Busfor Case Study: We Had 12 Hours, Halloween, and a "Wheel of Fortune"...

We’ve collaborated with a partner agency on a great case, where we helped increase the customer base of Busfor during the Halloween season using gamification. And now, we want to share it with you.

Client

Busfor is a large international service for searching and purchasing bus tickets that directly connects passengers and carriers. On their website, you can find online tickets for over 50,000 routes to 31 countries.

Task

To design, implement, and test gamification in under 48 hours. The ultimate business goal was to attract new customers during Halloween.

"For us, Halloween is the start of the high season and our personal horror in general. We wanted to make our marketing activities as unusual as possible for the audience, while spending reasonable resources and not throwing away tons of discounts. That’s why we picked gamification.

One of the key tasks was to activate new contacts. Since there weren’t that many game mechanics that could be implemented in a short time, we settled for the 'Wheel of Fortune'. Although at first I didn’t understand what kind of customers would engage in the game, I now completely get it."

— Galyna Panasyuk (CRM Head at Busfor)

Nuances

The client couldn’t provide internal resources for development and analytics tasks due to the tight deadlines. However, they provided copywriting and design support.

Timeframe

The client wanted to launch the campaign by October 31st.

How much time did this leave us? 

On October 29 at 6:20 PM, the Busfor’s marketer registered with the service for a demo, selected a template, and assigned tasks. And on October 31, right on Halloween, everything was already working, and the mechanics were collecting contacts.

What Was Done

On the Busfor Website

Shortly before the holiday, they created a subscription form in the shape of a Wheel of Fortune. The site visitor was offered to leave their contact details, spin the wheel to test their luck, and get a discount.

Here's how it looked on the site: At the bottom right of the screen, an intriguing icon "Get a Gift" appears. After clicking, a pop-up game appears with four possible discount options and a subscription form.

For the purpose of collecting and processing contacts, Busfor used our service. The discount appeared randomly. After that, the information was immediately sent to Yespo along with the entered email.

"On the evening of the 29th, we assigned tasks for adapting the form, identified the main problematic points, decided how to handle them, approved the budget, and the wheel started spinning.

On October 30, we did testing and a few modifications. Everything worked out thanks to the exceptional teamwork!” 

— Galyna Panasyuk (CRM Head at Busfor)

In Yespo

Each time a user won a discount, we automatically sent them a trigger email with the code and an invitation to purchase. The email looked like this:

And the workflow of its automatic sending was set up so that each participant received a personal discount that they got from the four options on the wheel:

• 75 UAH
• 50 UAH
• 5%
• 10%

We at Yespo actively accompanied the process and helped to set up all the necessary elements.

"Since Yespo does not have a mechanism to start the workflow when a contact gets added to a segment, their support helped us configure the event transfer with two parameters: email + the segment ID the participant landed on. By and large, I prefer this scheme because after the end of the campaign, the likelihood that the event won't work is higher than if a new contact doesn't get into the list. The campaign ended at midnight, so we didn't want to wait until the carriage turned into a pumpkin.

Each sector corresponded to its own discount and a separate email. For me, when setting up events, it is always a problem to correctly configure the workflow parameter checks. This has to be done quite infrequently, and I constantly forget some important points. Therefore, with the help of Tetyana and Oleksiy, we adjusted the workflow, found a couple of bugs, fixed them on the game mechanic side, and by the beginning of the holiday, the wheel was ready. First, I was worried about fake emails, and as it turned out, I shouldn’t: almost everyone provided a valid address and fulfilled all the conditions."

— Galyna Panasyuk (CRM Head at Busfor)

Results

With minimal spending, without huge discounts, and within extremely short implementation timeframe, Busfor managed to gain impressive results:

• 10% Conversion of site visitors to subscription
• 3,000 Addresses collected in less than 12 hours (Validity – 94%)
• 50% Email open rate
• 5.5 UAH Cost per lead

"We didn't expect that the new mechanic could generate such interest among site visitors! We had representatives from two offices spinning the wheel at least once, and clients joined in with great enthusiasm.

Within the first 15 minutes, we collected 200 contacts, and the first ticket with the received discount was paid by a client five minutes after the start, choosing the route 'Kyiv–Prague'.

Of course, the web version worked better than the mobile one, but overall these are quite different customer segments, so we were ready for this."

— Galyna Panasyuk (CRM Head at Busfor)

By then, Busfor had launched short-term contact collection campaigns several times using a pop-up with a discount on the first order. Their conversion rarely exceeded 2%, while the gamification we described here allowed them to achieve much better results.

Customer Feedback

"We had a great project, which initially seemed like a crazy adventure.

Once again, I am convinced that non-standard game mechanics in marketing do not go out of fashion, and their implementation is becoming simpler and more interesting."

— Galyna Panasyuk (CRM Head at Busfor)

We are pleased to participate in such an interesting project and thank our friends from Busfor for the possibility to work on their case!

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