How brands can revolutionize their data enrichment strategy with gamification

In the world of marketing, data enrichment, and personalization have become well-talked-about buzzwords

However, many marketers are finding it difficult to achieve true personalization due to incomplete or low-quality data profiles. It's hard to provide personalized experiences to your audience when you're missing important data points - and it’s even worse if the data points you have are outdated or incorrect. That's where data enrichment using gamification comes in as an innovative solution to this problem.

By creating playable experiences using a gamification platform, you can collect missing data points, and build richer and more accurate marketing contacts and customer profiles, enabling you to create truly personalized marketing experiences.

In this article, we'll explore the power of using gamification in your data enrichment strategy, and how it can help you take your marketing efforts to the next level by providing the personalized experiences your customers crave.

What is data enrichment?

Data enrichment is a fancy way of saying you make your data even more useful by adding extra information to it. It's like adding sprinkles to your ice cream, but instead of sugary treats, we're adding demographic data, social media data, buying preferences, and more.

With data enrichment, you can improve the accuracy, completeness, and relevance of your data, which can help you make better decisions and take more informed actions. From a marketing perspective, which is the core direction of this article, you can enrich your data to have complete marketing contacts and customer profiles. This will enable you to segment your target audience more effectively and plan marketing tactics across the buyer’s journey that are personalized and leads to better results.

From marketing contacts to rich customer profiles

Building rich data profiles for your customers is crucial to the success of your marketing efforts. From the moment a new contact fills out a form on your website, you should be collecting valuable data about them that can be used to create personalized experiences. As your relationship with the customer grows, you should continue to collect data at every touchpoint, including website visits, social media engagement, and purchase behavior. By doing so, you can gain a deeper understanding of your customers and their preferences, allowing you to tailor your marketing messages and offers to their specific needs and interests. This can help you build stronger relationships with your customers and increase their loyalty to your brand.

In other words, data enrichment should not be seen as a one-time marketing effort, but more as a strategy that is always activated. For every marketing tactic you push forward, you can ask yourself, what am I learning about my contacts/customers here? And how do I collect this information and make sure it is available in my CRM system?

Data enrichment: B2B vs. B2C

Data enrichment plays a critical role in both B2B and B2C marketing efforts. However, there are some key differences in how data enrichment is approached in each case. In B2B marketing, the focus is typically on collecting firmographic data, such as company size, industry, and location, as well as data on decision-makers and their buying behavior. B2B data enrichment also often involves using account-based marketing (ABM) strategies to target specific accounts with highly personalized messaging.

In contrast, B2C data enrichment is focused more on collecting individual-level data, such as demographics, interests, and purchase behavior, in order to create highly targeted and personalized marketing campaigns.

Ultimately, the goal of data enrichment in both B2B and B2C marketing is to gain a deeper understanding of your audience and create more effective and personalized marketing experiences. That’s why gamification is an effective strategy for data enrichment in both B2B and B2C settings, as it can incentivize your audience to engage with your brand and provide valuable data.

Data enrichment & zero-party data: how gamification is your best friend

Collecting zero-party data is an excellent way to enrich your data because it is based on actual preferences and needs, rather than just inferred data. By directly asking your customers what they like, what they need, and what they don't like, you can obtain accurate, factual data that can be used to personalize your marketing efforts and provide a better customer experience. One effective way to collect zero-party data is through gamified experiences such as quizzes.

In fact, a recent study by YouGov and Playable found that 50% of Gen Z and Millennials are open to providing personal preferences in a quiz to receive more targeted offers. This demonstrates the potential for gamified experiences to not only engage customers but also provide valuable data that can be used to improve marketing strategies and drive sales.

Interested in reading more about this report, check out the full research report - Marketing is a data game.

Step-by-step: How to do data enrichment using gamification

At Playable, we often help our clients to boost their data capture using a well-defined gamification strategy and these are the steps we recommend:

1. Look at the data you currently have

Gather all the data you currently have on your customers, such as names, email addresses, purchase history, and any other relevant information.

