Sex toy retailer
How Sinful, one of Europe’s leading sex toy retailers, drives permissions, engagement, and sales with marketing gamification
Sinful is redefining how it connects with customers. Through its partnership with Playable, Sinful uses gamification to engage, learn from, and reward its audience at every stage of the customer journey. From first touch, to reactivation and sunset campaigns, all while staying compliant with advertising regulations for sensitive products on Meta.
Advertising sex-related products on platforms like Meta is highly restricted. While some items, such as lingerie and lubricants, can be promoted, Sinful cannot run standard product ads for most of their core products like other retailers do. That’s where gamification comes in. By including games as part of the strategy for paid ads on Meta, Sinful can promote their products and brand to a broader audience while still complying with Meta’s advertising guidelines.
At the heart of Sinful’s gamification strategy is customer engagement driven by ‘playfulness’, one of the company’s core values. Another key goal with marketing gamification is to capture permissions as well as learning more about their customers; from birthdays to key preferences. They can then use that data to improve personalization, trigger timely campaigns, and automate experiences.
We use Playable throughout the customer journey, including in our reactivation and sunset flows, because games are one of the best ways to drive higher open and click rates and reactivate dormant subscribers. Mathilde Laursen, CRM Manager at Sinful
We use Playable throughout the customer journey, including in our reactivation and sunset flows, because games are one of the best ways to drive higher open and click rates and reactivate dormant subscribers.
Mathilde Laursen, CRM Manager at Sinful
Sinful’s approach combines large, seasonal campaigns with smaller, always-on games to maintain engagement throughout the year. Seasonal campaigns, spring, summer, winter, Christmas, and birthday campaigns, are designed for maximum engagement, lead generation and revenue impact. Meanwhile, smaller campaigns focus on activation and brand experience, sometimes without a direct push for subscriptions or sales.
This two-tiered strategy ensures there is always an active game available for customers, whether on the website’s front page, via email flows, or through social ads. Always-on campaigns are used to activate throughout the customer journey, from the welcome email when customers subscribe, to reactivation of inactive customers, and even sunset flows.
Using gamification as part of the reactivation efforts before sending the final sunset flow has helped decrease churn greatly. Mathilde Laursen, CRM Manager at Sinful
Using gamification as part of the reactivation efforts before sending the final sunset flow has helped decrease churn greatly.
Summer Game 2025
Birthday Campaign 2025
Always-on: The Kinky personality test
In their 2025 Birthday Campaign, Sinful’s idea was ”We celebrate YOU, on our birthday”. The grand prize? Win your order back or a gift card of approx. €65. Participants could also choose 1 smaller prize such as a free gift with their next purchase or 30% off selected brands.
The campaign game, Slice It, challenged players to open 20 gifts in just 15 seconds, combining speed and fun to create an engaging experience for every participant. By winning the game, participants could either get one of the grand prizes or the smaller prizes they selected as a consolation prize.
Results:
The birthday campaign was a success on many fronts. Since it was integrated into the on-site sales campaign, the most notable outcome was that it increased the average conversion rate among users who played the game by 1.2 percentage point compared to those who did not.Plus the game saw great engagement:
We have tested the use of games in our birthday campaigns for several years. We started small test emails with or without games, where the offer was the same, either a direct discount or one unlocked by playing a game. The results were clear, we saw a huge uplift in all metrics and conversions when using games. Mathilde Laursen, CRM Manager at Sinful
We have tested the use of games in our birthday campaigns for several years. We started small test emails with or without games, where the offer was the same, either a direct discount or one unlocked by playing a game. The results were clear, we saw a huge uplift in all metrics and conversions when using games.
In many of Sinful’s games, participants can choose between several prize options. This small interaction is intentional, it creates a sense of commitment right from the start. By making an active choice, players are already more engaged and invested in the outcome.
Once a player wins, they automatically receive an email with their prize details and a unique code. From there, an automated Klaviyo flow places them into a track based on the prize they selected. Each track includes reminder emails to encourage redemption, and if the player still hasn’t used their code, a fallback offer, such as 10% off the entire shop, is triggered to help close the sale.
It’s both about relevance and psychology. We want to avoid giving people something they don’t care about, and by offering a choice between various prizes, they’re already making a small commitment, which has a psychological effect on whether they will redeem the prize or not. Mathilde Laursen, CRM Manager at Sinful
It’s both about relevance and psychology. We want to avoid giving people something they don’t care about, and by offering a choice between various prizes, they’re already making a small commitment, which has a psychological effect on whether they will redeem the prize or not.
In their summer campaign, Sinful used that strategy and ran a fun Spin the bottle game where participants could first choose what they wanted to win; a discount for him, a discount for her, a free gift with a purchase, a discount on specific products, amongst other choices.
When participants won, they received an instant winner email sent directly from the platform. Klaviyo was then used to trigger follow-up flows, including a welcome email for new subscribers and reminder emails encouraging customers to redeem their discount code.
By building over 600 games, sometimes across 11 different markets, Sinful has developed a highly efficient approach to gamification. The team relies on standardized processes, checklists, and optimized workflows to scale gamification while maintaining creativity and quality.
At the same time, every campaign is designed to collect valuable customer data. Any information gathered through the games is automatically mapped to Klaviyo, enabling Sinful to trigger personalized, timely campaigns and automate experiences across the customer journey. This combination of efficiency and data-driven strategy has made their gamification approach both sophisticated and highly impactful.
In their “Kinky or Vanilla” swipe-it game, which is an always-on campaign, participants answer a few questions to discover their personality type.
Based on the answers to various lifestyle choices, participants receive their personality type along with a surprise: a discount on one of Sinful’s games. Each personality is outlined and validated, and participants receive a 20% discount as a thank you. Although the game collects detailed preference data, its primary value lies in immediate activation rather than long-term data analysis. The insights are used right after gameplay to segment participants into personality-based Klaviyo email flows, ensuring tailored follow-up communication aligned with each player’s personality result.
The results since going live in 2023:
For a game without an upfront value exchange, beyond a personality result, it performs remarkably well, even compared to instant-win games where prizes are the main incentive. Tjalfe Leonhard Kolsbjerg, CRM Specialist at Sinful
For a game without an upfront value exchange, beyond a personality result, it performs remarkably well, even compared to instant-win games where prizes are the main incentive.
Tjalfe Leonhard Kolsbjerg, CRM Specialist at Sinful
Sinful’s journey with marketing gamification shows how creativity, data, and playfulness can work hand in hand, even in a highly regulated industry. What started as a way to make marketing more engaging has evolved into a strategic approach for driving sales, collecting insights, and personalizing communication across every touchpoint.
We’re now looking to collect more impactful data points, like birthdays or other key insights, so we can segment our customers better and build new automations that reach them at the right time with the right message. Tjalfe Leonhard Kolsbjerg, CRM Specialist at Sinful
We’re now looking to collect more impactful data points, like birthdays or other key insights, so we can segment our customers better and build new automations that reach them at the right time with the right message.
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