Improving Post-Purchase Customer Engagement with Gamification
Sunday, June 26, 2022
Did you know?
It is always much easier to sell to your existing customers than to new ones.
The customers you retain will buy more often and spend more on your products.
It is at least 5x cheaper to retain your current customers than find new ones.
A 5% increase in customer retention can increase business revenue by up to 95%.
While there is no doubt that building brand loyalty and increasing customer retention rate, comes with many benefits, the process of making it happen also matters.
One of the best strategies you can use here is gamifying your post-purchase customer engagement. Gamification makes it easier to interact with customers at the post-purchase stage and ensures the engagement is more effective. Gamification can also help track performance.
What is Gamification?
Gamification entails incorporating gaming elements into your marketing and customer interacting content to improve engagement levels and encourage the target audience to take specific actions.
With gamification, you can deliver the message to customers creatively. This strategy can work for any business in any industry, so it will be an excellent addition to your post-purchase engagement regardless of what you sell.
Some gamification elements that can work for customer engagement include giving achievement badges and rewards or running contests.
What is Post-Purchase Customer Engagement?
As the name suggests, post-purchase engagement entails engaging the customers after they buy from you. However, there is more to it than just sending them an email with the receipt or thanking them for their purchase.
Providing a positive post-purchase experience offers an excellent opportunity for businesses to deepen relationships with customers and enhance brand loyalty.
Post-purchase engagement is critical since it is easier to convince someone that already bought from you to buy again. If you have already solved a problem for a client or customer with your goods or services, it will be easier for them to trust you to solve another one.
Building trust through continuous post-purchase engagement allows you to leverage a relationship you have already built to decrease your marketing costs and increase customer lifetime value.
How to Leverage Gamification for Improving Brand Loyalty and Retention Rate?
Gamification provides one of the best and easiest ways to engage customers post-purchase. Also, it is an excellent way to improve brand loyalty and customer retention. Here's how you can leverage gamification to achieve these end goals.
Importance of brand loyalty and customer retention
Customer retention and brand loyalty are two critical ingredients for the success of any business that you cannot afford to overlook.
Although their importance to your business will ultimately depend on your particular situation, here are some interesting facts that show just how important they are:
It is cheaper to retain loyal customers compared to getting new ones.
Your loyal customers spend up to 3x more than the average customer.
Customers emotionally connected to your brand have more lifetime value.
How to influence customers to improve retention rates?
No matter how good your services or products might be, it may not be enough to improve your customer retention rates or ensure more brand loyalty.
It is still essential to find a way to influence the customers to stick with your brand and products longer, and here are some ideas for achieving this:
Use emails and direct mail
Emails and direct mail provide a straightforward way to engage customers post-purchase, and they can be very effective at influencing them to ensure greater retention rates.
Sending clients an email concerning the purchase is an excellent way to make their post-purchase experience easy and win their loyalty. Also, both email and direct mail can be handy for cross and upselling.
Sending a “thank you” note via email or direct mail can also show customers you value their purchase, which motivates them to do more business with you in the future.
Ask for feedback
Showing customers you value their feedback and opinions about your products and services is an easy way to win over their trust and loyalty.
Customer feedback can also influence others and give you good word-of-mouth marketing when shared on platforms like social media.
Additionally, it will give you a good insight into what you need to improve to ensure customer satisfaction, which is vital for building brand loyalty.
One easy and effective way to collect customer feedback is through QR codes. A QR code feedback form is an easy tool that can be used to collect customer feedback easily. QR codes are easy to create with a custom QR code generator, and you can even create a dynamic QR code to track the scans and edit the QR code in the future.
Run customer loyalty programs
Rewarding customers for their loyalty can make them even more loyal, which is just what you need to improve your customer retention rates.
You can structure your loyalty programs in any way that best suits your specific business type. However, the most successful ones will often entail using gifts, discounts, and access to early product releases as incentives to encourage customer loyalty.
Provide excellent customer support
Making high-end customer support a part of a customer’s post-purchase journey can be highly effective at building long-term relationships with customers.
If customers know that they will always get excellent support from your business if they have any issues, they will likely stick around with your brand for a long time.
Remember that the customer support team will talk to customers and showcase your brand identity in the process. Therefore, good customer support can also boost the overall brand experience.
Ensure they get a personalised experience
Personalisation is key to customer loyalty, and you should keep this in mind when implementing your post-purchase engagement.
A personalized experience that includes exclusive offers for the customers shows that you care about them and can be very effective at boosting their loyalty to your brand and products.
Best gamification practices to improve brand loyalty and customer retention
It is important to have a clear plan for successful post-purchase engagement and communication. Gamifying the process can simplify things and ensure you get better outcomes.
But what role does gamification play in post-purchase engagement?
Gamification is mainly intended to motivate the target audience to take some action. For example, adding a contest to the post-purchase engagement, where customers can get rewards or discounts for their next purchase, will motivate them to participate.
