Gamification is transforming the DTC landscape by making shopping more engaging and rewarding. Loop Subscriptions helps DTC brands like TruHeight, Good Protein, and Mammaly implement gamification to boost customer retention and revenue. Techniques include progressive discounts, milestone rewards, and interactive customer portals. For example, TruHeight saw a 314% subscriber increase with gamified discounts and rewards, while Good Protein achieved a 400% subscriber growth by offering discounts and freebies.
In this blog, Sakshi Jain, Head of Growth at Loop Subscriptions explains how integrating gamification in your subscription strategy can enhance customer engagement, boost revenues, and reduce churn.
Let's admit it - D2C is becoming increasingly crowded and noisy! There are far too many brands with all sorts of promises vying for the customer's mailbox and attention.
So, what does that mean to you as a D2C brand owner? Create more noise?
Yes, but with a difference called 'gamification.'
In this blog, we will understand:
- What is gamification in D2C?
- Why should D2C brands use gamification as strategy?
- How Loop Subscriptions helps brands retain customers with gamification?
Ready? Let's dive in!
What is gamification?
Gamification is a D2C marketing technique that transforms routine interactions into engaging, and often rewarding, experiences for customers. Think of it as a playful incentive to retain your customers for a longer time.
Let us understand this with an example:
Imagine you discover a new hairdresser in town and you’d like to check them out. Now, here's an imaginary conversation between you and your hairdresser after the first sitting:
Hairdresser: "We hope you enjoyed our services today. Since this is the first time you've stepped into our salon, we'd like to offer you a flat 20% on your bill as a mark of our appreciation."
You (fiddling with your credit card to pay them): "Wow! I didn't fancy that. I'll be back next month for sure."
Hairdresser: "Most welcome! In fact, we offer customers a 25% discount on their consecutive visits. And their sixth visit is on us - completely free!"
You: "Nice one! That sounds like a good deal. Thank you, see you later!"
Imagine if this example were to be extrapolated to a D2C product instead of a service.
It could go this way: If a brand offers a 20% discount for signing up for a subscription to a product, the discount could increase to 25% on the second order.
By the fifth order, the brand might include a free gift, like a sample of a new product. Later on the tenth order, it could offer an option to exchange for a different product.
But, how does gamification help D2C brands?
Gamification boosts D2C brand engagement by making shopping interactive and rewarding.
Think of the last time you purchased a product on Amazon. If you've forgotten to proceed from your cart, they'd probably nudge you with one of these progress bars in your email.
They added this playful visual element to their checkout process: a cart icon that moves across a progress bar as users proceed with their order. This design draws on the Zeigarnik Effect, which explains that incomplete tasks are more memorable than complete ones.
Using this dynamic visual cue, Amazon nudges customers to finalize their purchases, reducing the chance of abandoned carts.
Whilst there are probably thousands of examples how D2C companies are using gamification to nudge customers, we'll look at how Loop Subscriptions employs it to lasting effect for their customers.
For context, the subscription management app, driven by an application programming interface, uses gamification and a subscription model to help brands retain customers.
Gamification with Loop Subscriptions: TruHeight
In the first example, TruHeight® is a nutritional supplement brand that provides comprehensive and convenient nutrition to kids and teens who want to grow to their full height potential.
This eCommmerce brand migrated from Bold Commerce to Loop Subscriptions. Here’s how they combine their offers to make it more attractive to buyers.
They offer a combination of chocolate protein shake, growth gummies and sleep-aiding supplements. Now, all of this is offered at a discount of 15%. These nutritional supplements are offered to buyers as a subscription every month.
TruHeight lets their buyers know what to do to expect best results: “For visible and lasting results, take TruHeight monthly for at least 3-6 months. Skip, modify or cancel anytime.”
How do they gamify it?
Subscription buyers get an additional 10% discount on their second order, whilst on the third order, they get a free T-shirt as a reward.
Impact of gamification for TruHeight
As a result of its gamification strategy, TruHeight grew its DTC subscriber base by 314% in 12 months.
