I remember chatting with a friend back in 2020. She owned a skincare store and had this issue – plenty of first-time shoppers, but not many returned. Her 'free gift after each purchase' strategy wasn't working as well as she hoped. So I said 'why not make it a game?" Two months later, a spinning wheel had become a permanent fixture in her store.
My earliest memory of spinning wheels goes way back to the game show 'Temptation'. I would curl up on a couch next to my dad, brimming with anticipation as a contestant spun the wheel that could unlock anything from unbridled joy to instant disappointment. I think something as ingenious as a spinning wheel could be the key to unlocking better user retention and engagement for you. Just ask Temu.
What Makes the Spinning Wheel a Great Tool for Startup Retention?
The spinning wheel is more than a prize dispenser; it’s a tool of engagement and if you're sleek with it, it could unlock a ton of user engagement. It combines the allure of visible prizes, the thrill of suspense, and the clarity of odds to make each user’s experience unique.
Every spin weaves into the user’s personal journey, making engagement not just likely but inevitable. The allure of the spinning wheel stems from these simple psychological concepts:
Scarcity and Desire: Prizes are laid out for the user to see. This sparks immediate interest. Users know exactly what’s up for grabs and each spin becomes a mission to snag a specific prize, turning the experience personal and urgent.
Joy of Anticipation: The wheel takes its sweet time to stop, teasing users while hovering over various prizes. This dance of almost-wins and close calls amps up the excitement, making every spin a nail-biting experience.
Transparent Probability: With the spinning wheel, what you see is what you get - the odds are clear.
How to Choose the Right Rewards and Guarantee Success From Your Spinning Wheel
The best way to ensure success from your spinning wheel strategy is to choose your rewards well and position them even better. Here are some tips I like to keep in mind:
Follow the data: Who are your customers? And what types of rewards could get them excited? Cash, subscriptions, access to events, a vacation, merch, devices, a blog feature, etc. Go back to your customer persona and figure out what's really important.
Don't be afraid to ask: If you're having trouble figuring out what rewards to add to your wheel, try asking your audience directly. You can try a poll or survey or go a little deeper: take a sample size of your ideal customer, call them, and ask about:
Their most pressing need at the moment
Their most recent purchase
Their most frequent purchases
This will give you a window into what your audience sees as 'must-have' rewards.
Space out the great rewards. Imagine this lineup of rewards on a spinning wheel with 8 sections: $1, $50 bonus, 20% discount, an iPhone 15, a company t-shirt, $200 Starbucks voucher, $1.
The most valuable reward here is the iPhone 15, so it should be more difficult to get, but not unattainable. Ideally, a small group of users should be able to win it at some point to build credibility for your wheel strategy. The easiest prize to win should be the least valuable because this saves you money and still allows your users to anticipate winning the bigger prize in the future.
4 Effective Ways to Retain and Engage Users With a Spinning Wheel Strategy
I absolutely enjoy daydreaming about fun ways to use game strategies and in my daydream haven, I thought about the following:
1. Time-Triggered Spin to Win Challenge
A time-triggered spin to win is like your daily coffee fix - it's there, waiting, at the same time every day, week, or month. It’s a rhythm that could turn into a habit. When the clock strikes that special hour, users know there’s a spinning wheel, buzzing with prizes, just a click away. Users are looped into a cycle of expectation and reward.
2. Event-Triggered Spin to Win Challenge
Now, picture this: a user makes a purchase or signs up for a newsletter, and bam! Wheel in their faces. It's like a delightful ‘thank you’ note but way more exciting. This event-triggered spin turns mundane actions on your platform into golden ticket moments. Spend a bit here, sign up there, and voila, the wheel emerges from the shadows, cheering users on and tossing prizes their way. It turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, making every on-app action a potential prelude to a huge serotonin boost.
3. Streak-Triggered Spin to Win Challenge
If you've sat with me for two minutes at a stretch, then I've probably told you about my guilty pleasure: Township, the town-building game by Playrix. Apart from being a treasure trove of ninja-like growth tactics, it's incredibly addictive.
So it's no surprise that I've easily racked up a 150-day streak which I get rewarded for daily. If the township Reddit with people holding almost 10-year streaks is anything to go by, then you should give streak rewards a second look.
There’s nothing like being on a hot streak, and with a streak-triggered spin to win, every return visit becomes a step closer to the jackpot. It’s like a digital pat on the back - ‘Good job on the 7-day roll; now spin to claim your crown!’
