Email Gamification: A Game Changer for 2024

Email gamification is the process of incorporating game design elements into email marketing campaigns.

With the help of this feature, you can achieve superior engagement statistics and have subscribers eager to access your emails. But it’s not as simple as adding a quiz or roulette wheel to your emails and hoping readers will click on it. It takes both planning and strategy.

In this piece, we cover the A to Z of gamification in email marketing — including its benefits, how to implement it, and the best ways to get the most mileage.

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What is Email Gamification?

Email gamification refers to the practice of applying game design elements and principles to email marketing campaigns and strategies. The goal is to increase engagement, motivation, and interaction with email content. This is done by making the experience more enjoyable, rewarding, and game-like for recipients — a great example of email marketing psychology.

Email Gamification in Action: How Does it Work?

Gamification breaks the monotony of a boring brand email by encouraging the reader to get involved.

Why do we play games? For a small dose of serotonin, of course. 

In email marketing, you can do that by awarding points, handing out virtual badges, or offering rewards to subscribers for performing desired actions.

Another option is to display progress bars or levels subscribers can advance through by completing specific tasks or engaging with the emails. You can add another layer by creating leaderboards or competitions. This lets subscribers see how they rank against others and compete for rewards or recognition.

It’s also important to develop storylines or narratives that unfold over multiple emails — this will encourage subscribers to continue engaging to see how the story progresses.

The idea behind gamification in email marketing is to tap into people’s natural desires for achievement, competition, and fun. This makes the email experience more engaging, interactive, and rewarding for them. When done well, it can increase open rates, click-through rates, and overall subscriber engagement.

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Benefits of Email Gamification

Gamification isn’t just about sending entertaining emails to your subscriber base; it helps you greatly with your marketing goals. Let’s review the tangible and intangible benefits of gamified campaigns.

Increased Engagement

Games are inherently appealing, and incorporating them into emails can make them more fun and interactive. This can lead to email subscribers spending more time with your messages, opening them more frequently, and clicking on your calls to action (CTAs).

Higher Conversion Rates

By making emails more interactive, gamification can encourage subscribers to take the actions you want them to take. These actions can include making a purchase, signing up for a free trial, or referring a friend. Gamified email marketing campaigns have been shown to boost conversion rates, as we explain further below.

Improved Brand Loyalty

When subscribers have a positive experience with your emails, they’re more likely to develop a positive association with your brand. Gamification can help create a more enjoyable and memorable email experience, leading to stronger brand loyalty.

Enhanced Customer Retention

Gamification can help keep subscribers interested in your brand and prevent them from unsubscribing. By providing rewards and incentives for continued engagement, you can encourage subscribers to stick around for similar experiences in the future.

Boosted Brand Awareness

If your gamified emails are successful and subscribers share their experiences on social media, it can generate buzz and spread brand awareness. It can also encourage people to discuss your brand with people they know.

Valuable for Data Collection

Gamification can be a way to gather data about your subscribers. Through their participation in games and challenges, you can learn more about their preferences and interests, which can be used to improve your future marketing efforts.

Overall, gamification can be a powerful tool to make your emails more effective and achieve your marketing goals.

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Does Email Gamification Work? The Stats Say Yes

People clearly love email gamification. Excited to give it a try? This next section tells you how.

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Implementing Gamification in Your Email Campaigns

If you’ve been seeing weak engagement or just want to work on your sender reputation, gamification can help. It can transform your emails from boring reads to engaging experiences. This guide will equip you with the knowledge and tips to implement email gamification like a pro.

Ready to get started? Here’s step one!

Set Gamification Campaign Goals

Clearly define what you plan to achieve by using gamification. 

Purpose	Desired objective
Boost engagement	Increase open rates, click-through rates, and time spent with emails.
Drive more conversions	Encourage desired actions like purchases, sign-ups, or downloads.
Enhance brand recognition	Create positive experiences that build stronger brand connections.
Gather feedback	Use games to collect valuable data about subscriber preferences.

Once you know what you want, it’s time to decide what type of game can help you achieve it.

Choose Your Game and Plan the Game Mechanics

Progress bars won’t help you collect feedback, and roulette wheels won’t tell you anything about recipient preferences. Depending on your goals, you must choose the right type of game.

Consider these gamification options:

Gamification methods	How they encourage interaction
Roulette/Spin the wheel	This one is a crowd favorite and can be addictive for recipients as they hope for bigger, better prizes.
Points system	Award points for completing actions and offer badges as milestones.
Progress bars or levels	Visualize progress towards a prize with a filling bar or level-based system.
Slot machine	There’s a reason they’re so popular in Vegas! Slot machines build anticipation and encourage repeat playing.
Quizzes and trivia	People love to test their knowledge, and winning them can be a high. Get readers hooked by strategically planning quizzes.
Scratch cards	This game has been around for ages and even in a digital format, is still really attractive to recipients.
Puzzles	Engage subscribers with brain teasers or simple puzzles to solve.

