Tourism
Thurgau Bodensee Tourismus
Thurgau Bodensee Tourism has embraced the innovative approach of strategic Gamification to address the evolving challenges of the tourism industry and distinguish themselves from competing regions.
They recognized its transformative potential to elevate brand recognition and attract existing as well as new visitors by using Gamification to showcase unique regional offerings in a creative, interactive, and engaging way.
Gamification has proven to foster increased and prolonged customer engagement, build anticipation and excitement among potential tourists, and serve as a creative medium to highlight the region’s distinctive, diverse experiences.
The Result
Who is Thurgau Bodensee Tourism?
Thurgau Bodensee Tourism is the leading tourism organization for the northeastern Swiss region of Thurgau. Situated between Lake Constance and scenic hills, the region is famous for its idyllic landscapes, orchards, vineyards, and serene lake shore.
The tourism organization is committed to showcasing Thurgau’s distinctive mix of natural splendor and cultural richness, attracting both local and international tourists.
Thurgau Bodensee Tourism offers a variety of experiences, from bike trails through apple orchards to wine-tasting in historic venues, ensuring visitors enjoy unforgettable moments while emphasizing the area’s tradition, innovation, and sustainability.
Overcoming Obstacles: Addressing Challenges in Visitor Attraction and Retention
The tourism sector, specifically smaller entities like Thurgau Bodensee Tourism, faces multifaceted challenges in today’s dynamic environment.
One apparent challenge is the decrease in visitor numbers post-COVID-19. During the pandemic, the Thurgau Bodensee region experienced an uptick in visitors from nearby European locations as international travel restrictions left people exploring closer to home. However, as international travel resumes, the influx of tourists to the Thurgau Bodensee region is decreasing, posing substantial challenges to the local tourism industry to keep attracting customers and convincing them to visit Thurgau instead of going abroad.
Building a recognizable and meaningful brand identity is another challenge, as the Thurgau region is less well known than famous Swiss regions such as St. Moritz and Zermatt. The large competition within Switzerland therefore makes it difficult to stand out from the crowd and draw attention to the region’s unique offering.
In addition, it is a constant challenge to retain customers and encourage repeat visits. Therefore, in a market saturated with diverse and enticing destinations, it is important to adapt to and exceed customers’ changing expectations.
Strategic Gamification: Thurgau Bodensee Tourism’s Innovative Approach to Brand Enhancement and Customer Engagement
As mentioned, the tourism industry is intensely competitive, and creative promotional strategies are now commonplace. Consequently, Thurgau Bodensee Tourism sought innovative solutions that would distinguish them from competing regions and their promotional endeavors. It became paramount for this region-focused organization to provide prospective visitors with an enjoyable way to explore what the region has to offer in terms of seasonal and diverse attractions.
After debating the use of several different strategies, Thurgau Bodensee Tourism has recognized the substantial value of Gamification. Gamification holds transformative potential in the tourism sector, serving as a brilliant mechanism for companies like Thurgau Bodensee Tourism to foster increased engagement to elevate brand recognition and attract new visitors by showcasing unique regional offerings in an innovative and engaging way.
Thurgau Bodensee Tourism harnesses this innovative marketing strategy to consistently captivate prospective visitors with tailor-made experiences, aspiring to cultivate lasting customer loyalty and increase the number of new and returning visitors.
It quickly became apparent that interactive games and rewards not only build a sense of anticipation and excitement among potential tourists but also serve as creative mediums to highlight the region’s distinctive, diverse experiences.
Thurgau Bodensee Tourism X BRAME
While looking for a fitting partner that could provide them with the Gamification services they needed, Thurgau Bodensee Tourism connected with BRAME, a Swiss startup company offering a Gamification software-as-a-service tool.
One reason Thurgau Bodensee Tourism chose BRAME as its Gamification partner is the versatility and intuitiveness of their Gamification solution, which allows the tourism organization to create fully customized marketing campaigns.
