Category: Customer Connection

How retailers are using gamification to maximize customer connection

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How retailers are using gamification to maximize customer connection

Jagriti Shreya

Business Strategy Lead | Oct 26, 2022


How can your brand improve its ability to reach retail customers? One of the most promising methods is to make interacting with your company fun, with an infusion of game mechanics. In short, you should embrace gamification.

Since so many customer interactions take place in digital spaces, especially mobile apps, it’s easier than ever for brands to use gamified mechanics. Turning everyday experiences into fun, enjoyable touchpoints should be a major priority for brands across the retail spectrum.

A gamified experience combined with customer loyalty marketing enables consumers to earn rewards they really like, ones that fit their interests and will keep them highly engaged with the brand. Combining fun interactions and perfectly targeted rewards is a great way to craft a cohesive, compelling customer journey.

Use gamification as a customer outreach tool

The rise of gamification has touched industries of all kinds, but its applications in the retail industry and the e-commerce space are especially promising. As Forbes contributor Elad Natanson explains, retailers are able to make make customers more loyal and engaged by adding gamification elements to their apps, following successes in the education and health sectors.

Natanson cited success stories such as fitness and language apps that have managed to add fun, competitive, social elements to everyday.

interactions. When users earn points, badges and other digital rewards for completing common tasks, there is more incentive to finish those actions. This theory has managed to earn 200 million downloads for health tracking app MyFintessPall and 300 million for language learning app Duolingo.

Gamification marketing isn’t just a useful way to make users more likely to open an app repeatedly. It can also be an effective digital marketing for new customer attraction. Martech Alliance reports that after snack brand Popchip gamified its mobile advertising efforts, it saw a sales increase of 40%, which culminated in $100 million in sales.

Today’s customers are bombarded by marketing and branded content, both from bands they know and those trying to get their attention. How will they choose which deserves their time? Entertaining, repeatable activities that lend positive reinforcement can help them pick your brand over competitors.

Integrate gamification into retail sales strategies

Gamification is an exciting concept in customer rewards strategies because the fun mechanics allow your brand to keep up a connection with customers over time without some of the issues that tend to hamper legacy customer loyalty programs.

An old-fashioned earn-and-burn, points-based rewards strategy without game or similar interactive elements may lose customer interest today.

Without interesting or fun mechanics around earning and spending points, shoppers may quickly abandon the programs, especially if they put hard limits on when consumers can spend their points. Today, loyalty programs are not enough to engage customers and create sustainable and meaningful relationships.

A gamified strategy, on the other hand, can create fun and interesting repeatable experiences – ones that don’t always have to be associated with monetary value to maintain a two-way communication between brand and audience.

Smart devices can be a constant source of contact between audiences and brands, and smart companies will make sure they have a compelling mobile customer experience, even if their primary sales channel is through brick-and-mortar stores.

Make retail gamification happen with a lifestyle marketing platform 

The technology powering a gamification strategy can make the difference between a merely serviceable campaign and one that truly captures consumers’ imagination. Using a lifestyle marketing platform that enables a deep level of customization is a way for your brand to reach out to your specific audience with optimized game mechanics and rewards triggers.

A powerful technology platform will let your brand dig deeper into the non-monetary side of gamification marketing. This may be an especially

powerful method of connection with your audience. By tapping into the same types of experiences that have made fitness and education gamification so popular — the ability to track progress, compete on leaderboards and earn badges — you can stay in touch with consumers between purchases, without squandering value.

Another advantage of building a customized and optimized mobile customer experience is the ability to incentivize and prioritize different behaviors based on what you need most from your audience. Are you seeking to get more frequent customer engagement from casual followers? Do you want your most loyal audience members to refer friends or family members? Are you eager to promote brand awareness or certain in-store actions? All of these and more can be reward triggers with advanced gamification solutions.

A true customer engagement platform pairs these varied customer actions with rewards that actually matter to your audience. You can use rich data on current audience behavior to make sure you’re truly getting through to shoppers with the rewards you’re providing and the cadence at which you’re providing them.

Perx is the technology platform for you if you’re ready to get serious about retail gamification. Request a demo now to see it in action.