4. Spin the Wheel Before an Action
And then there’s the pre-action spin, a taste of the victory before the battle. Users get to spin and glimpse the prize that could be theirs - but wait, there’s a catch. A little action, a small task stands between them and their prizes like a teaser. The key here is the soft touch – it’s a nudge, not a push, inviting them into a dance where the prize, though in sight, still plays hard to get.
Setting Up Your Spinning Wheel Experiment
You can't just push a spinning wheel to all your customers without testing its effectiveness first. What if it doesn't work as well? You would be stressing your customers and engineering team unnecessarily. And don't get me started on the finance team! That's why you need to grab your scientist hat and run an experiment on a small portion of users first.
Since we already know exactly what we want, we can skip the thinking and research phase of the growth experiment process. Here's what to keep in mind specifically for the spin-the-wheel experiment:
Get the almighty hypothesis
Figure out which metrics to track
Set up proper tracking
Test different designs
Try different placements and positions
Test rewards
Test copy variations
Report your observations without boring people to death
Repeat or trash? Decide quickly
Make the spinning wheel permanent if it works
Shall we go deeper?.... Get the Almighty Hypothesis
What do you think your spinning wheel will get you in terms of engagement? This prediction step gives you clarity and a baseline on what to expect. Now, you can ask yourself "If this is what I expect the outcome of this experiment to be, how relevant is that outcome to the overall metric I'm trying to improve?"
Be careful with your hypothesis. There's a difference between the probable outcomes of your experiment and the outcome you want to see.
Figure Out Which Metrics to Track
A spin-the-wheel game is one of my favorite gamification methods because it's incredibly versatile across several growth levers. Trying to retain users? Let them spin the wheel once a week or a month. Trying to activate new users? Let them spin the wheel and claim the reward at checkout. Trying to acquire new users? Try a spin-the-wheel GIF that takes them to a landing page where they can enter their emails (sign up) to complete their wheel turn. What about reactivation? Send your dormant customers a wheel full of free transactions, delivery, vouchers, cashback, etc.
Set up Proper Tracking for Your Experiment
No matter which levers you choose, it's important to set up proper tracking. Here's how:
Get your metrics right: Ideally, as a growth team, you should already have the key metrics you would like to improve within a certain period. Next:
Decide which of those metrics would be best served by this experiment.
Get those metrics and state them somewhere everyone on the team can see them. For example, achieve a 10% boost in company X's monthly retention rate.
Carve out a target cohort: Who do you want to deploy the experiment to? For a metric like retention, you would most likely be testing to see if the customers who tend to drop off every now and then could actually be motivated to keep coming back.
The simple way to go about it is by pushing the wheel to your active or inactive customers and tracking retention from there. But I've found that a big-picture approach could work better and here's how I would do it:
Imagine that Company X had a 50% retention rate in the last 6 months. That gives you 2 user buckets to start with: those who dropped off and those who Company X retained.
Look into the 50% who returned, and filter out those who transacted every month for the last 6 months. These are your most active users and do not need this experiment because they already have a strong enough motivation.
Remember, the goal should be to keep your experiment as lean as possible. Whoever is left is your 'in-between user' who has probably gone through the cycle of dropping off and returning at some point within the last 6 months. They have 1 leg in and 1 leg out so they're great for testing the effectiveness of your spinning wheel experiment.
You can now decide on how many people you would like to experiment with from this cohort.
3. Create your Control Cohort: The first time I ran a growth experiment, I completely forgot to add a control cohort and I ended up feeling really dumb in my stakeholder sync. Don't be like me!! Your control cohort should have the same number and characteristics as the people in your target cohort.
In our retention case, if you're experimenting with 1000 people who have dropped off and returned at some point in the last 6 months, the control group should be another 1000 people who also dropped off and returned at some point within the last 6 months. Pro Tip: Divide your experiment cohort into equal halves. One half will get a spinning wheel while the other half will serve as the control group and won't get the spinning wheel.
Why is it important to have a control group in your experiment?
It's important to have a control group because you need to be able to compare the behavior of those who see the wheel and those who don't. It gives a glimpse into how your experiment cohort would have behaved if they hadn't seen the spinning wheel. It also gives you a way to see a clear impact:
If those who saw the spinning wheel had better retention than those who didn't, then it shows that the spinning wheel is an effective retention tool for you.