Consider the simplicity of the game and also evaluate if you will be able to collect accurate data using the method of choice.

Get the Design Right

Time to add your game to your email! This is where you must also test it extensively to ensure it works the way you want it to.

Here are all the design aspects you must keep in mind while creating your email:

Design considerations	What they mean
Seamless integration	The game should complement your email design, not overpower it.
Mobile-friendly	Ensure the game functions flawlessly on all devices, especially smartphones.
Clear instructions	Provide easy-to-understand rules and guidance within the email.
Focus on UX	Make the game intuitive and enjoyable to avoid frustration.

What Does the Subscriber Get?

While games are fun, you can sweeten the deal by offering your email subscriber a little something at the end. In fact, it may even influence their decision to participate at all!

The kind of rewards you can offer include: 

What the customer can win	Make it appealing to the customer by:
Discounts or coupons	Offering exclusive discounts or coupons for completing the game.
Early/exclusive access	Providing early access to new products or special sales for winning subscribers.
Freebies	Gifting downloadable content, ebooks, or samples for game completion.
Bonus points or additional entries	Awarding points/contest entries for game participation. People love higher chances of winning.

Tracking Performance

Without tracking your campaign metrics, you’ll never know if your gamification effort paid off.

Here’s how to assess how your gamified emails are doing:

Do this	To understand this
Track engagement	Check how many subscribers participated and completed the game.
Measure Click-Through Rates (CTR)	See if the game drives clicks to your desired landing pages.
Analyze conversion rates	Measure how many conversions were achieved from gamification.
Conduct A/B testing	Test different game mechanics and rewards to see what resonates best.

By following these general guidelines, you can measure how your gamification campaign is performing.

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When to Use Email Gamification

If you’re convinced about using gamification in your email campaigns and are eager to implement it, your next question should be “When?”

There are plenty of ways you can make the best of email gamification. Check out how these brands did it.

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Great Examples of Email Gamification

Before you get started on designing games or hiring game developers, find some inspiration in these email gamification examples we’ve compiled. 

Chick-fil-A Uses a Word Finder Game to Promote an Item

 

This gamified email is a prime example of getting customers involved in a fun game. The goal is to share information about new items on their menu, and they share a simple word puzzle to get readers involved. There is also a CTA to help track engagement and the email also contains a product they wish to promote. 

A Home Appliance Brand Uses Gamification to Grow Email List

In this example, the brand (Comfy) used gamification to convert website visitors into subscribers. This game invited new website visitors as well as their existing customers to participate in a game of roulette. All they had to do was spin the wheel and wait for a discount coupon or win the grand prize. 

Doordash and Starbucks Use Email Gamification to Boost Sales

Nothing like a progress bar to get customers excited about spending money. This is an amazing example of using user data and sharing an easy goal to achieve conversions. To further encourage the recipient, a discount is added. The premise is simple and the visuals are compelling. 

Bose Scratch Card Email

Everyone loves to win by scratching a gift card! That was what Bose was going for here with this gamified email. Additionally, they also added significant discounts below, to further entice recipients into scratching the card for a huge prize.

Stylus.ua Roulette Wheel Campaign

This brand used a roulette widget to entice readers to participate in their email gamification campaign. This led to an additional 35% in revenue for Black Friday when the emails were sent.

Points to Consider Before You Use Email Gamification 

Gamification in email marketing might sound like a great idea and easy to execute, but it can be a challenge.

By being aware of these roadblocks and planning accordingly, you can increase your chances of successfully implementing email gamification and reaping the benefits it offers.

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Gamification at Campaign Refinery

At Campaign Refinery, we’re huge fans of gamification! We believe it’s a healthy, organic way to increase subscribers’ interest in your emails and achieve high engagement metrics. 

Thanks to our gamification feature, we’ve tracked open rates of 76.37% and clocked click rates of 72.76%. And this was combined with a 0% complaint rate! 

We’re confident you will be able to generate up to 8X more engagement compared to your current configuration.

Think of how great this feature is for your sender reputation. Mailbox providers track these engagement metrics and assign you a high sender score, which means more of your emails land up in the primary inbox.

And not to brag, but — we’re quite literally the best at inbox placement. 

Campaign Refinery is your ticket to achieving sky-high engagement. 

Apply to become a customer today!