You hate to see them go.
After all the efforts to reach out and engage your target audience, it finally worked – they visited your competition site in droves and played your skilled game like spot the ball.
Once.
Only to never come back and play again. That kind of retention can render even the best marketing campaign useless. What should you do about it? Well, retail companies have got it figured out with quality rewards programs.

At the heart of the rewards, marketing model is client retention. Reward programs make it easy to build lasting connections with your players by incentivizing them to engage in a number of ways. This could simply be referring to friends and family, sharing a post on social media or writing a review. We’ll discuss two major approaches: rewarding loyal behaviour and building a community.

While a lot of business hold on to the old-school Tesco-in-the-90s-Clubcard perception of reward programs with discounts and sales. These days it is shifting towards understanding the customer behaviour rewarding longevity and loyalty. For example, Sky, in its VIP package reward users for how long they have been with the company to reduce the churn in a highly competitive market. The same principle can to your competition site – the more time people spend playing games the more chances they get to win the prizes they came for. This works on the emotional level and turns a corporate experience of engaging with just another brand that wants something from you, into an empathetic one, where the user is being understood, his actions expected and behavior rewarded. The dopamine loops, that the developers of mobile games praise so much, become active and a positive perception of the brand grows.

Building a community is another approach worth mentioning. Instead of point collection and chasing discounts, fashion brands Sephora and Simply Be invite people to build a connection with other users, share their experience for all of them to be rewarded with exclusive community deals and gifts from third party brands.

This route offers an alternative of building behaviour competition for discounts on top of your competition site. Establishing a connection between people through referral system, community discussion and helping each other, allows to make the entire experience more humane and more about the game and the people participating in the game. Some companies and marketers go as far as making the account of the longevity and loyalty of the customer invisible, seamlessly integrated into the experience to make the reward a pleasant surprise.

Your company shouldn’t be alone when figuring out how to incentivize the users to stay longer and return to the competition site or build a community of friends and family around it. Tentacle Solutions are there for you, with years of experience and undisputed market leadership in skilled games development and they can take you through all the methods of reducing the user retention while making the hard parts seem easy.

This works on the emotional level and turns a corporate experience of engaging with just another brand that wants something from you, into an empathetic one, where the user is being understood, his actions expected and behaviour rewarded.