Swipe Right For Customers: 4 Things Brands Can Learn From Tinder

3) Give interactive media a star role

Visual appearances play a strong role in everyday life choices—what we eat, what we wear, who we are attracted to, and more. Top brands amp up their visual and interactive offerings, pairing curated content with interactive media, such as rich landing pages featuring a picture of that new little black dress with product information and a buy button.

The Victoria’s Secret PINK Nation app succeeds in gamifying the retail experience, and supporting the visual browsing experience with interactive media. The PINK Nation app uses a mini-game feature called ‘want’ or ‘need’ in the app to showcase products. The feature encourages the user to swipe left or right to identify their interest in different looks. After time’s up, PINK Nation shares the breakdown of how many ‘wants’ vs. ‘needs’ with clickable product information.

The app also uses playful elements such as a lotto-style scratch card and icons that reveal rewards or offers when traced. It also awards badges to users when they complete certain tasks.
As with dating apps, PINK Nation uses push messages as a way to prompt engagement, crafting the message content so there is a call to action paired with the payoff (such as unlocking a new freebie).

4) The journey matters in driving decisions

While gamification strategies excite users, messaging is key to delivering curated content to generate conversions. Brands need to realise the richer opportunity of going beyond reaching consumers anytime and anywhere, to reaching them with what matters most to them.

For example, “shopping” for love in a dating app isn’t much different from shopping for clothing in a retail app—in both instances, apps have an opportunity to learn a lot about a user’s preferences and behaviours and create rich segmentation profiles that can recommend good matches.

Sales psychology suggests that curation drives buying decisions, because people who are presented with a small number of choices are more likely to make a selection than those who are shown a plethora of options.

The Coffee Meets Bagel app in the US succeeds in sending hand-picked prospects to its users for a more personal dating experience by integrating with Facebook. The free dating app will select one “bagel” for each user every day (who is a friend of a friend), favouring quality picks over quantity of choices. If both parties indicate interest, they are set up to chat and get to know each other. Coffee Meets Bagel also enables you to perform tasks or pay outright for unlocking features.

Curating suggestions based on users’ preferences and affinities prompts deeper consideration than a swath of options. The key is mapping the brand’s objective to the user experience, which can unlock massive benefit, enabling the promotion of new full-price items or promoted content in a way that is more likely to delight users.

Successful apps have a defined strategy that focuses on engaging users throughout their journey with the app, rewarding desired behaviours and customising content based on users’ expectations. Taking a page from the playbook of some of the most popular dating apps can help you keep the romance alive with your app users.

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