Gamification in Loyalty Programmes: What Actually Increases Engagement

Google's Larry Page has a well-known heuristic for judging whether a product will actually succeed, often called the toothbrush test: is it something people use once or twice a day, and does it make their life a little better? A toothbrush passes easily. Most retail apps don't, because there's usually no reason to open one outside the moment you're actively buying something.

That gap matters more than it sounds like it should. A phone holds hundreds of apps, and an app nobody has a reason to open daily quietly sinks to the bottom of a folder and gets forgotten, not because the customer decided to stop using it, but because nothing ever gave them a reason to open it today. Getting a customer to open your app once a day is already a real win against that backdrop. Gamification, done well, is one of the more reliable ways to earn that daily open.

Most loyalty programmes stall at the same point: someone signs up, earns a few points, and then has no real reason to open the app again until they happen to be buying something. Gamification is supposed to fix that, but "add a spin wheel" and "actually increase engagement" aren't the same thing. Based on gamification builds we've run, here's what we've seen genuinely move the needle, and what's closer to decoration.

Real implementations, different mechanics

MR.DIY built gamification into its loyalty app from launch: badges, streaks, and challenges layered on top of the core points system, alongside a Friends & Family group feature. The app surpassed 100,000 downloads within its first week.

We've also run a limited-time gamified promotion for a client we're keeping unnamed here, built around a reveal-based mini-game: users qualified to play through an existing relationship with the brand, registered to take part, and earned additional plays by completing a specific repeat action tied to the brand's product. The funnel from that campaign is worth walking through in detail below, because it's some of the clearest data we have on how a mechanic like this actually performs in practice.

Different products, different mechanics, but underneath all of them, the same handful of design principles are doing the actual work.

What the funnel actually looked like

Across the full run of that unnamed campaign: only around 5% of people who qualified to play ever registered to take part. That's the real bottleneck, most eligible users never engaged with the mechanic at all. But of those who did register, 99.7% went on to play at least once, meaning registration, not participation, was the hard part.

Among people who did play, the average player revealed roughly 2 outcomes each across the campaign, meaning repeat play was the norm, not the exception, among the small group who engaged in the first place. And of every outcome revealed, about 81% returned some kind of reward or collectible progress rather than a flat "miss."

That combination tells a specific story: a gamification mechanic doesn't need to convert a large share of your audience to be worth building. It needs to convert a small share into people who come back repeatedly, and it needs enough of a reward rate that repeat play feels worthwhile rather than frustrating.

What actually drives engagement, not just novelty

Social mechanics turn individual engagement into networked engagement. MR.DIY's Friends & Family group (which we've written about separately) isn't traditional gamification in the badges-and-streaks sense, but it belongs in the same conversation: it's a design choice that makes the programme's growth and engagement partly self-sustaining, rather than depending entirely on the brand's own push.

The simplest version: daily check-in and streaks

Not every gamification build needs to be as elaborate as a full reveal-based campaign or a badge system. One of the most common mechanics we build for clients specifically chasing that daily-open habit is a simple check-in: open the app, tap to check in, earn a small number of points. Do it again tomorrow, and the streak continues. Break the streak, and it resets.

The mechanic is deliberately simple, and that's the point. It doesn't need a big reward to work, because the reward isn't really the few points earned each day, it's the small satisfaction of not breaking a streak someone's already invested days into. Layer a bigger goal on top, a voucher or a meaningful reward once a streak hits a set number of days, and the daily habit has both a short-term reason (today's points) and a longer-term reason (protecting progress toward the bigger prize) to keep going. It's a small mechanic, but it's often the most direct route to the toothbrush test, a real reason to open the app today, specifically because of yesterday.

What's usually just decoration

Not every game mechanic pulls its weight. A generic spin-the-wheel with no tie to an actual purchase or account action, no collection or progression element, and rewards good enough to get one play but not good enough to chase, tends to get tried once and ignored afterward. The mechanics above work because each one is solving a specific problem: getting people to act, getting them to come back, keeping them playing after a loss, and making the top prize matter. A mechanic that isn't doing one of those four jobs is probably just decoration.

If you're adding gamification to a loyalty programme

• Tie at least one game mechanic directly to a real commerce action, not just app opens or logins, so the game reinforces the behaviour that actually matters to the business.
• Build in a collection or progression element, not just single-instance rewards, so there's a reason to return beyond the current session.
• Design the loss states, not just the win states. How a "you didn't win" moment feels determines whether someone plays again.
• Keep the top-tier reward genuinely scarce. A collection mechanic with no scarcity at the top isn't really a collection mechanic.
• Consider a simple daily check-in with a streak, even alongside a bigger mechanic. It's the most direct way to chase the toothbrush test specifically, rather than just engagement in general.

If you're weighing whether to add gamification to an existing loyalty programme, or building one in from the start, talk to us about Gamification or Loyalty CRM.