Articles Tagged with: Customer Loyalty

Drive MAU Through Aha! Moments With Gamified Customer Touchpoints

Drive MAU Through Aha! Moments With Gamified Customer Touchpoints

Drive MAU through Aha! Moments with gamified customer touchpoints

Grace Alexander

MarTech Blogger | November 23, 2021


Building a strong MAU base is crucial to growing your brand. Your MAUs (Monthly Active User) are your most interactive customers, but if you are not providing them with continuing opportunities to engage, you could be missing chances to convert.

By creating a road map that anticipates and proactively encourages customer behaviors, brands can continually prompt engagement and keep the customer journey active, leading to more and repeated conversions.

What is Your MAU Ratio?

The effective reach of your brand is determined by the number of active users measured over time. Your daily active user (DAU) number counts how many unique users were active in the span of a single day.

Your monthly active user (MAU) number measures how many unique users were active at least one time within the one-month window.

The relationship between these two numbers — DAU divided by MAU — provides the MAU ratio. The higher the percentage, the more people your brand is reaching consistently (stickiness). A 20% ratio is an acceptable range for many industries. A brand like Facebook has a (self-reported) MAU ratio of 50%.

Each wow moment provides an opportunity to encourage a customer to perform a trigger event.

Monthly active users are important because they are consumers you can reach through lifestyle marketing. Think about Facebook. How many users get up, check Facebook, and maybe play a round or two of a game on the platform before work? Facebook has become part of their lifestyle.

From Wow to Aha! and Beyond

Customer journeys consist of multiple touchpoints. When a customer’s journey ends, so does their engagement with the brand. Brands must then work to restart a customer journey or create a new one.

By creating a road map that anticipates and proactively encourages customer behaviors, brands can continually prompt engagement and keep the customer journey active, leading to more and repeated conversions.

Gamification delivers instant gratification through hyper-personalized rewards through customized engagement mechanics that drive the customer journey from one micro-experience to the next.

Each touchpoint provides an opportunity for customer engagement and a wow moment. So, what is a “wow” moment? It is when you offer a pleasant surprise for your user and exceed their expectations, even in a small way.

In gamification, this can mean giving them a free powerup for the next game round or extra points just for logging in. For a bank, you might provide a stamp every time your user checks their balance. For a retailer, you could award points when they click to view the day’s deals.

Every Aha! moment reinforces your value to the customer and encourages them to keep engaging with your brand, performing actions that directly correspond to increased revenues.

Each wow moment provides an opportunity to encourage a customer to perform a trigger event. Maybe it’s just playing another game round. Perhaps it’s clicking to compare rates for their insurance coverage. It could even be agreeing to take a short, two-question survey that provides your business with beneficial data on consumer wants, needs, or behaviors.

Every trigger event provides the opportunity to wow the customer again. When they complete the desired action, they receive another reward or incentive. This could be a special offer, extra points that can be banked toward a tangible reward, or a discount code. Every action they perform and every reward they receive helps to establish the lifestyle ecosystem you are building.

When the customer is wowed repeatedly, they can experience an Aha! moment. This “Aha!” moment is when the customer realizes and understands the value of your product/service, and becomes both more loyal to your brand (and more likely to share it with or recommend it to others).

When nurturing customers through multiple micro-experiences leads to Aha! moments, brands never miss a chance to interact with customers and drive revenue-connected actions. Every Aha! moment reinforces your value to the customer and encourages them to keep engaging with your brand, performing actions that directly correspond to increased revenues.

CX + UX = Success

Customer experience (CX) is the journey, touchpoints, and milestones your customers progress through via engagement with your brand. User experience (UX) is how easy the environment your users interact within makes completing various actions.

Perx ties the two together, making every customer interaction with your brand easy, fun, and part of a larger plan to drive revenue. Gamification delivers instant gratification through hyper-personalized rewards through customized engagement mechanics that drive the customer journey from one micro-experience to the next.

