The benefits of adding gamification to your email marketing

Elements of gaming don’t have to be reserved for specific campaigns — your email marketing can join in the fun too.

Consumer gamification has gained major attention from brands who’ve discovered how beneficial it can be in attracting new customers. Converting email subscribers into customers is a top priority for many B2C marketers and creating excitement can help.

Gamifying email acquisition can be the tie between traditional email marketing goals and modern practices. To share the benefits of adding game-like content into your email initiatives, we’ve written a list of prime examples.

1. Leaderboards and scorecards

Humans have an innate sense of competition, and progress bars feed that natural desire.

Leaderboards and scorecards are often used as checkpoints for athletes and gamers, but they can also be beneficial to email subscribers.

Being able to track a customer journey on a leaderboard can increase someone’s engagement, loyalty to the brand and rate of purchase. It can also create a sense of competition and incentivize people to sign up for your emails in hopes of becoming a top scorer.

2. Points

If you’re looking for a consistent way to measure who makes the leaderboard, gets the reward or earns a badge, give a points-based system a try.

Points are known for being an essential part of any game, as they offer insight into how well a team — or email subscriber — is doing in their journey. When you implement points into your email marketing, customers are rewarded for their actions (signing up, opening emails, sharing content) and know exactly what’s needed of them if they want a certain outcome.

3. Rewards

When it’s time for your email subscribers to cash-in on their points, you want to give them rewards that will make their engagement worth it. 

Offer rewards for signing up for your email list, sending referrals or making a purchase. These rewards can include things like free shipping, points, discounts, early-bird access to new releases and any other incentives that align with your target audience. 

4. Badges

It’s human nature to be driven by a goal, to see something valuable and want to work towards it. This is what makes badges in gamification so effective.

Similar to points, badges are seen as a reward for completing a desired action. However, badges can be offered in tiers as a way of incentivizing even more action from consumers. When your email subscribers are aware that certain badges offer more prizes, more exclusivity and more benefits, their desire to engage with your promotions grows.

5. Contests

Combine the psychology of competition with consumers’ love for rewards, and you get the power behind gamified contests. 

A call-to-action is far more exciting when there’s an element of anticipation attached. During an email contest (for example, maybe the first 100 consumers to sign up for email notifications earn a reward), subscribers are alerted to the possibility that they may be able to win a prize later on down the road. They’re given the opportunity to read about the contest, input their information and count down the days until a winner is announced.

If the contest is well-crafted, customers have a clear understanding of what your contest is and how winning will benefit them.

Keeping your email marketing fresh and fun for your subscribers is essential to brand success, and lucky for you, many aspects of this game are already familiar to you. Consumer gamification in email is simply the process of modifying ideas you’ve learned from games and implementing them in your email marketing.