Too many restaurant companies are oversimplifying their loyalty programs by limiting the experience to simple points schemes or gimmicky badge-and-leaderboard mechanics that collectively offer little incentive to drive customer behavior.
At the end of my previous article on the subject, I invited readers to submit questions so I could leverage my expertise as a video game designer to help enhance loyalty and engagement within your programs. Below are the questions I received, along with my answers.
1. Is there any way for me to link customer engagement or gamification to my business outcomes?
A successful gamification strategy isn't just "fun for the sake of fun." It's a thoughtful blend of understanding your audience, aligning game mechanics with desired behaviors, providing meaningful incentives, and continuously refining the approach based on data and feedback. It's essential to tailor the strategy to your specific business context and continuously evaluate its impact on the desired business outcomes.
You start by clearly defining the specific business outcomes you want to achieve through gamification. This could be increasing customer engagement, boosting sales, or any other relevant goal. You also need a deep understanding of your target audience, including motivations, preferences, behaviors, demographics, interests, and existing engagement patterns.
Next, you need to determine the specific actions and behaviors that align with your business objectives. For example, if you aim to increase customer loyalty, desired actions could include making repeat purchases, referring friends, or engaging with your brand on social media. By clarifying the desired behaviors, you can design gamification mechanics that encourage and reward these actions.
Perhaps the most critical step is selecting the appropriate game mechanics to align with the desired actions and motivate your target audience. These could include quests, challenges, virtual rewards, collaboration, competition, or social interactions, to name a few. Create a sense of progression, competition, and achievement to keep participants engaged and motivated to continue participating.
Rewards can also be used but are not always required. They can be both tangible (such as discounts, freebies, or exclusive access) and intangible (such as recognition, status, or virtual rewards). Ensure the rewards are aligned with the desired actions and are enticing enough to drive participation.
2. Is there any tool or methodology (eg. similar to Net Promoter Score) I can use for measuring engagement?
Customer engagement is a multifaceted concept and no single metric can provide a complete picture. Typical analytics in the past have come from combining data from surveys, website analytics, social media metrics, purchase data, and customer lifetime value, along with specialized analytics like Net Promoter Scores.
When you add cutting-edge gamification to your customer engagement strategy, the task of measurement becomes that much more complicated.
Fortunately, new measurement tools have recently been developed to help. Steve’s Net Engagement Score (SNES) is one such method for measuring the engagement health of a community. SNES examines psychological and behavioral elements that reflect a community member’s interest and attention and combines it into a single useful metric.
You can read more about SNES in a whitepaper found here.
3. How long should my customers stay engaged with a gamified loyalty campaign or program?
Unlike most marketing programs, campaigns, and contests, a gamification program has much higher durability and long-term effectiveness when done properly.
There are many gamification mechanics that can be put to good use for lasting engagement and beneficial customer-brand outcomes. Progression and levels encourage customers to remain engaged over an extended period, regular updates and content keep the gamified campaign fresh and exciting, and collaborative and competitive elements have lasting appeal that make customers more likely to stay engaged and motivated.
In this way, a gamified customer experience has more in common with loyalty programs than pure marketing. The most effective gamified programs are treated by companies as such, with the customer community in a continuous state of "simmering" participation, with supporting plans and strategies that boost and amplify this baseline throughout the month, quarter or year.
4. Can engagement and gamification features be used to support or amplify my existing loyalty program?
Our own data has proven that loyalty programs with gamified features generate a stronger positive impact on sales compared to those without. Gamification's game-like elements can make a company's existing loyalty programs more interactive, engaging, and rewarding for customers. By presenting challenges, offers, and rewards within the context of a game-like experience, gamification makes the loyalty program more interesting, satisfying and relevant to each customer, further enhancing loyalty and sentiment. The result is a program whose impact is dramatically enhanced and focused on building a healthier brand-customer relationship. This leads to increased customer engagement, customer lifetime value, and advocacy.
5. I've been hearing people use the term “surprise and delight” lately. What are these principles and how can I use them to create customer loyalty and engagement?
“Surprise and delight” is a concept borrowed from the game/gaming industry that uses fun and playful aspects of chance to create deeper engagement and loyalty.
This can be as simple as randomly presenting the customer with a message where the restaurant offers them an unexpected discount or free item. But it can also involve a more robust expansion of the brand's traditional points-per-purchase system where a core element of the program involves a “Rewards Wheel” that members get to spin each time they reach a certain points threshold or make a particular number of purchases. The wheel might offer an array of prizes, ranging from smaller rewards like a discount coupon, bonus loyalty points, or free shipping, to larger, more exciting rewards such as free merchandise, high-value gift cards, or even money-can’t-buy experiences.
The simple cycle of anticipation and payoff (followed by either satisfaction or disappointment) is a very powerful engagement loop that keeps players coming back again and again.
AUTHOR BIO
Steve Bocska isn't just another marketer who has learned a thing or two about loyalty, gamification, and engagement. He is an experienced and innovative game designer and producer (Disney, Electronic Arts, Sega, Vivendi, Ubisoft) who approaches the marketing field with fresh concepts and technologies that actually work. Steve has been repairing broken loyalty programs as CEO of PUG Interactive (puginteractive.com) since 2008. His company has engineered the industry's most mature and advanced online engagement and gamification platform, the Picnic Customer Engagement Engine
