Dodo Pizza: How we launched the game Dodomania with a huge success

Dodomania - Dodo Pizza’s prominent annual sales promotion ended on October 17, a month after it launched. Along with the campaign, the company introduced a game in the Stories feed of their mobile app and summed up the results. The latter exceeded the wildest dreams of Dodo Pizza, InAppStory, and all pizza lovers: 162 thousand unique users, excellent user engagement growth, and over 9 million views in four weeks. This article will tell you how it became a great success story and why this is just the beginning.

The setting

The main task of the story-based game was to involve the maximum number of people in the Dodomania promotion. The idea was that if a person played during a month more often, the higher the chances of winning one of the week’s prizes— a car, vacation tickets, an apartment near the sea, etc. At the end of the promotion, there is an ultimate prize for the top 10 players: a year's supply of pizza.

The main concept

To stir things up with the upcoming promotion, Dodo Pizza decided to release a game and place it in the Stories feed of their mobile app. The InAppStory team was responsible for developing and rendering the design and animation of the game, while the Dodo Pizza team implemented the concept and added engaging mechanics. We chose the Candy Crash mechanics game, where users need to rearrange the puzzle pieces in a row, diagonal, or column to be replaced by new elements.

Our team used pizza ingredients as the game elements: cheese, tomatoes, bacon, salami, onions, and mushrooms. We added two essential features to increase players’ excitement. The first one was to give bonus points for finishing a pizza before the time expired. The second one involved burning a certain number of pizza ingredients to collect a whole one, depending on pizza type: Margherita, Meat, Carbonara, or Vegetarian.

An essential part of the game was the giveaway. Every week, the company gave one of the prizes to participants with the highest results. Anastasia Bestsenko, Project Manager from Dodo Pizza, describes the company's approach to their campaign as follows: 
 

“This is the most extensive Dodo Pizza promotion campaign, so we wanted to make the prizes more valuable: travel tickets, an apartment near the seaside, and even a unique customized Dodo automobile.

In our earlier promotions, we realized that people did not actively participate due to the fundamental mechanics. Ergo, we decided to find a way to make the mobile experience more memorable, engaging with the grand prizes. So we came up with the concept of ​​making the mini-game. Fun but straightforward actions of the Stories game allowed our customers to participate more proactively since they need to make some effort to win a valuable prize."

Business results

In total, 315 thousand games were played with 162 thousand unique players. 71,6% of users came from the Stories feed straight to the game. The most persistent users played more than 90 times, and 6680 players scored more than a thousand points. On average, each player spent 250 seconds in the game. The records are as follows: the best result was 15,137 points, and second place was slightly less than 500.

From the Dodo Pizza, Anastasia comments: “We are delighted with the results: more than 162,000+ unique users played the game in the mobile app at least once during the four weeks of its release. That is far more than the metrics for a game created on a Single-page application.

Some clients changed their behavior patterns and began visiting the mobile app more than just playing the game. The average activity per client was 1.97, with our targeted value of 1.5. That is an excellent indicator of how we managed to gain more customers with the help of our marketing campaign.
 

Among the factors that particularly influenced our metrics were the simplicity and replayability of the game. The mechanics of "three in a row" are familiar to everyone who played similar games. Additional attempts to win a grand prize were given once a day, making the users appreciate every single opportunity to play. At the same time, every attempt showed how high they climbed in the leaderboard, making their desire to participate again much stronger. It seems that this is what ultimately had such a positive effect on the activity of the players."
 

Pavel Murkin, the leader of the InAppStory development team, believes that the game's success was mainly due to its simple yet addictive gameplay. It had everything that a game needed: swift onboarding, engaging sound effects. Pavel notes: “An important component of the game was the competition itself. The participants saw the leaderboard and gave it their all, taking the highest possible rankings. It also stimulated them to buy pizza and earn new attempts to play the game and acquire huge prizes."

Further plans

Right now, together with Dodo Pizza, we prepare a new game for the New Year holiday, or rather a series of games united by a similar concept. The launch is scheduled for early December. That's why don't forget to watch the new Dodo Pizza app Stories for more fabulous prizes.

As you can see, the advantage of gamification in mobile Stories is simple but yet so efficient. The mechanics built into the Stories feed are more attractive and accessible than a browser game from 1995.

Even the same project manager from Dodo Pizza added: “Gamification enhances customer engagement in sales and marketing campaigns. We plan to build up our experience on this front together with InAppStory. We will continue to try different interactive mechanics, from simple time killers to more complex, multi-stage stories. It seems that gamification is the future of all of our upcoming offers."