What grabs the attention of many consumers?
Sports!
This statistic speaks to the power of your brand using gamification incentives.
Consumers like to engage with their favorite brands or teams, especially when it’s fun for them. And that’s what gamification can do for you during sporting events because it transforms product features and benefits into exciting, interactive experiences.
Besides product education and brand engagement, gamification can help you achieve the following marketing objectives:
- Social activation and engagement
- CRM and loyalty onboarding
- Customer acquisition
Let’s see how some examples of predictive gaming and real-time sports can create successful and engaging gamification incentives for your brand.
Accelerate Your Brand Sales Through Gamification
Brands can educate their customers about products and guide them toward purchases based on their needs and expectations. At the same time, gamification promotions help you obtain valuable zero-party data about consumers’ habits and preferences.
You can engage fans across various channels such as:
- In-stadium
- On-premise
- Sponsorships
- Loyalty
- Social media
- Mobile
Reese’s “Go For Two” real-time gamification engagement tactic is a great example because it focused on integrating a real-time sporting event with brand awareness.
Reese’s “Go For Two” played off the brand’s famous dual peanut butter cup packaging with a strategy to sponsor 2-point conversions.
When a team attempted a 2-point conversion, an alert was sent out. This was a great way for a brand to own the moment.
PepsiCo and Meijer stores teamed up for a gamification promotion titled, “Rush to Savings.” The objective was to activate Pepsico’s NFL sponsorship to drive sales at Meijer stores.
Shoppers selected their favorite NFL teams to receive mPerks offer coupons loaded directly to their mPerks Rewards cards each week.
Whenever their team rushed for 120 yards or more in a game, shoppers received an additional, higher value mPerks coupon to drive program engagement and purchase frequency.
Nothing Says Real-time Engagement Like the Super Bowl
Gamification incorporates game mechanics to increase customer engagement, improve sales and elevate loyalty.
In other words, it’s about making things fun for your customers when they engage with your brand. And, we know from our opening statistic, a gamified incentive tied to real-time sporting events increases engagement levels.
For Super Bowl LV, Rocket Mortgage launched the world’s largest Super Bowl squares game. To play, consumers answered dynamic lead qualification questions, then picked their squares, which were later assigned numbers. This incentivized engagement collected data about participants’ interest in buying a house.
On game day, the score was tracked via Sportradar’s real-time sports data and every time the score changed, one lucky player with the corresponding square was drawn in real time for the chance to win $50,000. Plus, all players were automatically entered into a drawing for two $500,000 grand prizes.
Increase Your Customer Engagement By Making In-game Events Rewarding
There are creative ways you can tie an incentive to a sporting event.
To drive on-premise sales and real-time fan engagement, Miller Lite ran a promotion with the Chicago Bears titled, “Miller Lite Fantasy Football.”
It aimed to drive traffic and Miller Lite pours at Chicago Bears’ alliance bars. Miller Lite created a real-time, bar trivia game for fans. To participate, consumers at least 21 years old checked in at a Miller Lite Bear HQ bar and made a qualifying purchase.
Next, participants answered 10 predictive questions about the upcoming Bears game. On game day, participants returned to the bar to see how they fared against other fans and could also trash talk other competitors online. Each participating bar received Bears’ swag for that day’s winner and the top scoring fan won.
Also, Volvo launched a unique promotion tied to the Super Bowl and the company’s reputation for safety. The objective was to reinforce a brand promise in an organic moment.
Volvo pledged to give away $1 million worth of cars, letting fans configure their dream Volvo online for a chance to win it if either team scored a safety.
The $1 million worth of cars celebrated the more than one million lives saved by the three-point safety belt, a Volvo invention.
Tap Into Gamification Incentives That Engage Sports Fans
When you gamify your incentives tied to real-time engagement during sporting events, you’re giving your most loyal customers another reason to talk about your brand and share content with others.
Gamification can involve things like points, badges and leaderboards, which get your customers’ competitive juices flowing in the form of magnified engagement.
These types of interactive experiences give your customers an opportunity to engage with your brand in a fun and entertaining way and allow you to collect important zero-party data.
When you make incentives fun through gamification, you’ll engage more customers and get them coming back for more.
If you need help with any incentives or would like to talk about your customer engagement efforts, feel free to reach out to our experts here any time.
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ebbo helps brands achieve their customer loyalty goals with full-service, end-to-end solutions and also creates original educational content straight from the experts to help loyalty marketers stay on the cutting edge of customer engagement.