Nowadays, practically everyone has a smartphone. It’s no wonder that mobile platforms are the most used across the world. As people adapted to mobile, companies went after their customers, creating various apps to make customers’ lives easier and make them loyal to their brand.
Having an app for your brand is essential to keep competition away from your customers. Unfortunately for some, the growth period for this trend has passed and we are now in the maturity phase. This means that luck is no longer a factor to depend on. Your competitors probably already have apps for their brands and now you need to stand out. Creating mini games for your brand can help you.
Mini games for your brand
Do you remember when apps started to be used by almost everyone? It wasn’t banking or social media apps that made people normalize apps, it was games!
If you said you never had any kind of game on your smartphone at that point, I wouldn’t believe it. Even if you don’t play them, you have to admit they can keep people hooked for a long time.
Why not implement this inside your app?
We will add an area for the user to be distracted with a mini game while your application continues to fulfill its purpose. Obviously, we will fully incorporate the brand image in this mini game to reinforce the brand image.
These mini games don’t need to and can’t be that complex. Our goal is to provide a simple and fun way to entertain the user who enters our app.
Want to see some examples?
Continente and Snake game
During the month of April 2024, the Portuguese hypermarket Continente implemented the classic snake game. The campaign is simple. Within the brand’s app, where the user makes their purchases, there is an icon that redirects the user (without leaving the app) to a mini game.
With the possibility of redeeming rewards depending on the number of points, many users participated in the campaign and redeemed discount coupons.
AliExpress and the Tree Collecting Game
In 2022, AliExpress implemented a game within its app where players are introduced to a tree that, when shaken, is rewarded with coins. These coins can be exchanged for discounts in the in-app store. Pretty simple, right?
It turns out that this simple campaign was so successful that this coin system is now permanent. New games have been developed to keep users’ attention and more rewards are possible to redeem.
It’s not that difficult to retain customers after all.
What are the advantages of mini games in my app?
App Store Optimization (ASO)
If you are already familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), ASO is basically the same thing. While SEO aims to define the positioning of your website, ASO aims to define the positioning of your app.
Our goal as a company is to optimize the app as much as possible to score the most points within the ASO. Our app’s placement in stores will improve as it scores more points.
But how can mini games help with this?
A very important metric in ASO is the Engagement Rate. To improve this rate, it is necessary to increase the frequency and retention of users on the app. Can you think of anything that is great for keeping people entertained? Because I can.
By implementing mini games within the app, users will have a higher Average Session Duration and more interactions within the app. These metrics will improve our ASO score and consequently improve the positioning of our app.
Know your customer
Sending surveys to measure customer satisfaction is very important, but there is a problem… People don’t like it. That’s why indirect data collection is increasingly valued by companies because it provides accurate information at a lower cost.
Using mini games, it is possible to place the player in a situation of choosing between X and Y. The result of this choice will be saved and we can know the profile and number of people who chose X or Y. All this without being invasive with the customer!
Loyalty Strategies
Implementing loyalty strategies is essential for ALL companies. Any company that does not value customer retention is doomed to lose them to the competition.
But a common problem with loyalty strategies like coupons and discounts is that people may not value them very much.
We are used to doubting everything that is given for free. It is natural. One way we found to get around this is to make the customer feel that they deserve it, a small challenge of a mini game rewarding the player with real rewards makes the customer value their reward much more.
Interested in implementing mini games within your app? Contact us so we can create the ideal mini game for your company.
