Value-seeking customers love to be rewarded for their loyalty, but a cluttered wallet full of paper coupons or carrying dozens of plastic rewards is never fun. Enter loyalty apps.
These free apps give brands valuable data on their shoppers’ purchases, habits, and preferences while providing an enjoyable experience for the consumer.
By implementing loyalty reward programs that work on your customers mobile devices, companies can keep up communication and advertising from within their customers pocket. In spite of the benefits, many branded apps fail to provide value to their visitors, resulting in low converting apps.
To make sure their app provides value Victoria’s Secret uses gamification and reveal based marketing. These two marketing tactics provide a simple way to engage visitors and keep them coming back for more.
The Pink Nation loyalty app has a simple motive – get users to unlock badges by looking through the brand catalogues and playing branded games. The games such as scratch offers and a “trace to reveal” drive engagement with the app by playing off of their users curiosity. Due to the concealment of their messaging, visitors are compelled to interact with the app, leading to high levels of engagement and greater brand awareness.
This tactic of “revealing” comes as no surprise from a brand that gained it’s notoriety being characterized by that very same word. Revealing.
Digital marketer Simon Spencer lauded the app’s functionality stating, “What’s great about the app is it incentivizes users to explore. It’s simple to navigate and provides fun features such as a camera and current weather. The hope is that with enough exploration and a well timed offer the user will blossom into a customer”.
In order to keep users coming back for more the app sends out push notifications asking users to go back to unlock more “badges”.
This idea of gamification is nothing new. According to the research firm Gartner, by the end of 2014 more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one “gamified” application.
Why should you use Gamification?
- To encourage a specific response or behavior, think “Scratch to Reveal”
- To increase the perceived importance of otherwise “minor” actions
- To promote competition; think higher scores versus friends or more badges
- To retain customers by setting goals (higher levels = greater reward)
If leveraging the psychological principles of reveal based marketing within mobile apps is new to you review our guide to reveal based marketing and learn all the ways you can use this new approach to succeed.
