Thriving businesses know the golden rule: It costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep the one you already have. This is why it is so important to nurture loyalty, and not just pursue the next first sale.
Another hard lesson for companies is that, despite every best effort, a small percentage of loyal customers will disengage at some point in time.
That’s where the magic of gamification comes in.
Below, we’ll discuss why customers disengage, the challenges of winning them back, and the powerful effect of gamification in loyalty programs. Unlocking how to increase customer loyalty for the long term helps you convert your shrinking ROI into lasting emotional connections.
What Is a Lapsed Loyalty Member and Why Do They Disengage?
A lapsed loyalty member is a customer who has actively engaged with program benefits, rewards, and other incentives in the past, but has ceased to engage for a defined period. The length of inactivity may vary by industry or a company’s program structure, and the range of inactivity is typically anywhere from 90 days to 18 months.
It’s important to understand why loyalty members disengage, because they are individuals who have already overcome program enrollment barriers to adopt your brand. Reigniting a lapsed member’s passion for your brand is well worth the effort.
Winning them back costs less than acquiring new customers, but you also have the benefit of previous data, data on what has worked with them in the past.
Why Loyal Customers Disengage
Customers often disengage from loyalty programs when the experience feels stale or misaligned with their interests. This might occur because incentives that were effective in the past fail to keep pace with societal trends, or a business tries repeating the same incentives with the idea that a good thing never gets old.
Rewards that are too generic or irrelevant fail to capture long-term interest, and inconsistent messaging across channels can make a program feel disjointed.
Customers also disengage if they feel overwhelmed by too many offers. If a company bombards members with offers because they’ve spent generously in the past, they can start to feel targeted instead of appreciated, or they simply need the opportunity to build interest in new offerings.
Loyalties often erode when generic perks simply don’t resonate on an individual level. Companies have to invest in understanding each unique customer to tap into personalized rewards.
The Power of Reactivation
Reactivating a past member is like winning over a new customer with added benefits. Re-engaging loyal customers saves you money in the long term, because they’re already familiar with your products or services.
One of the most effective customer loyalty strategies is harnessing the power of analytics and amplifying loyalty through personalized, gamified experiences. Once you master how to create customer loyalty and retention in a crowded market, you can effectively rebuild emotional connections based on past success.
How Gamification Can Re-Engage Dormant Loyalty Members
When loyalty fatigue threatens your ability to nurture long-term customers, gamification is your new secret weapon—transforming the routine into meaningful customer experiences that convert.
What Is Gamification?
Gamification provides a breakthrough in driving user engagement by introducing game mechanics in non-game settings. It builds strong emotional connections between brands and customers, and ethically steers user behavior toward your business goal.
Gamification activates game elements like level-ups, challenges, and rewards to help companies with specific campaign initiatives: in this case, re-engaging dormant loyalty program members. Games might include:
- Spin-to-win wheels
- Digital scratch-offs
- Interactive puzzles
- Trivia
- Interactive questionnaires
Ways to Re-Engage:
Adding gamified incentives can transform even dull tasks like polls or email opt-ins into fun interactions. Here are some ways gamification in loyalty programs is used to re-ignite the passion of stagnant members.
1. Daily Missions: Loyalty members love quick wins. Rewards for daily check-ins, login bonuses, and other incentives for recurring tasks keep members engaged with minimal effort.
2. Time-Limited Challenges or Events: Seasonal promotions, time-limited campaigns, and countdowns are powerful mechanisms for reactivating members.
3. Personalized Quests or Incentives: Personalization based on previous behaviors and preferences lets members know you recognize and appreciate them.
4. Instant Win and Surprise Mechanics: Spin-the-wheel, digital scratch cards, or a mystery reveal box can re-engage members with the power of instant gratification fueled by curiosity.
How CataBoom Has Helped Our Clients Re-Ignite Customer Loyalty
Here are just a few great examples of how top brands have used CataBoom-powered gamification to re-engage loyalty members.
Carl's Jr.
Carl’s Jr. reactivated lapsed members with CataBoom’s “Catch & Avoid” game, a daily streak-based experience that doubled site traffic, drove loyalty sign-ups, and made app engagement feel like a game, so that 25% of prize redeemers were lapsed members reengaged.
T-Mobile
T-Mobile turned to CataBoom’s custom mobile games to drive urgency with time-sensitive offers on its T-Mobile Tuesdays app, resulting in 95K plays per minute, 3X traffic to sponsor sites, and 2X normal engagement levels.
Chipotle
Chipotle amplified its loyalty program through CataBoom’s IQ quiz experience, offering BOGOs, sweepstakes, and reward points. The result: 24% YoY growth in quiz completions, 1.6M forms submitted, and 2.14M landing page visits.
Cinemark & Sony
Cinemark and Sony partnered on a Marvel-themed co-marketing promotion for "Venom", "Spiderman" and "Morbius" movie releases. They used CataBoom’s Instant Win and Sweepstakes engines to reward ticket buyers with prizes and grand prize entries, resulting in 120K unique plays and awarding 12K instant rewards.
5 Benefits of Using Gamification to Re-Engage Loyalty Members
Use gamification in loyalty programs to re-ignite customer excitement and curiosity. Doing so yields the following five benefits.
1. Faster Redemption and Reactivation: Instant wins and countdowns boost response rates and reduce friction through the power of urgency.
2. Stronger Emotional Loyalty: Welcome customers back with personalized challenges, achievement badges, and unique incentives to let every individual know they are seen and appreciated. This builds deeper connections to your brand that can always adapt to new buying habits.
3. Lasting Engagement Habits: Keep them engaged by keeping things interesting. Using surprise rewards, streak bonuses, and evolving challenges helps you reimagine routine processes to keep members coming back for more.
4. Deeper Customer Insights: Gamification isn’t just about activating data into personalized experiences. It also helps you creatively learn more about your customers’ preferences, motivations, and buying behavior, so future efforts to target segments of followers can become increasingly effective.
5. Greater Long-Term Value: Effective implementation of gamification doesn’t just get them reactivated into your process funnels—it cultivates better loyalty, advocacy, and overall lifetime value.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Gamification is powerful when designed around your customers. Knowing how to measure customer loyalty is essential to avoiding ineffective strategies and unlocking the full impact of well-aligned gamified experiences.
- Generic Experiences Lack That Personalization: Tailor gamification rewards and challenges to segmented members based on behavior and interests.
- Overcomplicated Game Mechanics Lose Their Interest: Keep the flow intuitive and make it easy for users to understand how they earn and redeem rewards.
- Failing to Promote Offers Effectively: You can’t re-engage dormant loyalty members if they don’t know there’s a reason to log in and take part in an offer. Clearly promote offers across all channels for maximum visibility.
- Ignoring Feedback Leads to Failed Optimizations: Track, listen, and adapt. Loyal customers disengage when they don’t feel heard. Re-engagement campaigns are your chance to avoid making the same mistake twice.
- Underwhelming Rewards Simply Don’t Work: Re-engagement through gamification is about tapping into what excites your loyal customers about your brand. Failing to align rewards with their interests is solved by dialing directly into your customers’ motivations and past purchase behavior.
Let CataBoom Help You Launch Your Reactivation Campaigns to New Heights with Gamification
It’s time to rejuvenate dormant customers and get them excited about your brand all over again. Ready to get started? Schedule a demo to see how easy it can be to enhance your engagement with gamification today.
.jpg)