If the wheel doesn’t boost retention, it’s time for a rethink. Chat with the users, and get their take. Sometimes, a tweak in rewards or design can turn things around.
Set Up Proper Tracking
Setting up tracking can range from a basic spreadsheet to intricate dashboards, depending on your analytics setup. Take it from me, a balance between simplicity and functionality is your best bet. A simple Google Looker dashboard could visualize any changes in your experiment metric, while still being simple enough for anyone to understand. Your dashboard should show:
The retention rate for your experiment cohort
The retention rate for your control cohort
Other metrics you want to check (like engagement that didn't lead to conversion).
Users who came back and visited some pages after the spinning wheel without completing a transaction
A date filter to see their retention values across other periods such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and all-time.
Test Different Designs
Nailing the design is crucial; it’s like baking where the right mix determines if you get a perfect cake or a flop. It isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s a crucial element that can elevate user engagement or send it plummeting. Keep the following in mind:
Consider trying out different color schemes, themes, and visual elements. Does a minimalist approach, with its clean lines and subdued colors, resonate more, or does a bold, vibrant design capture your user's attention?
Does putting a popular meme or face in the middle of the wheel make it more appealing? Is a fast spin better than a slower one for building anticipation?
Pay attention to the feedback and behavior of your users. Do they spin more when the wheel has playful icons and emojis or when it has a more modern 'luxury' vibe? Each spin, click, and user comment is a breadcrumb leading you to the design that not only pleases the eye but also maximizes engagement.
Try Different Placements and Positions
Positioning is to your spinning wheel what location is to real estate - it’s everything. Where the wheel is located can impact its visibility and accessibility. Test putting it on the homepage for immediate visibility, or drop it within a user’s profile to make it a nice surprise.
It's like placing the candy aisle at the front of the store versus the back - each has its own merits. Analyze the data; does front and center yield more spins, or does the element of surprise work in your favor?
Test Rewards
Rewards are the juiciest part of the spinning wheel experiment. To nail this, consider diversifying the rewards. Mix instant gratification with long-term gains. Maybe throw in a dash of exclusive content, a sprinkle of discount codes, or even the golden ticket - a one-on-one with the CEO for your most loyal user. Observe your user reactions. Which rewards get them spinning like there’s no tomorrow, and which ones are not appealing? Tailoring the rewards to resonate with the users’ desires and needs can turn each spin into a personalized experience.
Test Copy Variations
There's copy and then there's "COPY"! Copy is your average 'hey! Spin the wheel for a chance to get a nice reward'. And COPY is what makes your user say "I have to spin this."
And no, I'm not talking about the 'punny' overly pretentious copy like 'Spin this wheel for a reward that spins your world'. I'm talking about smarter COPY like:
"3 people have won the iPhone 15 today. Are you the 4th?" "If you think you're lucky, then prove it. Spin the wheel" COPY uses the power of your user's curiosity to work for you. In the first example, your user most likely also wants to know if they could be the 4th winner of that present today. In the second example, your user probably wants to prove that they're a lucky person; it's a form of self-validation.
Report Your Observations Without Boring People to Death
Reporting isn't about boring your stakeholders with a bowl of numbers and graphs. It's storytelling. Your task here is to weave your data into a narrative that’s as compelling as it is informative. Share the journey from the initial hypothesis, the twists and turns of user interactions, to the revelations unearthed from the data. What did the users embrace? What did they absolutely hate?
Each metric, feedback, and observation is a chapter unveiling the story of user engagement, the successes, the missteps, and most crucially, the learnings for future experiments.
Repeat or Trash? Decide Quickly
Here’s the fork in the road. The data’s in, your users have spoken. Is the spinning wheel a keeper, or is it destined for the digital dustbin? This isn’t about being married to the idea but more about being ruthlessly objective.
If the wheel spins users into a frenzy of engagement, it’s a winner. But if it's as enticing as saltless food, it might be time to let go. The key is in the ability to adapt, iterate, or if need be, pivot entirely. Every data point is a stepping stone to refine or dump your strategy.
Make the Spinning Wheel Permanent if it Works 👑
If the wheel is a hit, boosting engagement significantly, it's time to make it a staple in your strategy. Think bigger - integrate it into your loyalty program too. Every spin could rack up points, every point a currency for exclusive rewards. It’s not just a game, but an ecosystem where engagement, retention, loyalty, and rewards are intertwined.
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