By streamlining and aligning both CX and UX, you create a continual customer journey user experience that can do all of the following:

  • Acquire new customers, whether through referral or introductions to your gamification experience through a business app or an ad.
  • Activate these customers by incentivizing them to perform their first action, giving you the opportunity to wow them.
  • Retain your new customers by keeping them engaged with continued incentivized touchpoints and wow moments.
  • Drive revenues when your customer reaches an Aha! moment after continued rewards tied to desired behaviors.
  • Attract new customers thanks to the referrals your existing customers generate for your brand.

Gamifying each touchpoint on the customer journey allows you to keep customers engaged. When you track your customers and analyze their behaviors, you can identify important milestones at which your customer is ripe for a nudge.

Using push notifications via SMS or email when a customer has nearly achieved a milestone gives you the ideal opportunity to incentivize the desired action.

For example, an active customer with 8 stamps out of 10 can be provided with an opportunity to perform an action that wins them two stamps instead of just one, allowing you to wow the customer by boosting them to reach their goal, and guide them toward an Aha! Moment.

By unearthing deeper insights into customer behavior and creating additional customer-brand touchpoints, you can stay top-of-mind as you build your brand’s tribe and gamify critical journey milestones to increase campaign completion and engagement rates.

The cycle of action and reward can be repeated over and over. The customer becomes accustomed to participating in your gamification as part of the lifestyle environment. Continued interaction and revenue-driving actions increase their lifetime value (LTV) to your brand, and prepare them to be brand ambassadors, ready to act as an organic recruitment arm.

Perx Bridges the Gap One Micro Experience at a Time

Most rewards, loyalty and incentive programs are transient, meaning they do not have a strategy to maintain continuous engagement with the customer. They are also highly transactional, lacking a meaningful connection to the customer.

Your company needs to shift from these transient and transactional engagements to continuous and meaningful engagements. Making that change requires the ability to streamline the customer journey user experience and make each engagement personalized for the individual.

Perx makes it possible to string multi-action engagements into a seamless customer journey, combining specific customer actions with collaborative or competitive challenges to increase stickiness. As a result, each micro experience is a potential wow or Aha! moment.

By unearthing deeper insights into customer behavior and creating additional customer-brand touchpoints, you can stay top-of-mind as you build your brand’s tribe and gamify critical journey milestones to increase campaign completion and engagement rates.

The proof of what Perx can do to unify your customer experience strategy is undeniable. See what we have already done for our partners:

  • Leading telco: enjoyed 50% customer acquisition in 8 months and increased net new revenues by 100%.
  • Popular retail company: drove transactions worth $34M in the first 60 days after launching the campaign and acquired 225% unique customers.
  • Mobile-first bank: reached a 99.8 last-mile redemption rate, with 601K users engaged and 2.5M rewards redeemed.

Want your business to be predictably successful? Watch this short video of how Perx uses gamification to drive MAU and schedule a demo.

Recommended for you


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

Ready to join them?


How the World’s Most Popular Game Failed to Put a Smile on its Players’ Faces

make your customer smile

How the world’s most popular game failed to put a smile on its players’ faces

Sundeep Keramalu
Director, Marketing Content | October 01, 2021


The primary lockdowns in 2020 were hard for all of us. Numerous brands reinvented themselves and achieved extraordinary success. And some became extinct in a matter of days during this time. Then some outliers created solutions and products to capitalize on the possibilities and dominate the market in response to disruptions in consumers’ lifestyles.

What is the point of being tall if you are not going to make the people who made you tall sit on your shoulders and feel elevated?

Genshin Impact (GI), an action role-playing, free-to-play (F2P) game, having only launched in September 2020, profoundly affected the whole gaming industry. For a world that had been shut down, an open-world game appeared to be a faraway universe’s answer to a desperate cry from the heart.

GI became the only game in history to earn a billion dollars in just six months. The gamers were crazy about the game, and the game developers made sure their game was incredibly good to keep the players from getting enough of the game.

