Part of building a successful brand is creating a human touch that consumers can relate to outside the retail environment. This kind of touch encourages consumers to further engage with the brand and spread word of their positive experiences.
Pure play lingerie retailer Adore Me launched its online gaming experience last year as a way to bring this human touch to shoppers, using gamification to drive conversations with the consumer and help them contribute to a charitable cause. In partnering with Onor to implement the Play For Good(s) marketing cloud platform, shoppers could play games, get instant prizes and share results with their friends.
Thus far, the campaign has done wonders for Adore Me, boosting its marketing campaign ROI twelvefold, reducing consumer acquisition costs (CACs) by 60% and improving conversion rates an average of 4% to 9%.
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“Initially our thought process revolved around how we were going to engage our customers in a different way,” said Sharon Klapka, Director of Brand and Business Development at Adore Me. “Naturally, when we talk about the perspective of engagement, interaction and activation, gamification comes to mind.”
The Onor platform appealed to the Adore Me team in that it was specifically designed to make the brand interaction process fun and to fulfill philanthropic goals at the same time.
“Adore Me was a brand that started because we wanted to disrupt a market that was sidelining women and not giving them enough choices,” Klapka said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “The idea that our shoppers could contribute to a cause that would be near or dear to them, such as breast cancer awareness or gender equality, for example, are things that really align with the core values of our brand.”
Klapka also indicated that Onor was a proper fit for the data-driven nature of the Adore Me team, which focuses on tracking metrics such as ROI and CACs.
“Onor could really measure everything we wanted,” Klapka noted. “We can see how many people use the platform, how much they are engaged in the sense of how long they are playing every day, how many times are they revisiting this, and where we’re getting our conversions.”
Third, the platform was a perfect fit for the mobile-first mindset of the e-Commerce retailer. As much as 70% of traffic on the Adore Me web site comes from a mobile device, while 71% of the retailer’s consumer base are Millennials, making it vital for the company to cater the game to that demographic. With Onor, Adore Me could responsively tailor the game’s design so that the presentation would be consistent across any computing device, whether accessed through a desktop, tablet or smartphone.
Giving By Gaming
The Adore Me game is based on another online game, 2048, in which players need to slide numbered tiles on a grid and combine them to create a tile with the number 2048. Users playing the game can select a cause organization that they would like to support from a provided list. Causes partnering with Adore Me in the past have included CanCan Health for Breast Cancer Awareness and the Third Wave Fund. Adore Me was able to market both the online game and its integrated awareness campaigns through multiple channels to spread the word to consumers.
“We have four million women in our network and almost one million followers on Facebook, so we have a very strong social footprint from the start, and we have a lot of women engaged with our newsletter,” Klapka said. “We sent the links and promotions for the game out on our email newsletters and we posted this on social. Then we could even increase the awareness further by offering them a referral program, which led to many people inviting friends to play as well. This brought in new people who weren’t necessarily shopping with us before, which created more awareness for the cause and the brand.”
For each game that a user completes, Onor and Adore Me will donate $0.05 to the selected cause. Players also have the opportunity to win a variety of prizes, including up to $20 off their next purchase and free lingerie sets. Users can play up to 40 games per weekly promotion period, with total earned points used to rank a leaderboard and to identify the winners of the weekly tournaments.
