Elevate Your Email Marketing with Gamification

Take a look at your inbox, you’ll probably find multiple campaigns battling to stand out. In the age of information overload and with a shortening attention span added to the mix, getting to the spotlight in an inbox is getting pretty tough.

While personalization, segmentation, and optimization of subject lines play an important part to boost your email marketing efforts, they’re no longer enough to keep customers clicking.

So, what’s a marketer got to do?

Enter – Gamification.

It is a fun and effective strategy to grab and hold attention in the battle of overcrowded inboxes.

In this blog post, we’ll learn more about this hot marketing strategy and how it can be used to engage customers, boost user experience, and grow ROI.

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the process of implementing game-like dynamics to something in a non-game context to make it fun and engaging. These could be badges, awards, or points to make ol’ school tasks game-like.

Here’s an example of gamification in action by Gmail:

The user is more likely to follow the steps in order to achieve 100% set-up complete. You can use this concept in your email marketing strategy too.

Why Should You Try Gamification?

Gamification evokes positive emotions like excitement and happiness. You can use gamification to onboard new customers, engage existing customers, reward loyal customers, or even ask for feedback.

Here’s an example from SendFox that made onboarding fun for new customers. Their email presents users with an interactive checklist that helps the user finish setting up their account.

Gamification can also be used to build anticipation with gamification to announce an important date, product release, event, etc.

With fun interactive elements, you can make your emails more memorable and engaging. Also, it helps:

• Delight users and improve user engagement
• Amplify existing user experience
• Create a better reputation
• Build customer loyalty and satisfaction

Gamified email marketing campaigns can give your audience an incentive to actually look forward to seeing your message in their inboxes.

How to Add Gamification in Your Email Campaigns

To gamify your email campaigns, you need a well-thought approach to attract more subscribers and boost engagement. We’ve got a few key points that you should keep in mind when you gamify your email campaign. They are:

1. Understand Your Target Audience

Your target audience should always be the center of your universe. Research your audience and their needs to yield the results you’re hoping for. Take into account that different demographics will respond to different strategies, so dig into your analytics to test and refine your email marketing campaigns to effectively engage your audience.
Ask yourself questions like:

• What will attract my audience?
• What do my customers like?
• What will motivate them to act?

Don’t just implement the latest gamification technique just because it’s all the rage. First, ensure which topics and games your audience can relate to and then use those in your emails.

2. Determine Your Campaign Needs

Not every email campaign will need gamification. So, think – will your campaign get a better response with interactive content? Will it motivate subscribers to engage with you?

For gamification, your best bet can be lead nurturing and promotional emails. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t explore other ones. Here are a few questions you could ask yourself to decide if your campaign would benefit from implementing gaming elements:

• What kind of email marketing campaign are you planning?
• Does the tone of its content justify a fun approach?
• Will the interactive approach help engage users?

For instance, for holiday-themed campaigns, you can create quests or riddles to get attention and encourage engagement. Here’s a holiday-themed example, by EmailMonks.

3. Give Rewards

Who doesn’t love prizes?! So, offer your subscribers a chance to win a reward to make them more inclined to interact with your gamified campaign. Ensure that your gamified idea is easily understandable so that your audience knows how they can win rewards. You can start by rolling out small prizes, discounts, free demos, extended trial periods for a product, free courses, free shipping, etc. For instance, you can go for a ‘spin-to-win’ coupon wheel for your loyal customers, which can offer them exciting rewards if they refer ‘x’ number of people to you or maybe give them gift cards for filling out a feedback form.

4. Focus on the CTA

When you use gamification, your call-to-action (CTA) becomes the main part of the game. It should let your subscribers know that they could win prizes by clicking a specific CTA. It needs the perfect blend of content and design. It should be catchy, have appealing colors, fonts, placed accurately, and most importantly should be in line with your email campaign content.

Now that you know all about gamification, it’s time to get your game face on to add fuel to your email marketing fire!

Ready to gamify your emails? Talk to us!