Success Story
6 minutes a year. That’s how long the average consumer spends with an electricity company.
Back in 2020, 11 local energy suppliers made a bold move: they wanted to change the way consumers buy electricity and they wanted to do it together. A new brand was born: Oomi, which sells electricity, solar panels, charging for electric cars, and other services.
While you might not think about household energy and the utility sector every day, a brand like Oomi is very aware of this and wants to engage their audience with fresh, fun, and interesting marketing content.
With this starting point, Oomi decided to integrate playable experiences into its marketing mix to attract customers.
“In 2020, we were fully aware that our products are “low interest”, so we searched for different ways to create awareness and in that phase, we met Playable’s Finland team. We soon realized that playable experiences are not only a powerful way to cut through but also potentially could create a level of engagement that would enable us to win customers” Linda Katila, Digital Marketing Manager, Oomi.
“In 2020, we were fully aware that our products are “low interest”, so we searched for different ways to create awareness and in that phase, we met Playable’s Finland team. We soon realized that playable experiences are not only a powerful way to cut through but also potentially could create a level of engagement that would enable us to win customers”
Oomi decided to work with Playable to create activity at the top of the funnel to capture first-party data, learn more about their audience, and continue to engage with them.
In the early stages of the collaboration, Oomi and Playable both invested in identifying the right starting point. For Oomi it was important to find the right balance between volume and quality both in terms of engagement and the email permissions captured.
“We decided to launch with a personality test to engage our target audience in a casual and fun way to build a positive association with our newly established brand” Linda Katila, Digital Marketing Manager, Oomi.
“We decided to launch with a personality test to engage our target audience in a casual and fun way to build a positive association with our newly established brand”
The results were amazing. Traffic to the personality test was generated through social media channels and email marketing. Cost-per-click went down, and engagement and data capture went up:
“We were quite impressed and excited about the very first initiative, where we not only managed to attract more people than with our normal ad messages but also managed to engage them individually for almost two minutes. This led to an impressive cost per permission. On top of that, we also learned quite a lot through our audience’s answers in the personality test.”
This starting point was crucial for Oomi to realize the potential relationship-building they can do with their audiences and what playable marketing can achieve.
One of Oomi’s first learnings was that playable marketing is efficient marketing. We’ve seen this firsthand in our platform data and a consumer research study conducted with YouGov. In the Playable study with YouGov, consumers reported they were 56% more likely to click on a gamified ad, compared to a static ad. From customers, we know that the CTR can be much higher; for example, another traditional brand saw a 70% higher CTR from paid social media ads compared to a standard ad.
“These gamified mechanics have become a crucial part of our toolbox to cut through and get our audience’s attention at the top of the funnel” Linda Katila, Digital Marketing Manager, Oomi.
“These gamified mechanics have become a crucial part of our toolbox to cut through and get our audience’s attention at the top of the funnel”
The strong start motivated Oomi to make playable experiences an integral part of their marketing strategy. Now they account for playable marketing when they plan out their customer journey. Two years after the start, the investment return is more than originally expected.
“As a marketer, it’s always exciting to create campaigns that your audience wants to engage with both in terms of reach, time spent, and sharing their data. But at the end of the day, what we do in marketing also needs a return on investment with a tangible business impact” Linda Katila, Digital Marketing Manager, Oomi.
“As a marketer, it’s always exciting to create campaigns that your audience wants to engage with both in terms of reach, time spent, and sharing their data. But at the end of the day, what we do in marketing also needs a return on investment with a tangible business impact”
Through data, Oomi has been able to dive even deeper to quantify its return. With playable experiences, Oomi was able to create a conversion rate of offer requests which was 20% higher for engaged customers. These customers also had an 11% higher order value than the median. These tangible results show the power of playable marketing, and how it can complement a brand like Oomi that wants to be known as accessible and fun.
Today Oomi uses playable experiences as a core aspect of their strategy, including how they think about marketing campaigns, plan, and then execute them.
“Crafting a playable experience is fully integrated into our set-up. We have learned which different game formats suit different objectives. Building the content in the Playable platform is now much faster than when we started so we are graduating from seasonal campaigns to more targeted ones for segmented audiences. This is simply because our efficiency around playable experiences is now at a level, where it justifies the investment even to smaller segments” Linda Katila, Digital Marketing Manager, Oomi.
“Crafting a playable experience is fully integrated into our set-up. We have learned which different game formats suit different objectives. Building the content in the Playable platform is now much faster than when we started so we are graduating from seasonal campaigns to more targeted ones for segmented audiences. This is simply because our efficiency around playable experiences is now at a level, where it justifies the investment even to smaller segments”
“We value that the existing game concepts work so well for us. Also, it’s great that we can reskin the games and make them look really on-brand.”