Gamification will incentivize customers to participate in any engagement you are using, making it easier to build brand loyalty and retain more customers.
Gamification can increase customer engagement by up to 47% when properly utilised. Also, it can improve brand awareness by 15% and enhance brand loyalty by at least 22%, which are both quite impressive numbers.
With that in mind, here is how you can use gamification to improve brand loyalty and customer retention:
Define your goals – You should always start by defining what you want to achieve with the post-purchase engagement. Do you want to build brand loyalty and retain more customers? Do you also want to increase the average amount customers spend?
Come up with a clear structure – Your post-purchase customer engagement gamification needs to have a clear structure. A good structure makes the game fun so that more people will want to play.
Keep customers interested – Keeping customers interested in the game ensures they will want to participate in your post-purchase engagement. A game with a progress bar can be instrumental in maintaining customer interest. Also, using push notifications and other alerts to show customers their progress in the game keeps them interested.
Benefits of post-purchase customer engagement gamification
As you have realized by now, you can get many advantages by gamifying your post-purchase customer engagement.
Here we explain 6 of the top benefits and why they are essential for building brand loyalty and boosting your customer retention rate.
1. Regular customer feedback
You cannot make customers loyal to your brand or retain them if you do not know what they want. Hence customer feedback will always be essential. Luckily, gamification allows you to gather regular customer feedback and customer data.
By offering customers the possibility to have some fun with gamification or even an opportunity to get rewards, you give them an incentive to provide valuable feedback and data.
The feedback and data can benefit future customer engagements since you get better insights into your customers.
2. Improved user experience
If the games you use for your post-purchase engagement are fun, easy, and user-friendly, they can help improve the overall user experience as they play.
A good user experience is an easy way to keep customers engaged, and it will increase the time they spend engaging with your content, which helps improve brand loyalty.
3. An extra layer of marketing
Gamification provides an extra level of marketing. The sense of competition helps excite customers, which makes them look forward to the rewards you are offering, and in the process, they also stick with your brand much longer.
4. Makes promotional offers look more interesting
We are exposed to several ads and other marketing content types every day. And so, it is only natural to lose interest in these promotional materials as they can be overwhelming.
Gamification can be beneficial in making what you share with your customers look more exciting and not appear like just one of the thousands of ads they see every day.
5. Helping customers feel part of brand-making
Gamification can help customers feel like a part of your brand-making process, and so they are more likely to be loyal to your brand.
You can achieve this by creating game plots that make the customers feel central to the brand-making process. By making them feel important, they will, in turn, be more loyal.
6. Social connection
Gamification will allow the customer to share rewards and achievements from the games with their peers and other customers, leading to more social connections.
Social connection inculcates brand loyalty. It can also help you get more customers without spending much, leading to free word-of-mouth marketing.
Gamification Strategies for Boosting Brand Loyalty and Retention Rate
There are many viable touchpoints for the application of gamification in customer engagement. These touchpoints also allow brands to utilize gamification as a strategy for loyalty marketing.
Here is an overview of these innovative and strategic gamification applications in post-purchase customer engagement that can help improve loyalty and retention rates:
Using gaming rewards to attract new customers
Gaming rewards are an easy way to attract new customers and make existing ones more loyal to your brand. Rewarding consumers with virtual items like points when they achieve something, such as completing their profile or making their first purchase, will attract more people to your brand.
Customer onboarding/training
A gamified environment is a good solution for businesses that require some post-purchase onboarding and training.
For example, if you have to train customers to use your products, you can add an interactive gaming element to the instructions to make your brand stand out.
Customer loyalty gamification
Gamifying customer loyalty is a common practice, especially among retailers. With this innovative approach, customers get points and other rewards when they buy something.
Starbucks implements this for its loyalty program, and the more points customers accumulate, the higher their rank and potential for getting even more rewards.
This form of gamification motivates customers to keep buying from you, and they also end up becoming more loyal to your brand.
Mobile, social media-friendly games
Gamification is more effective when you make the games mobile-friendly, given that most people are always on their phones.
Mobile-friendly games and incorporating social media sharing into your gamification are clever ways to encourage more people to interact with your brand.
Customer service gamification
Customer service is another area of interaction with customers where you can use gamification to improve engagement. Adding excitement with fun games as customers wait for customer service ensures better brand recall.
Gamified sales/discounts
Gamifying sales and discounts is another way to enhance how customers interact with your brand. For example, you can require customers to solve puzzles and riddles or complete a quiz to access special discounts.
Bottom Line
Gamification in post-purchase engagement is one of the best strategies for improving brand loyalty and customer retention rates. It can reduce customer complaints and enhance brand and product knowledge.
It is crucial to understand what gamification in post-purchase engagement is all about, its benefits, and innovative ways to implement this strategy for the best outcomes.
Remember to use the correct game elements to ensure the gaming experience is unique for better brand remembrance.