Each time it released a new character pack, the most obsessed players generated a cool $12 million (in a single day) in revenue for GI.

Everything in the GI universe was going fantastic, until GI decided to celebrate its first anniversary, at which point things became real… and ugly!

When brands re-energize their customer engagement strategy and loyalty initiatives by aligning them with the everyday life choices of their consumers, they increase retention and create superfans.

Fans of the game expected great prizes for their dedication on the game’s first anniversary. Instead, GI offered only a quarter of a gacha doll’s price. What is the point of being tall if you are not going to make the people who made you tall sit on your shoulders and feel elevated?

When players started complaining about the measly rewards from GI on the official forum, the game’s publisher deleted the complaints. This led to the players expressing their frustrations on the app’s review section on the Google Play store, plunging Genshin Impact’s score from 4.5 to a meagre 2.8.

If GI could have duly, appropriately, and timely rewarded its players, it might have deepened its emotional ties with them.

It is a terrible irony that a gaming company that excels in enticing players to purchase fantastical accessories and levels fails to amaze where it counts most – ensuring that hooked users stay hooked through meaningful engagement strategies.

Steps that could have kept GI on its exponential trajectory

If GI had implemented tailored rewards for its estimated three million users through gamification, it would have had happier players and not disappointed fans on its anniversary.

GI failed to go the extra mile. It was the occasion to make its players happy by circumventing the rules, adding extras, or offering contextual rewards for their in-game actions. If GI could have duly, appropriately, and timely rewarded its players, it might have deepened its emotional ties with them, transforming happy users to a loyal tribe.

Maintaining a transient and transactional relationship with customers is no longer sufficient. GI is no doubt an awesome game. However, did it perform admirably when it mattered? Not at all.

A brand is only ever truly happy when its customers are genuinely happy.

Never too late to course-correct your engagement strategy

Brands must go above and beyond to maintain meaningful engagement with customers, from the first to last touchpoint. This can happen through hyper-personalization, dynamic engagement mechanics, advanced gamification and focusing on data-in-motion rather than data-at-rest. When brands re-energize their customer engagement strategy and loyalty initiatives by aligning them with the everyday life choices of their consumers, they increase retention and create superfans.

Not only does that make customers happy, but it also makes the brand happy. And we all know, a brand is only ever truly happy when its customers are genuinely happy.

Perx Loyalty and Engagement Platform has helped brands transform their customer engagement strategies and actively contributed to their topline growth by increasing customer engagement by up to 12x. Connect with us to learn how you can influence and drive customer actions in the instant gratification, mobile-first economy.

Recommended for you


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

Ready to join them?


Is Loyalty dead, or does it just need a defibrillator?

Is Loyalty dead, or does it just need a defibrillator?

Is Loyalty dead, or does it just need a defibrillator?

Amrith G
VP, Marketing | June 28, 2021


Okay, so that is not entirely true. Customer loyalty isn’t really dead – it’s still a top priority for marketers and brands world over.

Only thing is, it’s vastly different now.

For one, brand-centric loyalty metrics like the recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM) of customer spends aren’t relevant anymore. Instead, today, loyalty is all about how well your brand fits into each customer’s life, powered by emotions.

In 2021, if you want customers to continue buying from your brand, just showing up with good products or services isn’t enough. You need to offer additional value, and it has to be personalized to fit each individual customer.

Which brings us to the most important portion, “lifestyle marketing”.

In a world where technology has drastically altered consumer lifestyles, it is the panacea to your customer loyalty conundrum. It involves building brand affinity by offering content and experiences that your audience doesn’t want to live without. This is why, today customer loyalty can be built through wholesome experiences, enhanced by instant gratification and hyper-personalization.

But, first, let’s unpack the reasons for the evolution of customer loyalty to what it is today.

