Every retailer wants the same thing during a major tournament: a slice of the attention, and an email address to keep the conversation going afterwards. The usual route is paid performance advertising — buy the click, buy the lead, hope it converts. It works, but the leads are cold, the cost climbs with demand, and the moment the campaign stops, so does the pipeline.
For the Swiss furniture retailer LiPo, we built the opposite instrument: a free-to-play prediction game for the football World Cup window that earns the email instead of buying it. Predict all 104 matches, add a few special bets — champion, top scorer, surprise team — and follow your standing for six weeks. The football does the engaging; the product does the capturing.
Predict first, register second
The mechanic is deliberately front-loaded with fun and light on friction. A visitor can make their first prediction before they hand over anything. Only then does a passwordless magic link turn that anonymous tip into a known contact — no password to invent, no form to abandon.
The newsletter opt-in is a separate, explicit choice — a DSG-compliant double opt-in, never bundled into the act of playing. That matters twice over. Legally, it keeps consent clean and defensible. Commercially, an address confirmed through a double opt-in after someone chose to play is worth far more than a box ticked in a hurry.
Behind the game runs an automated scoring engine, daily prize draws and a live leaderboard — the loop that brings players back day after day rather than once.
The viral loop, built in
Prediction games are social by nature, so we made sharing structural rather than an afterthought. Players spin up mini-leagues and challenge friends and colleagues with a share link. Each invitation pulls a new player into the same predict-first, opt-in-second funnel — reach that compounds without a matching rise in ad spend.
What LiPo's marketing team actually sees
None of this is worth much if the business can't measure it. A password-protected dashboard tracks the funnel end to end — Started, Email, Double-opt-in, First tip — and exports verified contacts as CSV straight into LiPo's CRM. Marketing sees exactly where players drop and where they convert, in near real time.
The strategic case is simple. A six-week emotional engagement loop produces verified, high-intent first-party opt-ins at a better cost and quality than cold performance ads — and because the game is free to play, it needs no gambling licence in Switzerland. Compliance-first by design, not by patch.
Buy attention and it leaves when the budget does. Earn it through a game people actually want to play, and the opt-in stays.