The software developed by BRAME offers Thurgau Bodensee Tourism a diverse selection of game types and fully customizable templates to choose from. Nadine Pfister, who works in the communication and partner service department at Thurgau Bodensee Tourism, highlighted that due to these features, they can provide their audience with continuously renewed touchpoints, ensuring visitors keep returning for a new interactive experiences.
Beyond the creative breadth, the outstanding support and inputs provided by BRAME are very insightful, inspiring novel ideas for future campaigns.
Moreover, according to Nadine Pfister, the provision of real-time analytics stands out as a significant advantage, offering a clear understanding of the performance of each campaign. This real-time insight is crucial, as it helps Thurgau Bodensee Tourism to use its learnings and refine their strategies for subsequent campaigns.
Results: Impressive Outcomes through Gamification
Thurgau Bodensee Tourim’s gamified campaigns are various. However, what they share amongst each other is their great effect and success.
Revitalizing Winter Tourism – An Innovative Gamified Advent Calendar
Faced with the challenge of great competition during the winter season by well-known ski regions across Switzerland, Thurgau Bodensee Tourism sought an inventive solution to stand out and boost customer engagement.
To achieve this, they implemented a gamified Advent Calendar campaign, allowing visitors to win daily vouchers and prizes sponsored by their partner network for various experiences within the Thurgau region.
The results were significant; the interactive Advent Calendar recorded almost 300,000 visitors in just 24 days, with visitors returning on average 15 times. It also increased the newsletter open rate by over 12%, proving Gamification’s effectiveness in increasing newsletter performance rates.
Blooming Success – A Gamified Quiz
To celebrate and promote the start of the blossom season, locally known as “Bluescht”, that lasts from April to May, a vibrant campaign was launched aiming to highlight the various blossom-related activities and events occurring in the region.
This innovative approach not only amplified the attraction of the regional blossoming and spring-related activities but also served as an interactive platform for participants to learn and immerse themselves in the regional culture and specialties.
Thurgau Bodensee Tourism also rewarded prizes such as a “Night under an Apple Tree”, tickets to the nature cinema, and tickets for an “Indulgence Tour,” allowing the winners to explore the seasonal activities by themselves.
By attracting close to 29,000 unique visitors and generating 4k unique leads, the numerical results of this campaign speak for themselves and underscore the potential of gamified experiences in promoting regional attractions and events.
A Summer Full of Activities
To spotlight the diverse summer activities of the Thurgau Bodensee region, a “Summer Activity Personality Quiz” was launched, offering participants recommendations about their ideal watersports type along with a chance to win appealing prizes like wakeboard sessions and cruise tickets on Lake Constance.
This creative initiative served dual purposes: promoting the region’s variety of summer offerings while being able to effectively segment the target audience based on their recreational preferences.
The quiz captivated over 6,000 visitors and generated a significant number of new leads, proving it to be a highly engaging method to ensure participants discover and enjoy activities best suited to their interests, all while elevating awareness and appeal of the Thurgau Bodensee region’s summer experiences.
Strategic Insights: Leveraging Gamification for Enhanced Engagement and Promotion
Thurgau Bodensee Tourism made several key learnings through their experience with Gamification.
According to Nadine Pfister, one of the key insights is the importance of clearly mentioning the game in the subject line of newsletters to, on the one hand, promote the game itself and, on the other hand, enhance the opening and click-through rates of the respective newsletter.
Proper promotion of the campaigns, in general, is crucial; the game must be easily discoverable by various target groups to gain adequate recognition and interaction. This can be achieved by using the company’s own channels, such as company newsletters and Social Media channels or on the company website. For the Advent Calendar campaign, for example, Thurgau Bodensee Tourism used a pop-up on their main webpage that cleverly led visitors to the gamified Advent campaign.
Thurgau Bodensee Tourism has also realized that by using Gamification regularly, long-term visitor engagement can be achieved.
The interactive campaigns can be an additional channel for sharing new offers and seasonal activities. In that way, Gamification helps to keep existing and potential tourists interested and well-informed about the diverse experiences available in the Thurgau Bodensee region all year round, and occasional motivations in the form of prizes that can be won in the gamified campaigns additionally incentivize repeated visits.