Why customers deserve their pound of flesh in the digital era

Today’s customers are a mobile-slinging, well-informed, and dynamic bunch. They are switching between channels, devices, and sites as they shop. At the same time, they are spoilt for choice, constantly being bombarded with targeted messaging, on their smart devices.

Technology has also lowered switching costs. So, while starting a new business and acquiring new customers has become easier, so has losing customers. Especially considering it costs 5 to 10x more to acquire a new customer, your efforts need to be focused on retaining loyal customers.

All of this has completely shifted the power dynamics. It’s the customers, and not brands, that wield the real clout and they are demanding their pound of flesh. They want a relationship that is more than just basic transactions.

To stay relevant, brands not only need to innovate beyond traditional offerings but also need to transform their loyalty programs into customer engagement engines. By embracing lifestyle marketing brands have started to place customer engagement at the core of any customer-brand touchpoint.

This is why you will find B2C and B2B2C businesses trying to become lifestyle brands. For instance, several insurers are venturing into fitness and wearables. Traditional banks are emulating a super-app-like ecosystem of digital lifestyle services within their banking apps or jumping on the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) bandwagon. Speaking of wagons, something core to people’s daily lives such as owning and fueling an automobile to move from point A to point B is shifting from a single price tag to a subscription-based service offering a lifetime of energy in form of battery swaps (electric cars).

But four fundamental questions remain!

1. What is the purpose of a business?

Contrary to popular opinion, brands shouldn’t be only about making profits and providing employment. These are merely by-products of doing business. Instead, your focus needs to be all about offering customers ‘real’ value by addressing their needs and solving their problems. The idea is to keep them constantly engaged. Ultimately, this value exchange creates a sense of emotional loyalty and shared purpose amongst your customers.

2. How to run loyalty programs right?

Loyalty programs have become a hygiene and a prerequisite. Today, successful loyalty programs run by Starbucks and American Express are considered the gold standard.

The only issue is that they are not very well thought-out. Mostly, they are just knee-jerk reactions to a competitor’s customer retention efforts.

To create loyalty programs that offer more strategic and long-term value to customers, you can follow these strategies:

  • Deliver additional customer value, be it functional, emotional, social, aspirational, or psychological, above and beyond the core offerings. Customers really value such add-on benefits. This is why ‘Paid Loyalty’ programs (like Amazon Prime) are becoming so popular.
  • Harness customer data smartly to offer hyper-personalized and authentic appeals to the head and heart. Thus, actively giving customers a reason to earn and burn their loyalty points.
    Is Loyalty dead, or does it just need a defibrillator?

    Source: McKinsey & Company – Preparing for loyalty’s next frontier: Ecosystems

  • Balance monetary rewards with experiential offerings such as exclusive events and early access. After all, 72% of millennials prefer to spend on experiences vs products.
3. What is the purpose of customer engagement?

The goal of customer engagement is to secure top-of-mind recall for your brand. This can be achieved by delivering customer value through interactions across varied channels that strengthen the relationship with customers.

The only problem is, nowadays, the focus of customer engagement and loyalty programs have shifted AWAY from customer value. Customer engagement strategies are disjointed from consumer lifestyles.

Luckily, Perx lifestyle marketing solutions resurrect loyalty as a concept for brands. We help by building data-driven engagement opportunities, targeting customers, and rewarding their actions. Growth in customer engagement rate by up to 6 – 12x compared to what you are experiencing now with traditional digital marketing.

4. What exactly is customer value?

Customer value is the satisfaction a customer experiences (or expects to experience) by taking an action relative to the cost of that action. To deliver real customer value, be sure to get regular customer feedback. Find out what the customer considers important and deliver better on these factors than the competition.

Tying all of it together

Any customer engagement strategy or loyalty program has to be centered around consumers’ lifestyles. Why? Because as individuals and as a society, our needs have evolved over time from the tier-1 physiological needs to the more sophisticated cognitive and self-actualization (emotional) needs.

Is Loyalty dead, or does it just need a defibrillator?

