Gamification Marketing: Sell More With Interactive SMS

Text messages are incredibly potent marketing tools if used well, reaching shoppers who are inactive or unengaged on social media and other channels. Additionally, text messages boast an impressive open rate of 98%—that’s four times higher than email open rates. 

There’s just one issue: traditional SMS marketing is a one-way affair, and the engagement just isn’t there for the average campaign.

Interactive text messages can help brands overcome this problem and use SMS marketing to its full potential. Use this Coalition Technologies guide to get started!

What is Gamification?

Gamification is an intuitive way to create more engaging SMS campaigns, incorporating game mechanics and elements into mundane text messages. The key idea behind gamification marketing is to turn what would otherwise be one-sided communication into a more organic back-and-forth conversation between a brand and its customers through automated messaging.

Many elements of daily life are already gamified, and you might not even have noticed. For example, Amazon uses a draining progress bar for items on a flash sale to create a sense of urgency, driving customers to check out as quickly as possible. Apple Watch owners will also be familiar with their gamified fitness apps, spurring competition between friends. 

Solving The 4 Biggest Marketing Challenges

But does your brand really need to gamify its text messages? Yes! Here are the four key challenges that gamification marketing solves:

1. Low Engagement: Traditional SMS messages often fall flat because they lack a compelling reason for users to engage. They can feel like generic announcements or promotional blasts, failing to capture attention or spark interest. A message saying ‘20% off all shirts!’ isn’t exactly exciting, and there’s no real reason for the reader to click on the link other than a vague idea of a discount.
   
2. No Personalization: Interactive text messages can turn generic messages into a tool for establishing a more meaningful, personal connection. The average text feels like mass marketing because it repeats the same tired old template and copy.
   
   Data can help you bridge that gap and make a more personal connection through gamification marketing. Here’s an example:

Generic Text	Interactive Text
Get a free month of our premium fitness subscription!	You walked over 5,000 steps every day this week! Beat 10k today and earn a free month of our premium subscription!

The difference boils down to two keywords: ‘get’ vs. ‘earn.’ Readers will be more likely to try out your offer if they feel like they have some stake in it. With interactive SMS, you’re effectively giving them an additional reason to click on the offer beyond the discount.

3. Low Click-Through Rates: Text messages get opened frequently, but click-throughs are much rarer. Readers generally feel like they don’t have enough incentive to click on links. This can stem from a lack of information about what the link offers or a weak incentive.
   
   Gamification marketing tackles this by providing a stronger incentive to click through. For instance, brands can create a ‘mystery deal’ text message campaign inviting readers to unlock a coupon code by clicking on a link.
   
4. Low Interactivity: Interactive text messages open up the communication channel between businesses and their customers. Brands relying on traditional text campaigns don’t really have the opportunity to gather feedback or interact with their users. Imagine being able to launch a poll inviting users to share what they’d like to see in your next product. Every interaction can be an invaluable source of marketing data.
   

With the right gamification marketing strategy, every text message can be an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with buyers and gather data that will fortify your next campaign.

Getting Started with Interactive SMS

SMS response rates can hit 45% or even higher with the right strategy. Here’s how you can start building that strategy:

Define Your Interactions

Automated two-way text messaging requires a very strong understanding of the audience and the overall goal of the campaign. These two factors will shape how your interactions play out. Consider the interactions used in gamification marketing in this brief three-step example:

Awareness	Decision	Retention
A chain of texts quizzing readers about a product or industry they might be interested in.	A link to a free spin for a chance to win a limited-time discount on the aforementioned product.	A text asking about their experience with their purchase, with personalized recommendations based on their response.

Create an Outline

Pick the type of interactions that make sense for your interactive text message campaign and draft an outline. This outline will be your guide throughout your campaign, and it should clearly state the intended outcome of each interaction. Is the goal to increase awareness with a quiz? If so, what kind of copy would most effectively elicit a response?

Set Up The Auto-Responder

Tons of tools can make gamification marketing easier. Klaviyo, for instance, helps brands plan and execute their campaigns with an intuitive UI. If you’re using Klaviyo, head to Flows -> Create Flow -> Build Your Own to start your build, or contact us to get help. 

Users on Attentive can also leverage the platform’s pre-built journeys to set up a responder. You’ll find these gamification marketing templates conveniently labeled based on different scenarios, such as cart abandonment and low inventory. 

For example, if the goal is to drive sales, you can use the low inventory journey to notify shoppers that an item in their cart is about to go out of stock. You could also throw in a coupon code as an additional incentive!

Best Practices for Interactive Text Messages

72% of people have bought a product after receiving a text from a brand. But how do you craft the kind of interactive SMS that drives those results? Successful gamification marketing boils down to a strong understanding of the fundamentals. Keep these pointers in mind for your next campaign.

Segment Your Audience

As a brand, the last thing you want to do is consider your audience a monolith. A thousand different people might be enthusiastic about your products, but they all:

• Prefer to be contacted at different times
• Prefer different styles of communication (formal vs. informal tone)
• Prefer different incentives (one group might like coupon codes, while another might prefer the thrill of a free spin)

Understanding and segmenting your audience will be a massive part of your automated two-way text messaging journeys, allowing you to contact your customers at the right times and in the right ways.

Engage, But Simplify

Successful gamification marketing requires a careful balance between engagement and simplicity. Shoppers can only look at so much text before deciding it’s not worth their time and moving on. 

The key to nailing interactive text messages is targeting that hard-earned sense of participation or achievement. Crocs handled this well with their Easter Egg Hunt campaign, hiding coupon codes around their landing page and inviting shoppers to take part. You’ll notice the messages are relatively short despite the amount of information they’re conveying. 

Keep Refining

Constant analysis is a necessity for success when it comes to gamification marketing. To truly maximize engagement and ROI, you need to be constantly monitoring and analyzing your campaigns. Track key metrics, such as:

• Click-through rates
• Response rates
• The number of points earned or challenges completed 

All of these metrics offer valuable insights into the success of your interactive SMS campaign. This data should guide you toward what resonates with your audience and what needs refinement.

You can get creative with how you use and analyze all this data. For example, if click-through rates are high but the number of points earned is low, your challenges/quizzes could be too difficult. Similarly, you might notice that a certain portion of your texts are going unopened at 8 AM on a Saturday. This could be a hint you need to adjust your send times.

Unleash The Power of Gamification Marketing

Interactive text messages can help businesses drive sales and generate new leads constantly. Businesses need to lay the groundwork for that success with smart audience segmentation and a laser focus on analytics. 

Looking to gamify your next campaign? We’re just a text (or email!) away. Coalition Technologies has been a leader in SMS and digital marketing for nearly 15 years now. Some of the biggest brands in the world rely on our expertise in both of these fields to drive hard-hitting campaigns. Find out what we can do for your brand today. Contact us for a free consultation!