Gamification with Loop Subscriptions: Good Protein
In the second example, we come across a vegan protein and a healthy superfood juices called Good Protein. This DTC brand had migrated from Stay.ai to Loop Subscriptions. Since the migration, they have witnessed a whopping 400% increase in subscribers thanks to the gamification angle they provide their buyers.
Let’s look at the below screenshot which shows that gamification can be planned meticulously by DTC brands. Good Protein also offers its buyers a 40% off on the first order and 20% off on all subsequent orders. It even allows buyers the flexibility to change flavors and collect rewards along the way.
Now, let us understand how they’ve planned their gamification strategy. In the screenshot below, you can see they reward buyers in the second order with a free plant-based collagen booster.
In the third order, they provide a free superfood green juice while in the fourth order, buyers get an extra 10% off. When buyers go beyond the fifth order, they get 25% off on all their orders.
Impact of gamification for Good Protein
Good Protein’s gamification strategy yielded a 400% increase in subscriber base in just 4 months.
Gamification with Loop Subscriptions: Mammaly
In our third example of gamification in the DTC subscription model, we look at Mammaly - a German pet health startup that develops a range of snacks specifically targeting and helping reduce the severity of common aging dog issues.
Here’s how their subscription journey looks like. They reward their buyers during the third, fourth, sixth and ninth stages of their subscription process. They let their buyers know about it in advance to encourage them to traverse the full journey.
The below image shows what happens when a buyer completes two purchases. They don’t get rewarded yet.
However things start changing when buyers reach the third stage, they get their first reward.
The momentum continues in the fourth stage too as they get rewarded here as well.
Buyers don’t get anything in the fifth stage, and will have to wait until the sixth order.
In the seventh stage, buyers don’t get any rewards but get it in the ninth stage.
In the ninth stage, they get their reward for sticking with Mammaly and the cycle repeats in the future.
Gamification with Loop Subscriptions: Dr. Livingood
Dr. Livingood is a Doctor of Natural Medicine, DC, and the founder of Livingood Daily. They provide real health solutions, tools, masterclasses and coaching, meal plans, workouts, and a community membership to help people change their habits, achieve immune health, and live the “good” life. He also provides guides and remedies for high blood pressure and cholesterol, osteoarthritis, asthma, allergies, and other ailments and diseases.
In 2022, Dr. Livingood had 130K subscribers on its roster. But, faced significant challenges with Recharge, including:
- Inadequate customer support
- A feature set that didn't effectively address churn, and
- A user interface that led to a high number of customer support tickets due to its lack of clarity for basic subscription management tasks
In order to tackle these challenges, the brand decided to migrate to Loop Subscriptions. They gamified the journey for the subscriber segment with two completed orders. With help of Loop Flows, Livingood Daily team set up a rewards system to give an additional 5% on top of the existing subscription discount of 15% - A total of 20%.
This discount gets automatically applied on the third order of the ongoing subscription.
Livingood Daily easily executed a personalized milestone reward system using IF-THEN conditions in Loop Flows, setting up a banner for subscribers who completed two orders and offering a secondary reward for those who completed six orders.
This included motivational messages to encourage continued subscriptions, even if customers had sufficient product on hand.
The implementation of the reward system led to a significant increase in subscribers completing more orders, with a 9% rise in the proportion of subscribers finishing 5-10 orders compared to the previous period.
Clearly the incentive programme was pushing customers to continue on for a longer subscription duration.
Impact of gamification for Livingood Daily
Livingood Daily’s gamification strategy with Loop Subscriptions resulted in their subscription revenues growing by 40% and reduced churn to 2%.
Gamification with Loop Subscriptions: Step One Foods
Step One Foods is a line of snacks and breakfast foods that were created by preventative cardiologist Elizabeth Klodas to lower cholesterol. This DTC brand provides nutrients demonstrated to help lower cholesterol and improve cardiovascular health.
So, if you were to land on their website to order products, you’d notice a progress bar at the bottom that tells you to order a minimum of four products in your bundle. This is to enable you to get discounts on your products.
The Step One Foods example shows us that gamification need not necessarily be in the form of rewards or surprises - it can also be in the form of progressive discounts as you keep adding more products in your cart.
