Playing Games With Your Customers: Gamifying the Shopping Experience

Acquiring new customers can cost up to 5x more than retaining existing ones. This puts more responsibility on retailers to find a sustainable way to create a positive, personalized relationship that maintains engagement and inspires repeat purchases. One way to do that? Gamify the customer experience.

Put simply, gamification adds gaming elements to non-gaming scenarios. For a retailer, that might include a progress bar that tracks reward points or a memory challenge game that delivers a discount upon completion. As long as the experience is engaging and the reward is relevant, gamification can help increase brand awareness and loyalty to drive sales. But those aren’t the only benefits.

Retailers can boost the effectiveness of gamification by combining purchase history with data collected from the games. This also enables a better understanding of a customer’s preferences and motivations. By fine-tuning their engagements and promotional offers to meet that buyer where they are, brands can increase the likelihood of a repeat purchase while providing a highly personalized experience. Better still, they aren’t wasting time promoting deals that the customer will never act on.

The gaming experience can also help retailers cross-sell and upsell in a way that feels intuitive. With that detailed customer profile, a brand can provide suggestions that match the known preferences of the customer as they try to complete an outfit, furnish a room, and more.

H&M Kids used a quiz to do exactly that. Parents answered questions about their child’s personality and preferences. Upon completion, they were directed to the H&M Kids website to browse specific clothing options based on the answers provided. The quiz earned a 30.8 percent clickthrough rate and provided the retailer with valuable data for use in future marketing.

While a bit more complex, Starbucks Rewards is another example of the power of gamification. Through the Rewards app, customers earn points that unlock discounts and freebies, receive personalized promotions, and participate in events that leverage scarcity and achievements to motivate engagement. Starbucks’ decision to gamify its rewards program has been so successful that as of October 2022, the program accounted for 55 percent of company revenue.

The reason all of this works is because humans are a competitive bunch. Give us a reasonable challenge and we’re likely to attempt it. Contextualizing the challenge through a game and offering a reward for completing it has value to us, and our brains find it nearly impossible to resist. Even when the deck is stacked against us, we’ll give it a try. How many people fail miserably in front of a crowd while trying to make a half-court shot just for the chance to win a prize?

In an ever-evolving retail landscape, gamification offers a proven path toward increased brand loyalty and sustainable customer engagement — and retailers don’t have to figure it out alone. Some companies offer pre-built games so that retailers of any size can put gamification to work for them. These off-the-shelf products typically require no coding expertise on the part of the retailer, are fully customizable, and come with a support team to help integrate the games into existing programs. This means that just about any retail brand is mere days or weeks away from adding the power of gamification to its customer retention strategy.

Joel Steel is the co-founder and CEO of Komo Technologies (Komo). Joel’s mission for Komo is to revolutionize how marketers connect, engage and grow relationships with customers.