How To Increase Customer Engagement By Using Gamification

Plenty of companies struggle to grow customer engagement and let other people know about their brand.

Gamification — a practice of incorporating gaming elements and experiences in settings that are not related to games — can help with that.

Don’t be tricked into thinking that gamification is badges & gold stars that’ll magically bring you new users or push your employees to master a new framework in a month, though. For gamification to delight, make awkward and boring things fun, and engage users to play your game — borrowing from gamedev, right? — you need to know what makes them tick: what scares them, gives them joy, what they would rather avoid, and so on. So, what you as a business can get from gamification?

Gamification In Action

Gamification in e-learning improves student’s performance by 34.75% and they are more motivated to take challenging courses offered within it. Banking apps are using it to reward customers for spending money on particular activities: getting cabs, buying books, traveling, etc. Gamification helps with onboarding and recruitment, it’s integrated into corporate education programs, and lots of industries utilize it in marketing and sales. 93% of marketers say they’ll continue using it.

Let’s take a look at Starbucks.

Firstly, Starbucks has a rewards program where customers receive stars for every dollar spent — through the Starbucks App, they can redeem rewards once they reach a certain number of stars for a meal, drink, or merch — which drives people to come back to them; these rewards are an element of gamification.

Secondly, let’s go to their website. Every resource that wants to work with EU customers has to comply with GDPR and has to ask users permission to use their cookies. But Starbucks, right after you’ve pressed “accept,” gets you a pop-up with a question — “what about a real cookie?” — and wants to redirect you right to ordering things. That is, too, a part of gamification — interactive user journey: it’s unpredictable, urgent, personal — and it makes users’ smile. So: not everything is about badges and rewards; gamification transforms even the most tedious elements of user experience into something fun.

Brand Awareness Increasing

In 2021, users will be expecting more businesses across industries. If they’ve had a good time with a meditation app that helped them reduce anxiety through gamification mechanics, they won’t like it if their app for rideshares will keep bothering them with notifications of minus 50% for the next ride if it’s evening and they’ve just gotten home.

The good thing is, you can give them more — and mechanics that offer more value than users’ have expected to receive is one of the ways to do it. Like when you come to a museum, and they offer you to see a dinosaur in motion reconstructed via 3D imaging or a Venus de Milo that’s not broken — through an AR-based app.

Gamification lets you deliver more than expected, surprising your users, making them feel in control, allowing them to contribute and be heard; moving them.

It’s both a joy to your users or customers and basically your PR campaign, constructed through software development and lots, lots of user research.

User Engagement Driving

Video games give you rewards, but material rewards for wins — gold, XP, etc. — isn’t the only thing that makes you happy when you pass a level. It’s personalization, too: when an NPC notices your progress when your surroundings are changing after your win. That’s the players’ prize for performance: the game interacts with them, recognizes them, praises them; makes them feel special.

Facebook works similarly, too, — its gamification mechanics react to your performance. As businesses that spend money on advertising are one of Facebook’s biggest sources of income, it offers you-as-a-business congratulations if a post or an ad is performing well and free money. Or, it gives a “low-stakes” opportunity—a pop-up that asks if you want to boost your underperforming post for $5 and reach a larger audience.

Customer Loyalty Boosting

A famous app for learning new languages, Duolingo, has a freemium monetization model — learn for free or learn without ads, make mistakes for “free”, and have special lessons for pronunciation. Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker launched it in Pittsburgh and it grew with lightning speed beyond its borders because of word-of-mouth. Each happy user told at least five of their friends about the app, and all of them downloaded it and started learning new languages.

Like with games, right? You tell all about games that hooked you at least to some people around you. You’re loyal to them and you diligently work as their most dedicated salesperson (maybe making your friends hate you.)

Duolingo has created forums for native speakers and beginners, gathered tips and pushed them into the design, and made the first adopters their most passionate advocates and promoters. To increase brand awareness, you have to build the entire experience in a gamification app around users and the niche you’re in.

User Data Generating

When people engage with your business, they leave data—lots of it, and you can use it for personalization to, for example, offer them additional value. Say, you’ve created an app for wellness and one of the features is helping people fall asleep. They can choose music or soundscape they want to listen to—and, as the app is hooked to their Fitbit (a bit of API programming is required to pull this one off) and they’ve agreed to share their data with you, you know when they fall asleep. You know when they struggle to do so as well.

You can help them with that by offering other music, asking them to pass an anxiety questionnaire, share their worries with a therapist, and talk to a friend in the in-app online community. Or, you say what’s up with the 60% of users struggling with falling asleep as the end of the month approaches (which is 48% more than in the middle of it), prompt them for a reason they aren’t sleeping, and then share the results on social media. That’s both engagement, personalization, and your other PR campaign.

Lead Scoring Increasing

With all these people talking about the way your brand moves them, you will have more leads who’ll be easier to turn into paying users. People easily offer money to brands they’ve been referred to or recommended to try.

The most important thing to remember — again — is that gamification’s strength isn’t in rewards. E-learning apps can be super effective, but they can be anxiety-inducing and annoying to no end. Gamification moves with its experiences that are carefully crafted around each user and their needs and wants—perhaps even those they haven’t been aware of. That’s the main engagement driver.

Source:Plato Data Intelligence