Gamification with Loop Subscriptions: Fragrant Jewels
Fragrant Jewels is an e-commerce and subscription company that offers a multisensory experience with a fun surprise that makes people feel special.
This jewelry DTC brand uses different email flows to send new mystery boxes each month. By purchasing any product and joining their community, customers will receive monthly mystery boxes thereafter.
Besides, they also have a spinning wheel on their website which is quite unique. When you spend more than five seconds on the website, you’ll come across a spinning wheel that offers you either a free gift or a 15% off on their products.
Gamification with Loop Subscriptions: Veloforte
Veloforte uses natural ingredients to create delicious, real food that boosts your physical performance, productivity, and wellness. This DTC brand’s range is designed for athletes and adventurers to help them in enhancing their performance.
Their previous subscription setup faced multiple challenges:
- Limited widget customization options hindered quick messaging experiments
- Reliance on the Smartrr team for changes due to the lack of an in-house developer, and inadequate cancellation prevention flows led to high first-order churn
- The customer portal lacked customization, causing a poor user experience and confusion among one-time purchasers.
- Additionally, the admin portal was unreliable, with issues in updating product SKUs and no bulk actions feature, making quick changes difficult.
As Veloforte migrated to Loop, they explored the opportunity to personalize gifts and discounts to reduce their first to second order churn. Besides, they were also looking to send targeted campaigns to subscribers based on certain segments/predetermined criteria.
Similar to the fifth example that we saw above, Veloforte lets you create bundles of four products and the cumulative discounts that you earn as part of the buying process.
Gamification with Loop Subscriptions: Lilac St
Lilac St, a popular beauty brand known for its DIY eyelash extensions, operates on a monthly box subscription model. The company is led by Alicia Weng, a former product manager at Google, and Patrick Ellsworth, previously at Tesla and Google.
Their previous subscription setup included a custom UI on their store built atop Recharge and Recharge Legacy as their checkout method.
This DTC brand encourages buyers to choose more products and earn a discount of up to 45%. Besides, they reduce the price of each set of eyelashes as the number of lashes go up.
In the screenshot below, you’d notice how they activate discounts only when you select a minimum of four products. Besides, the savings is also shown as an added incentive for buyers.
Impact of gamification for Lilac St
Lilac St gamification program resulted in a 72.7% increase in subscriptions revenue in 11 months.
Gamification with Loop Subscriptions: JASPR
Founded by Mike Feldstein, JASPR provides air purifiers that help homeowners, businesses, and healthcare practices provide a clean-air environment for their customers and patients.
In the screenshot below, you’d notice how they encourage buyers to add air filters as part of their subscription plan. A one-time purchase costs buyers $1,199 while a subscription plan along with an air filter costs you only $999 and even offers you a lifetime warranty. These filters are automatically replaced every 6 months.
Gamification with Loop Subscriptions: NutriPaw
NutriPaw aims to make pet health straightforward by offering products that are not only enticing to dogs but also vet-approved and cherished by pet owners.
This D2C pet brand uses gamification in its subscription model by offering a "Build-A-Nutripaw-Box" feature where customers can customize their pet care packages.
This interactive approach encourages deeper engagement as subscribers select products that best suit their pet’s needs. The anticipation and excitement of creating a personalized box likely improves customer retention and satisfaction.
When you visit their ‘Bundle & Save’ page, you can start selecting the products you want to buy.
As you start adding products to your cart, you'll notice the savings you're beginning to make in every product. The good thing about this visual is once you're able to have a customer land on this page, and they start adding products to cart - you can show them the savings they're making with every product. It serves as a sense of excitement and satisfaction.
This immediate reward creates a positive shopping experience, enhancing their perception of value and potentially increasing their loyalty to the brand. Such incentives can make the buying process feel more rewarding and encourage further purchases.
Summary
In this blog, we examined how DTC brands successfully use gamification with Loop Subscriptions to enhance customer engagement and boost subscriber revenue.
By integrating playful and rewarding elements into the shopping experience, brands like TruHeight, Good Protein, Mammaly, and others have significantly increased subscriber retention and order completion rates. Their gamification techniques include progressive discounts, milestone rewards, interactive customer portals and a lot more.
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