Your loyalty program is a savings account paying terrible interest. Nobody logs in to check a savings account.
Forbes reported in February 2026 that roughly 30% of Sephora's 46 million Beauty Insider members engaged with Beauty Insider Challenges. e.l.f. reportedly saw monthly active users climb 125% after gamifying its app. Neither result came from a better earn rate. Both came from changing the shape of the ask.
A challenge is a task with a deadline and a visible finish line. Try 3 shades this month. Review something you bought in June. Refer a friend before Sunday. Complete the set and something small happens: bonus points, early access, a sample you did not have to ask for. Then it resets and a new one appears.
Operationally this is lighter than it looks. Quest definitions live as structured content your marketing team can author without a deploy, so a new challenge is a form, not a ticket. Flow watches for the qualifying events and fires completion. Your loyalty platform issues the reward. The only new surface is a progress display on the account page and in email.
The honest catch is that challenges are a content commitment, not a feature launch. A points program runs itself for years. A quest calendar needs an owner, a monthly plan, and fresh ideas forever. A stale challenge sitting at 40% complete since March is worse than no challenge at all, because it advertises neglect. There is a measurement trap too. Gamification pulls in the members who were already engaged, so participation rate will look spectacular while revenue barely moves. Track incremental spend per member against a holdout, or you will be reporting on enthusiasm.
Start with 1 challenge a month, tied to something you actually need: reviews on a new launch, replenishment before a seasonal dip, a category people never try twice.
Points reward what a customer already did. A quest tells them what to do next. Only one of those sounds like a relationship.
