In today's competitive market, brands are always looking for new ways to engage customers. The Vitamin Shoppe, a leading retailer of nutritional products, faced a common challenge: making its loyalty program more dynamic and exciting. While they had some basic engagement tactics in place like secret codes and quizzes, their team wanted to add more interactive elements to grow their digital presence and keep customers—both in-store and online—coming back for more.
The company's Director of Loyalty and CRM, Karen Szarvas, explained the struggle: "Even the most basic giveaway proved difficult for us to execute due to technical constraints. We were just looking for much more."
The Vitamin Shoppe needed a solution that could power fresh, meaningful experiences for its loyal customers.
The Solution: Fast and Flexible Gamification
The Vitamin Shoppe partnered with CataBoom and discovered the power of a true gamification platform. They were able to build and launch real-time game experiences like instant wins and challenges with minimal development work.
"CataBoom is a true gamification platform that allows us to easily build and launch real-time game experiences. It helped us modernize not just our loyalty program, Healthy Awards, but also our brand."
Within just four and a half weeks of signing on with CataBoom, The Vitamin Shoppe launched a fully self-serve, cross-functional campaign. This campaign featured weekly brand partners, giveaways, and engaging promotional stories.
The results spoke for themselves. The campaign led to a 40% lift in sales for participating brands that month and a significant spike in new customer sign-ups.
Games That Drive Results
Among The Vitamin Shoppe's favorite game mechanics were Spin to Win and a timed "Healthy Grab" game where users tried to catch as many wellness products as possible in a virtual shopping bag.
The Spin to Win game mechanic proved so successful it became a key part of their loyalty strategy, including their birthday program. "We saw 10x the engagement in our birthday communications when we added a game element," Karen noted. "It's fun, flexible, and easy to re-skin for different objectives."
Why CataBoom? Speed, Flexibility, and Support
When asked why The Vitamin Shoppe chose CataBoom, Karen pointed to three core differentiators:
- Speed to market: They could build and launch campaigns quickly with minimal developer resources.
- Platform flexibility: The platform offers hundreds of game mechanics that are easy to use.
- Exceptional support: Even while being primarily self-serve, The Vitamin Shoppe team received outstanding support whenever they needed it.
Karen added, "You exceeded our expectations across the board."
What's Next for The Vitamin Shoppe
The Vitamin Shoppe is just getting started with its gamification strategy. They plan to:
- Create gamified tier achievements and exclusives for their top customers.
- Build acquisition and onboarding journeys that are both fun and engaging.
- Continue using tentpole campaigns across all channels.
As Karen puts it, "Gamification is a great way to meet your customer in a new, meaningful way. It’s where all brands are heading - customers expect more than just a transactional relationship."
Ready to energize your customer engagement? Contact us to learn how gamification can help you connect with your audience in fresh, exciting ways.
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