Employee or Partner disengagement can be a costly affair for companies! One of the most challenging tasks for companies is to maintain engagement with a consistent pattern. The term ‘gamification’ has garnered a lot of attention and interest in the business domain. Several companies diversifying into the tech space have been instrumental in adopting gamification to build strong engagement, raise brand awareness, and enhance their turnover to upscale their business.
So, what is Gamification?
Gamification, which appears to be a very mundane concept goes unseen despite presenting an enjoyable and pleasurable experience. Businesses usually prefer gamified solutions as a strategy for customer retention, to stimulate virtual communities, and to institute brands. Companies generally want to utilize gamification as a way to impart training to the personnel, which drives them to work harder and savor the labor.
Gamification, in simple words, is integrating gaming elements into alternative non-gaming backdrops and ambiance. An example would be the dinosaur game that appears on the screen when the internet connection disappears.
How is gamification used in marketing?
Gamification of marketing campaigns enhances engagement, generates leads, and aggregates the analysis of the data and the number of views for a page or website. This renders more clarity on how to frame marketing strategies to sell the products or services effectively and rapidly.
How does gamification increase user engagement?
Games inculcate the psychology to win, inducing a winner’s mindset and pushing the self to perform better when competing with others. This enables customer engagement resulting in more conversion and enhancement of all marketing metrics.
Gamification as a Marketing Strategy
Gamification as a strategy helps to incorporate game mechanics and design elements to drive the customers to interact with the brand, product, or service. Gamification creates a pleasurable and memorable experience as a brand for the customers and can also induce a specific behavior or action among the customers which can vary from buying the product, subscribing to the newsletter, or sharing the elements on social media platforms. With add-on incentives like game rewards, badges, or points, there is a higher probability of more engagement and conversion of leads. An extremely powerful marketing strategy, campaign gamification presents the opportunity to create engaging, inspiring, and influential experiences for the customers that inherently synchronize with the brand or product and can bring meaningful results for the business.
How to implement a gamification strategy?
When starting to work with a gamification strategy, the primary step is to evaluate the objective and the desired end goal. Some of them could be from the following:
- To surge the time spent by visitors on a page.
- Offer modest discounts and enhance the order value for the products or services.
- Enhancing the brand advocacy through loyalty or reward points.
- Build the reputation of the brand aligning with ‘fun’ by launching new games with creative approaches.
- Increase brand awareness among the customers.
- Collection of data (partners, customers, or users).
After deciding the objective and the potential outcome for the campaign, the next step would be to decide on the concept and the flow for the gamified elements. This requires fine-tuning of the imaginative wheels and coining the purpose with the game. Here’s a few of the examples of gamification widely used in the industry. However, you can always innovate with your creative energies to device a game for an ultimate customer engagement.
Add the ‘gamified’ effect to the cursor or pointer:
One of the best ways to grab the eyeballs of page visitors is to gamify the pointer when the viewer comes to the landing page. This would make scrolling the page an interesting experience. For e-commerce websites, one of the best ways this can be utilized is by incorporating a game around the hovering of the mouse, which could end up in a discount leading to a certain percentage which could be a fixed value or changing figure.
Games that give loyalty or reward points:
Loyalty appears to be a mutual requirement from the customer as well as the company’s end. It doesn’t need to be reiterated that maintaining a customer is 5x more economical than acquiring a new customer. A loyalty or reward-based game can be a very strong strategy. The preview of the gamified components on the website can attract a significant amount of website visitors to join the loyalty program. For instance, it can be as simple as daily scratch cards or a character or tool presenting the reward.
Loyalty or reward-based campaign gamification is also the perfect way to engage the partners or employees of an organization and can add a fun element to the internal training programs of the company. This enhances the feeling of inclusivity among the employees and partners and creates a nurturing and supportive working environment that ultimately boosts their productivity and becomes advantageous for the company.
Virtual badges can also be one of the in-game elements in loyalty or reward campaigns, which can be an attractive component.
‘Spin-the-Wheel’:
Gamification elements like the ‘Wheel-of-fortune’ or ‘Spin-the-Wheel’ add to the ‘fun’ element where ‘fate’ or ‘luck’ plays a strong role. This can act as a mini gift for the viewers scrolling through the website or application and can easily grab their attention for specific or seasonal campaigns with special offers that smoothly align with the objective planned priorly. Any generic pop-up on the screen can be easily neglected but a wheel that wants to test your luck is a hard one to scroll over.
Games with leaderboard on the webpage:
Leaderboard games unleash the competitive spirit among the users and trigger their urgency to win rampantly. Some commonly gamified elements designed with this concept are quizzes, memory-based games, or tasks relating to timely completion. For a gamified campaign directly presenting the score records, it is likely to have a higher probability of the same being shared by the customers on different social media platforms, thereby building strong brand awareness. For example, applications like Step Set Go or Healthifyme give weekly, monthly, and annual reports on their progress and have leaderboards to keep up the game among the customers.
Measuring the Impact of Gamification with Engagement Metrics
One of the fundamental attributes of campaign gamification is to have clarity on the business objective and then devise a game that takes one a step ahead in attaining the end goal or result. This can be simplified by having a comprehensive analysis of the actions and behavior of the target customers. Besides having the appropriate framework of goals, a study of engagement metrics is also a mandatory aspect, which can be evaluated based on certain predefined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will assess the success of the gamified campaigns. Some of the common KPIs can be elicited as follows:
- Rate of Customer Participation:
This is about the evaluation of the percentage of customers who are participating in the gamified elements or game.
- Time spent on the campaign:
This metric assesses the number of hours or minutes spent on the game or gamified element and the time of engagement or interaction.
- Rate of Completion:
This pointer measures the percentage of users or customers who have reached the final stage of the gamified task and completed it. This can signify the level of difficulty of the game and exude information about the motivating factors to reach the final stage and complete the campaign.
- Social promotion:
This performance indicator signifies the number of times the details about the gamified elements were shared on different social media platforms. This can imply the potential of the campaign to go viral and the capacity to get a wider reach.
- Rate of Conversion:
This metric indicates the percentage of users who followed the ‘call-to-action’ and got converted to a lead, post engagement with the gamified elements. For instance, the gamified elements were designed with the objective of brand awareness and promotion with the conversion rate being the number of users who bought the product after engagement with the game-based elements.
- Rate of Retention:
This is an indicator of the percentage of users who come back to the brand and the game after interacting or playing a game for the first time. When the retention rate is higher, it signifies that the users are enjoying the game and getting hooked to it positively.
- Feedback and Reviews:
This metric evaluates the feedback obtained from the users, through interviews, surveys, or online reviews. The feedback can be utilized to identify the gaps in the process, resolve issues, and optimize the user experience.
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