Are you feeling a little lost, trying to keep up with a customer with more unpredictable behavior than ever? Today the non-linear customer journey means they engage with brands when and where they want. That could be online or in-store, at the traditional start of the customer journey, closer to the end or somewhere in-between.
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But this isn’t just the story of a customer behaving erratically. It’s a fundamental change, caused by customers being bombarded with multiple channels and touchpoints through which to engage and find brands, products and services – and having more power than ever to control when, where and how they consume.
Their changing behavior requires a new approach to a customer journey strategy with a focus on engagement on their terms, not just communication on yours. Gamification has been a proven and effective way to tackle the new customer journey. Gamification can help you navigate today’s new customer journey at all steps, helping you to guide customers to purchase, retention and advocacy. It can help build trust and relationships to retain the brand loyalty that is disappearing so fast from traditional customer journeys. And it delivers true, measurable results.
Packed with real-world examples, stats, and actionable strategies, this guide shows how gamification can engage customers at every stage of the journey, turn browsers into buyers and buyers into loyal advocates, and much more!
So why the change? The traditional customer journey funnel has been a cornerstone of marketing, both online and offline, for years. It consisted of set, predictable stages. The marketer’s job was to introduce the customer at the awareness stage and carefully guide them through the subsequent steps in the customer journey to their final purchase and beyond to repeat business and advocacy. Easy, right? Perhaps not. But it was consistent at least.
Today the linear funnel framework doesn’t work because it fails to reflect how customers engage in 2025. The different routes for discovery lead to a customer journey that can loop and repeat, depending on the point at which they engage. With multiple demands for their time, attention spans are also short, with customers quickly distracted. This pushes up drop-off rates and high bounce rates. Marketers who stick to the ways of the past stand to lose existing and potential customers, as well as fail to maximize their revenue.
Gamification in marketing can help you navigate the new customer journey and better engage your customers so that they stay with you for the ride. It works by adding a fun and interactive element to your lifecycle marketing strategy through the addition of gamified customer experiences that are interactive, rewarding and fun. Such experiences increase attention, action and retention. Gamification works at any point in the customer journey, whether you are looking to boost awareness or to encourage customers to revisit your brand and reinforce loyalty.
This tried and trusted customer engagement technique taps into many elements of your customers’ psyche, primarily the innate natural instinct to play. But it can engage customers through other human traits too – the desire to compete, to be part of a community and to build knowledge, for example.
Different game types and game mechanics allow brands to focus on these human behaviors, creating deeper connections with customers that can ultimately translate into more powerful customer engagement, increased loyalty and ultimately boost sales. Its power means that the gamification market is set to treble in the next five years alone.
Understanding how to use gamification in the new non-linear customer journey is essential. Mapping gamified experiences to each stage allows you to connect and engage the consumer at whatever point they drop in, helping to overcome the unpredictability of their journey. It helps to create a feel-good factor which is essential for warming up a potentially cold prospect.
Gamification even works at what might previously have been the end of a traditional customer journey. For instance, at the advocacy stage you can include a gamified experience that uses mirroring game mechanics. These are leaderboard related games that allow individuals to see how they rank against others.
But a new customer might only discover the brand at this point. Gamification can capture them even at this late stage and loop them back to the conversion stage to complete their first purchase with you. It works because it engages the potential customer, which then allows you to drive the actions needed to get them to the next stage of the customer journey.
There are various market-leading examples of gamification in digital marketing. Some go in with a big-bang full lifecycle marketing approach. Others start small and scale gamified journeys over time as their confidence and experience increase. A scalable, easy-to-integrate gamification platform such as Playable, enables you to grow such strategies with ease.
British furniture retailer DFS operates more than 115 stores across the UK and the Republic of Ireland as well as a website that receives an average of 1.8 million unique visitors a month. The company recognized the need to create and deepen meaningful touchpoints across their customers’ digital journeys and used gamification from Playable to do that.
Personality tests including “What’s Your Thing” and “Mattress Picker” helped inform and filter product choices for shoppers, preventing them from being overwhelmed by big-ticket items and providing the data required for retargeting to generate sales. The “Mattress Picker” test generated more than £250 revenue per registration within 4 weeks of completing the test with 900 orders placed as a direct result. Personality tests such as these work particularly well at the conversion stage by providing targeted product recommendations that help the consumer in their buying decision.
SPAR Hungary has been using gamification for more than ten years but turned to Playable when it required a more efficient way to run campaigns. One of its key game aims is to drive downloads of its MYSPAR app. New games are launched and promoted through both digital and traditional marketing and when registering for the game participants are encouraged to sign up for the grocery retailer’s newsletter. After playing and entering the prize draw they are encouraged to download the MYSPAR app.
The regular nature of the game launches and the encouragement to download the app fit perfectly with the retention stage of the customer journey by keeping customers engaged and building brand loyalty. But such games can also work well for awareness. In a multi-brand partnership campaign, SPAR Hungary achieved more than 50,000 unique registrations and more than 17,000 clicks to download its MYSPAR app.
To find out more about how you could see similar successes by implementing gamification in the new customer journey, as well as the frameworks for applying it to your own lifecycle marketing strategy download Playable’s new customer journey guide.