It’s easy to get blinkered when it comes to trying to market to your customers, focusing more online and overlooking the value that your physical stores have. Enter the phygital retail experience.
The truth is that retail is at its best when it’s a strategy that combines all channels seamlessly, and where the clicks to bricks opportunity is maximized through a phygital strategy that makes use of the unique elements of each channel.
So how as a retailer can you help to drive online into store? One key tool is gamified marketing. We have seen our customers realize incredible customer engagement instore, simply by using gamified marketing to drive them there.
It’s a strategy that works particularly well for building excitement and engagement around store openings or relaunches or simply just to reignite the customer’s instore experience, especially important after the last couple of years.
Such strategies can be vital for building customer loyalty since it offers the experiential experience and face-to-face advice that may not always be possible with the online experience.
At Danish skincare brand Ecooking the company’s founder and owner Tina Søgaard, who had built her business from her kitchen table, wanted a way to drive the customers from her successful online business to the opening of her first company-owned flagship in Copenhagen.
She chose a Wheel of Fortune game from Leadfamly which would allow customers to win a prize that they could collect in store. The game received more than 9,000 game plays with many customers coming in to collect their prizes on opening day.
Søgaard said the role that the Leadfamly campaign played in supporting the store launch was vital. Speaking at the opening, she said: “There have been many people who wouldn’t be here if not for Leadfamly.”
But as well as driving customers to store she valued the opportunity for her and the store staff to engage with such customers face to face. This allowed them to teach the customers more about the brand and the products that might suit them to ensure they were getting the best from Ecooking’s skincare range. “What is great about handing the prizes over to the customers has been that they can be sure how to use the products and that it actually works for them,” she said.
When stretchy formalwear retailer Shaping New Tomorrow wanted to support the opening of a new flagship store in Denmark’s Aarhus it chose to reward the superfans who had turned up on the day through a gamified marketing strategy.
It created a Wheel of Fortune game with Leadfamly that was only available to customers that were waiting for the store opening. The customers had a chance to win boxers and a t-shirt.
In this instance the exclusive event played two roles, entertaining customers while they were waiting and potentially rewarding them for their patience with a prize once instore.
But such a strategy isn’t just about rewarding customers. The secondary aim was to collect valuable first-party customer information to enable future personalization. Within the first hour of the campaign going live, the retailer had collected over 200 registrations. By the end of the day, that tripled to nearly 600 unique registrations. And these were determined customers, with an average of 32 game plays for each customer.The brand was thrilled with how well the campaign worked and will now use the strategy in future store openings too. “Being able to provide our guests with an awesome experience while waiting in line is really special,” said Jacob Bech, digital marketing manager at Shaping New Tomorrow. “The value of entertainment and the number of unique registrations unite perfectly with this concept.”
In these instances, the retailers used the power of gamified marketing to support store openings. At Danish grocery foods retailer Coop the company has used a gamification strategy since 2018. One of its main aims is to drive footfall in store to help build customer loyalty, especially important since grocery customers often shop at multiple stores. By using targeted game campaigns, 1.1 million samples were picked up in store in 2020 alone.At Costcutter the company used a Wheel of Fortune game tied in with Valentine’s Day to help drive store footfall. The Leadfamly platform allowed Costcutter to place a location finder button at the end of the game flow so that customers could discover their local store. The campaign saw a number of positive results but one of the most significant was that 1,400 campaign visitors clicked through to find their nearest Costcutter store.
These are just a few examples of how retailers have used gamified marketing to blend their physical and digital experiences and drive footfall, delivering powerful results with increases in website traffic, AOV, and sales.