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.
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.
The diverse selection of game types and fully customizable templates provided by Brame's tool allow us to create new experiences every time.
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.
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.
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.
The real-time performance analytics are very important to us as we can use these to take our learnings and refine our strategy for upcoming campaigns.
Thurgau Bodensee Tourim’s gamified campaigns are various. However, what they share amongst each other is their great effect and success.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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