Guest Post by Josh Haynam of TryInteract
Two scenarios:
First, you are walking through a mall and see an interesting storefront that claims to have awesome products. Interested, you walk up to the door, but are stopped short. In order to enter the store and see what they have to offer, you have to fill out a form with your name, email address, and phone number. Disgusted, you walk away.
Second, you see a pizza place that claims to have the best pizza in the city. Intrigued, you approach the store. There’s a nice worker standing outside who offers you a sample and asks you about what kinds of pizza you like. Happy with their friendliness, you approach and begin talking about your pizza likes and dislikes. After a few minutes of talking the worker offers you a pizza based on your preferences and gets you set up at a nice table. After your meal, the worker asks if you would like to get emails when they pizza place is having specials. You agree, happy with the interaction.
The first scenario is how many lead generation forms online today appear. They are static “walls†that are in the way of something you want (like the door to the first store). We put up these walls and hold our information hostage in return for a lead. The forms often look like the one below.
The second scenario is an interactive form of lead generation. The end result was that the pizza place got your email address, the same way that’s attempted in the first scenario; the difference is the method by which that information was procured. Instead of asking up front, a dialogue was started, the process was “gamified.†The worker made it fun for you to talk about what kind of pizza you like (which is valuable information for future marketing) and in the end you decided to opt-in.
In this second process, the quiz automatically asks interesting questions to the user and gets to know them, albeit through an automated process, before asking for a lead. Putting the lead capture after the interactive portion catches people in a different mindset entirely. Asking for information up front is perceived as a necessary evil to access more content. This is abrasive and does not create a good feeling for the customer. However, the second process in which a series of questions or a “game†is used, the customer gets to know you before being asked for their information.
How to use games for lead generation:
- Interactive Quizzes: A quiz can be used to recreate the scene where a nice worker interacts with a potential customer by asking questions about his pizza preferences. You can even make a pizza quiz (don’t do that if your site isn’t about pizza). Using Interact, you can choose from quiz templates that apply to your industry and are designed to convert. Then connect your email list and ask for a lead before showing the customer how they did on the quiz. By the time a customer finishes a quiz, they feel a connection and interaction has already taken place with your brand, leading to 50% conversion rates.
- Hold a Lottery: It’s amazingly fun to enter in a competition where everyone wins. That’s exactly what you can do with a giveaway lottery. Here’s how it works - set up a sweepstakes where the minimum winning is a 10% off coupon and the maximum is 90% off. Then give customers a discount at random in return for their email address. It’s a game that everyone wins, even you.
It’s refreshing when a business takes an interest in us and makes interacting with them fun, especially online where that’s harder to do. Just as in real life where the worker who gamified selling pizza was much more successful than the business that required an opt-in to enter, online marketing greatly benefits from making lead generation more like a game.