Source: 1 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs

Read More

The real cost of standalone loyalty programs

The real cost of standalone loyalty programs

The real cost of standalone loyalty

The real cost of standalone loyalty programs

Martech Influencer, CEO of Esco Media | June 29, 2021


How are top enterprises leveraging loyalty programs? And more importantly, what is the cost and benefits of such programs?

Before we answer that question, let’s first align on what is a standalone loyalty program?

A standalone loyalty program is one that is static and transactional. Such programs only get triggered with the purchase and ignore all other actions taken in a customer journey.

An integrated program is dynamic. It aligns with every action a customer takes in a journey, rewarding him/her for specific ones that matter.

Integrated programs have traditionally been a win-win for both customers and brands. In fact, 58.7% of internet users believe earning rewards and loyalty points is one of the most valued aspects of the shopping experience.

And for brands, over 70% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand if it has a good loyalty program.

Now that we’ve covered the benefits, what are the costs?

Hidden Cost Of Standalone Loyalty programs

Even though it takes substantial time and effort to build the network and rewards, the outcome and ROI don’t justify the efforts put in.

Some of the other challenges standalone loyalty programs pose include:

  • Limited area of operations

    Standalone loyalty programs can work with specific geographical locations. Therefore, they limit your marketing reach. If your business needs to expand into another market, for example, then you’ll have difficulties implementing the standalone program there.

  • Brand liability

    Loyalty program liability is an actual liability for brands in their financial books. A static, standalone loyalty program only enables customers to earn points. All of a sudden, a few million points accumulate with little to no burning of points by customers (e.g. redemption of rewards and services, etc). Why is that? It’s because of the nature of a standalone program, that focuses on being a mere ledger of points and not one that actively engages the customers nudging them to burn and redeem services and rewards.

  • The tipped scale of efforts and benefits

    The tipped scale between the efforts that go into building the program is so much that it outshines the benefits for a brand. For instance, a 4 – 6 member team may spend roughly 1,000 hours collectively each year to scout, shortlist, partner, negotiate and procure rewards and reward partners.

  • No scope for growth

    Due to their inefficiencies, many standalone loyalty programs fail to trigger customer actions (or additional purchases). For example, customers may find it frustrating when they aren’t able to redeem their loyalty points on other platforms. This may negatively impact their repeat purchases.

From Cost Centre To Cost Saver

Here are just three ways to cut costs and drive revenue with AI-enabled automated and personalized loyalty programs.

  1. Generate new revenue streams with m-commerce in-app reward stores.

    You can instantly set up your own m-commerce in-app reward stores and create a new revenue stream. The in-app reward stores could help you develop your own marketplace, where customers can trade in points or rewards.

  2. Choose from curated rewards tailored to your customers’ lifestyles.

    Rewards can be filtered based on location, popularity, categories, expiry, availability, and price. For example, the rewards for newly introduced products could be different from older products.

  3. Reduce time spent on manually identifying, procuring, and managing rewards.

    Businesses spend a lot of time verifying and reimbursing rewards. Moreover, manually managing vendor relationships, as well as identifying and procuring rewards can be costly and time-intensive. Instead, your resources can be redirected towards additional activities such as optimizing campaigns.

The time and costs saved by replacing manual processes with personalized and dynamic customer engagement can boost your productivity and revenue.

How Top Brands Are Reinventing Their Approach To Building Loyalty

Here are just a few Asia Pacific-based brands that are modernizing their loyalty program.

  • Singapore’s leading telecom company achieved around 27% growth in monthly active users or MAU with the help of dynamic customer engagements.
  • A Philippines-based leading electronics chain was also able to improve their conversion rate by almost 90% with loyalty programs.
  • A leading global bank used gamification to achieve credit card spends in excess of USD200 million.
Loyalty Marketing For The Mobile-First Economy

It is clear standalone loyalty programs do just that – ‘stand alone’. They are expensive to run because of their inefficiencies. So, it is important to look for a viable solution as you update your customer rewards strategy. For more information, click here to learn more about how you can resurrect your loyalty or rewards program in your pursuit of building customer loyalty.