Evolving Engagement: Anticipated Future Success Stories
Given the overwhelming popularity of the past Advent Calendar campaigns, which each year proved to be a customer favorite, Thurgau Bodensee Tourism anticipates its yearly return to be grande again, with many partners already expressing interest in future participation.
Moreover, the tourism organization is looking forward to exploring new game types, such as the dropper and driver games, which promise even more significant levels of customer engagement.
Thurgau Bodensee Tourism is also keen on continuing to leverage its extensive partner network in upcoming campaigns. By integrating partners into these interactive experiences, a win-win situation can be achieved, with partners enjoying increased visibility and Thurgau Bodensee Tourism providing enriched customer touchpoints. This collaborative approach not only elevates the customer experience by offering exciting prizes but also strengthens the relationship between Thurgau Bodensee Tourism and its partners.
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Mattel
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MPREIS
MPREIS recognized the immense potential of gamification to revolutionize marketing campaigns for seasonal events and holidays, turning them into extraordinary experiences that captivate customers and entice them to return. By incorporating game mechanics into their marketing strategies, they were able to significantly amplify the attention customer directed toward current special offers while simultaneously fostering a deeper connection between customers and the MPREIS brand.
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See what Marc Marti from Tchibo and other leading marketers had to say about BRAME.
Marc Marti
Elena Abeltshauser
Luca Cadlini
Through Gamification, we reach customers on a different level and can surprise, inspire, and reward them. We are seeing an increase in frequency and revenue as well as enhanced engagement from users of our digital channels.
I can highly recommend BRAME's Gamification tool to anyone looking for a cost-effective and simple solution to collect email addresses or increase sales
The real-time performance analytics are very important to us, as they allow us to take our learnings and refine our strategy for upcoming campaigns.
In an A/B test, we displayed a Gamification banner to half of our website visitors, while the other half saw no banner. The group with the Gamification banner achieved an 18% higher sales conversion compared to the group without it. This was an outstanding result for us, as only very few tools or methods can boost sales conversion by 18%
With BRAME’s user-friendly software, we have been able to successfully implement a variety of campaigns and now see Gamification Marketing as a key component in our marketing mix.
What I appreciate most about working with BRAME is the drag-and-drop Gamification Builder, which made it easy for us to implement Gamification Marketing, along with the expert advice and support based on industry-specific best practices. This enabled us to launch a successful Gamification campaign and implement game mechanics perfectly suited to our industry and goals.
All the games have worked well so far. The Advent calendar is a yearly highlight, and customers are already anticipating it. The cost is much lower compared to the agencies MPREIS previously used to create a gamified Advent calendar.
In the last 20 months, we’ve collected over 35,000 unique leads and achieved a double opt-in rate of over 70%, which is more than double the industry average.
We had previously worked with agencies in the Gamification field, but with BRAME, we’ve become much more flexible. [...] We need much less time to set up campaigns, have excellent support that we can rely on, and are incredibly fast in execution.
The drag-and-drop functionality allows for quick game creation without technical expertise, which is especially valuable for day-to-day operations and to save time.
The diverse selection of game types and fully customizable templates provided by BRAME's tool allow us to create new experiences every time.
Users were motivated to repeatedly participate in games through gamified marketing campaigns, increasing the digital engagement and driving more frequent purchases.
Through our gamified campaigns with BRAME, we were able to generate numerous new app downloads and welcome new SPAR Friends members to our community. BRAME has made a lasting impression on us, and we are looking forward to various other campaigns.
During the European Championship, the Hit-the-Target Gamification Marketing mechanic increased sales conversions by 44% between June and July compared to January to May 2024. Additionally, the average card size grew by 11%, and transactions increased by 21% during the same period.
Compared to previous third-party providers, BRAME offers us a more flexible tool and the ability to independently create campaigns at a considerably lower cost.
Through a social media campaign with gamified content, we generated 14,000 leads, with 25% signing up for our newsletter via double opt-in. We were amazed at how easy it was to generate high-quality leads with Gamification Marketing in just four weeks. Simply perfect!
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