2. Spring clean your data

Now that you know which data points you already have, before you start looking at data enrichment, you need to make sure the foundation is stable. The truth is, it’s quite common for CRM systems to be a bit messy and needing a big spring clean-up before you can think about implementing a data enrichment strategy.

To spring-clean your CRM system, start by removing duplicate or outdated data, reviewing and updating contact information, and segmenting your contacts based on engagement and behavior.

3. Pinpoint which data points you need

Finally, you can determine the additional data points that would be most useful for building rich customer profiles. For example, you might want to add demographic information, such as age, gender, and location, social media engagement, or purchase preferences such as their favorite products, categories, or spending habits.

From a B2B perspective, some relevant data points that could be useful for building rich customer profiles might include firmographic data, such as company size, industry, and location, as well as data on decision-makers and their buying behavior or budget cycles.

4. Create a plan to collect these data points using gamification

Now that you know which data points you want to collect, create a plan using gamified experiences to collect the data. For example, you could create a quiz or a personality test to collect many different data points in one experience. However, you could also use a fun luck game such as a wheel-of-fortune with a lead form to collect one specific data point e.g, their birthday.

5. Analyze your enriched data

Once you have enriched your data, use it to build rich marketing contacts and customer profiles. Analyze the data to identify patterns, trends, and insights that can help you better understand your customers and create more effective marketing campaigns.

6. Personalize your marketing

Then, use these rich customer profiles and segments to create more personalized marketing campaigns that speak directly to your customers' interests, needs, and preferences. This can help you build stronger relationships with your customers and increase their loyalty to your brand.

7. Evaluate your data enrichment strategy

Regularly review and assess the effectiveness of your data collection and personalization strategies to ensure that they are achieving the desired results.

Use metrics such as engagement rates, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction to measure success and make adjustments as needed.

Let’s exemplify

Imagine an e-commerce baby brand that uses gamification to enrich their data and collect valuable information about their customers. To achieve this, they create a fun and engaging personality test for expecting mothers to take “What type of mom will you be?”, in exchange for a discount on their first purchase. The personality test asks questions about the mother-to-be's due date, the gender of their child, their preferred parenting style, and other relevant information. The responses are then used to segment the mothers into different customer groups, enabling the e-commerce company to send personalized marketing messages and product recommendations tailored to each mom-to-be needs and preferences.

This approach not only helps the company to build rich customer profiles but also enhances the customer experience by providing relevant and timely information and offers to the future mothers.

5 important tips to keep in mind

Here are four tips to keep in mind when using gamification in data enrichment:

1. Keep it simple and fun

Ensure that the gamification elements are engaging and easy to understand. Avoid complex or confusing game mechanics that may discourage participation.

2. Offer incentives

Offer tangible rewards or incentives to boost engagement and participation, such as a fun experience, discounts, free products, or exclusive and personalized content. This can encourage customers to provide their data even more.

3. Focus on relevant data

Design the gamification experience to focus on collecting data that is relevant and useful for building customer profiles and creating personalized marketing campaigns. This can help to ensure that the data collected is high quality and actionable.

4. Avoid overwhelming customers with too many data points at once

Instead of trying to collect a large amount of data in a single gamification experience, consider creating multiple games or experiences that focus on collecting specific data points. This can help to avoid overwhelming customers and increase the likelihood of participation.

Take your data enrichment to the next level with Playable marketing

In conclusion, data enrichment is a powerful tool for building rich marketing contacts and customer profiles that can help you create more effective marketing campaigns and build stronger relationships with your customers. By using gamification to collect missing data points, you can make the process more engaging and enjoyable for customers, increasing participation rates and the quality of the data collected.

So, if you're looking to take your data enrichment strategy to the next level, consider using a platform like Playable to create engaging gamification experiences that drive results. Book a demo today to learn more about how Playable can help you harness the power of playable marketing in your data enrichment strategy!

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