Gamification in email marketing is being widely discussed now. Most want to give it a try, but only a few have done it so far. Why? Because email gamification is said to be time-consuming, and pretty expensive, and you never know if you’re gonna recoup the costs spent. But is it so?
To shed some light on the subject, we decided to run a series of interviews with opinion leaders in email marketing — with people who have used gamification in their emails.
Here’s what they have to say…
Today, we are talking to Jordan Pritikin, a Head of Email & Growth Marketing at HubSpot. Throughout 2018, his team added a gamification element to all their digests. It was quite impressive, interesting, and informative.
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1. Jordan, every single week during a year, you would send out an email digest with this game. How did users react? Did they actively interact with your quizzes?
We received email replies and attention on social media shared by our users that they were enjoying the functionality.
2. How did you measure the effectiveness of this campaign?
This quiz was used to delight our audience as part of a newsletter. We didn’t have a direct goal tied to it.
3. Did you manage to track clicks on the answer fields in the quizzes?
We could not monitor clicks on the quiz as there was no clickthrough destination.
4. You used to send these emails for over a year. Why did you stop?
This was included in the newsletters sent by our blog team. As the team updated their template and structure, the quiz was removed.
5. Are you planning on doing something similar to the quizzes in your future campaigns?
As we continue to improve on the overall email experience at HubSpot, I’m sure we will revisit the quiz functionality for future newsletters.
In our “Building quizzes with Stripo” blog post, we showed in detail how to build and use one in your email.
6. Given that the AMP for Email technology gives us more possibilities to measure the ways users interact with our emails, are you going to give it a try in the future? Why?
As we move in 2021 we plan to experiment with all types of interactive elements in our emails. Some will utilize AMP, others won’t. Given there’s a significant portion of our DB that doesn’t use GMAIL we look to utilize functionality that spans all email clients.
7. Give three recommendations to those email marketers, who are just going to use gamification, on how to get the most out of it. Like where to start and what moments to pay close attention to?
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ensure what you’re creating is providing value and delighting your audience. Don’t try to “gamify” something just to say you’ve done it. Forcing interactive content or gamification where it doesn’t fit can cause your audience to unsubscribe;
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ensure whatever you’re creating is measurable. In the case I shared above, we weren’t able to measure the engagement of our quiz because it didn’t have a click-through destination. While we were able to gather anecdotal feedback, it’s better to have something measurable so you can understand the impact it has on your email program;
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start small. What’s something simple you can implement and test? I’d recommend introducing a small-scale experiment to see how your audience reacts. Based on the results you can expand your strategy from there.
To help you design professional gamified emails in no time, we've prepared an eBook "Ultimate Guide to Email Gamification" with a number of tips and ready-to-use mechanics.
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