programs, brands can invigorate customer participation and set themselves apart from the competition. There are three steps to take when implementing a gamification strategy:

Step 1: Identify where gamification best fits in the customer journey.

Brands often use transactional incentives such as points and discounts to capture new loyalty members, but then see many members disengage after receiving their sign-up reward. This is due to a lack of understanding about what motivates different customer segments. Successful loyalty programs rely on foundational customer experience practices, utilizing insights from voice-of-the-customer (VoC) data, personas, and journey maps to inform and enhance gamification strategies:

Related story: How Retailers Can Differentiate Their Loyalty Program

• VoC data: Customer surveys, interviews, focus groups and panels reveal what priority customer groups prefer from loyalty programs with gamification.
• Personas: These provide invaluable insight into what customers need, want and expect from a loyalty program experience and how different customers prefer to be rewarded for their loyalty, which can be leveraged for gamification.
• Customer journey maps: These help identify touchpoints that gamification can support in loyalty programs to drive post-purchase success and commercial outcomes for the broader organization.

Customers engage with loyalty programs for extrinsic reasons, like earning points and cash back, or intrinsic reasons, such as enjoying the activities or community involvement. By understanding these motivations, digital marketing leaders can tailor gamification strategies to engage top priority customers. Customer experience and loyalty metrics help prioritize segments to target, allowing leaders to identify and address experience gaps with gamification.

Step 2: Build your gamification road map.

Gamification, like the loyalty programs it serves, works best with a narrow focus based on goals and metrics to measure success. Don’t simply think of gamification as a game to boost your efforts to tap into younger consumers. You need a gamification strategy that targets customer challenges identified in their journey. Customer experience and loyalty metrics will help prioritize which customer segments to focus on first.

Gamification, and in turn loyalty, can’t be solely driven by the marketing team because they only touch one small part of the customer experience. Work with the marketing, IT, legal and other teams to set goals for gamification, such as increasing a target customer’s purchase frequency or increasing cross-category spend within a certain time period.

Consider these questions as you develop your gamification strategy:

• Which customer groups should be targeted?
• What motivates these customer groups?
• Where in the customer journey would gamification be most effective?
• Which customer behavior are you trying to change?
• Which customer metrics best measure success?

Once you understand the customer group as well as the metrics and most impactful touchpoints along their journey, you can identify where gamification is most likely to drive commercial results.

Step 3: Use customer feedback to iterate your gamification strategy.

Digital marketing leaders enhance gamification success through continuous iteration, adapting strategies as customer preferences evolve. Use insights from VoC data and feedback to assess if gamification meets its intended goals. If not, explore alternative tactics with customers. Once effective, apply gamification to other customer journey challenges. Successful gamification follows an iteration cycle of these four steps:

• Gather VoC data, loyalty program metrics and target segments.
• Analyze data to pinpoint where to use gamification next in your loyalty program based on customer use case.
• Develop gamification features for that step of the journey, along with a messaging plan to ensure the new features receive enough customer awareness.
• Release gamification features and begin tracking their effectiveness through targeted metrics.

Brad Jashinsky is a director analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice, presenting live on this subject and others at the 2025 Gartner Marketing Symposium/XPO, taking place June 2-4 in Denver.