Ready to transform your rewards, loyalty, and customer engagement strategy? Get in touch for a tailored demo today, and add it to your marketing toolkit!

Recommended for you


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

Ready to join them?


Welcoming Banks to the mobile-first instant gratification economy

Welcoming Banks to the mobile-first instant gratification economy

Amrith G
VP, Marketing | February 13, 2020


Too late! That is how large enterprises traditionally have responded to disruptions.

If you look at historic data just from the last 60 years, the least critical way of answering this question would be ‘not quite effectively’ Richard N foster in his book, ‘Creative Destruction’ proves the same by quoting ‘The life span of a company back in 1958 was 61 years and in 2018 it reduced to 18 years.’ In the next 7 years 75% of companies in the S&P 500 index are expected to be replaced by new emerging challengers in each industry.

The category of companies in the crosshair of displacement are the large B2C enterprises who serve the millions of end consumers – the you and me of the world.

Focusing on the Banking industry. 47% of key banking transactions such as C2C and C2B payments, funds transfers and personal loans have been executed by fintechs and digital payment gateways. The wedge that the Apple and Google Pays of the world have pegged between the banks and their millions of end customers is a sizeable one and if not addressed it is only bound to grow exponentially en-route to erode a bank’s profit margins, 1 micro percentile at a time.

In the era of fintechs and the shift towards digital and virtual banks, the one who holds the key to last-mile customer data becomes the victor by default. Last-mile customer data is the new oil, and the trick to master and acquire it is in how closely you position yourself as an enterprise to your consumer – This translates to how much of the customer’s mobile mindshare does your brand, products and services enjoy? With over $100B invested in existing and new mobile-first fintechs globally every year, the wedge between traditional banks and their customers will turn into a larger crevasse.

So how can banks respond to these disruptions? The customer engagement and loyalty platform from Perx enables large B2C enterprises across Banking and other core verticals to reduce this wedge. With the majority of Perx customers represented by Banking & FSI, Perx facilitates them to get back in the driver’s seat by intelligently incentivising its customers for every action and interaction they have with their bank. Let’s face it, in this instant gratification mobile-first economy, the one who conquers your smartphone has the map to succeed.

By arming marketers in the banking industry with a platform that drives not just vanity metrics such as likes and shares but ‘true top-line growth’ through revenue generating customer actions, Perx enables banks to conquer last-mile customer data and interactions – reversing the growing wedge into a disappearing crack.

The Perx-Oracle partnership delivers the sharpest tool in the marketing armoury that banks have long needed.

Leandro Bark, Head of Partnerships, Perx

Perx’s partnership with Oracle and its Open banking APIs initiative helps address and solve this problem at lightning speed. With over 1200+ global banks trusting Oracle Core banking systems, they now get a chance to take the fight back to disruptions such as the mobile-first customer, fintechs and the rest of the herd.

The Perx platform integrated with Oracle open banking APIs allows banks to instantly drive customer transactions, increase credit card spend, reduce loyalty debt and drive meaningful customer engagement all with instantly rewarding customers for doing so.

Our partnership with Perx enables banks to conquer the elusive last-mile in customer engagement.

Sanjay Mathew, Senior Director, Oracle Financial Services

Singapore’s largest bank drove S$ 24 Million in net new credit card spend on a single customer engagement onboard the Perx platform in a matter of 14 days. The largest bank in Philippines drove $64 Million in net new transactions over a week through a dynamic, gamified customer engagement campaign, and one of Singapore’s largest telco increased its daily engaged customers by 110x in the first 60 days of onboarding Perx.

Learn more about Perx. Connect with us to find out how Perx + Oracle can help you drive top-line growth for your company.

Recommended for you


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

Ready to join them?