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Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

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Feasting on a long-lasting connection with your customers

Feasting on a long-lasting connection with your customers

Sundeep Keramalu

Director, Marketing Content | January 27, 2022


According to Oxford University researchers, a tiger’s brain is sixteen percent larger than a lion’s. As a result, Tiger is now widely believed to be the jungle king, contrary to what we were taught in school.

Just as people have traditionally believed that the lion was the king of the jungle, brands have always assumed that customer acquisition was paramount, and that customer retention was irrelevant. The reality, however, has been quite the opposite.

Businesses in the United States lose $136.8 billion annually due to poor customer retention.

Customer retention isn’t hard to achieve; it’s just that brands rarely put up the effort to hit hard where it counts.

When you don’t prioritize customer retention, you’re a sitting duck waiting to get devoured by your competition, who, by the way, has been listening to the sounds of the jungle and is ready to attack when you’re least expecting it.

Have a tiger in your tank.

Customer loyalty initiatives that delighted Baby Boomers and Generation X are not enough to excite the brands’ generations. Today’s loyalty programs perform better when tailored based on previous transactions and customer data. Sixty-four percent of customers expect personalized customer experiences based on previous transactions.

That is precisely what Perx Platform enables you to achieve. To begin, it detects the specific customer behaviors that contribute to your revenue. Second, it finds the incentives that will motivate your customers to take action. Third, it transforms your static digital efforts into dynamic, interactive, data-driven experiences. Finally, gamified rewards make customers feel good about what they do right away.

Don’t have a tiger by the tail.

Companies are frequently attracted to build software in-house to address complicated business challenges. However, while cost, control, connectivity, and maintenance are all reasons why businesses choose to develop software in-house, this is not always the prudent course of action. According to Gallup, one out of every six IT projects had a cost overrun of 200 percent and a schedule overrun of about 70 percent.

Perx is aware of the issue. That is why its industry-leading approaches such as Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), automation testing, and dockerization have become industry standards in the SaaS arena. At Perx, we take innovation and delivery to the next level by setting up our technologies and teams and rapid development procedures. We take pleasure in co-innovating to solve difficulties for our partners and clients in a matter of weeks.

When in doubt, ride a tiger.

Customers are more likely to leave if you take a reactive rather than proactive strategy. Find out what your lost customers are complaining about, and modify your product, pricing, or positioning to address their concerns. Analyze the trend if many people leave at a given moment. Collect feedback, centralize it, and figure out why most of them are going.

Fifty percent of millennials said they dropped out of a loyalty program because the rewards took too long to accumulate. In a fast-changing digital economy, traditional static loyalty and rewards programs are no longer effective. They are expensive to maintain and have become a liability for companies worldwide, negatively impacting profitability.

Customers today have a lot of expectations. Perx believes that how businesses interact with consumers and ecosystem partners needs to be rethought as their behavior constantly changes. Perx’s LMP is built to help brands move from being short-term and transactional to delivering meaningful relationships to millions of customers and partners worldwide.

If you want to be the new king, don’t just roar, roar to conquer.

70% of brands having a loyalty program do not allow customers to choose their favorite reward.

When you reward a customer, you are appealing to their emotional side. By doing so, you begin the process of developing a bond. As time goes on, they’ll regard you as more than just a product! As a result, it increases customer loyalty, encouraging repeat purchases that increase your revenue. This means you have to give them what matters to them and not what matters to you.

The majority of loyalty programs have the same goal: to keep consumers, increase customer lifetime value, and demonstrate appreciation. The customer’s last-mile journey is crucial to any engagement strategy. Finally, the platform extends this last mile by engaging customers in dynamic, gamified, and incentive-driven engagements that encourage them to do the actions and transactions they were truly aiming for. Additionally, Perx has established the Rewards Marketplace, which features an extensive curated range of retailer rewards that are linked with the digital consumer’s lives. Brands can respond to the quick gratification trend by rewarding customers for their behaviors through customized lifestyle rewards in only three simple clicks. Furthermore, organizations that want to launch their own in-app mobile commerce store and create a new revenue stream can do it without making significant investments or allocating essential resources.

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Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

Ready to join them?