Daily chores are tedious, aren’t they? Washing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning, dusting. Gosh, such tasks!

Now, what if you walk out of your room one day after making your bed, only to find someone applauding and saying, “Good job! Here’s a cup of coffee for our Morning Star”?

Wouldn’t that make you look forward to doing such chores? Well, let us tell you a little secret — it would, and that’s because, per psychology, we humans love anticipating rewards.

Studies have revealed that the possibility of receiving a reward activates a pleasure at the centre of the brain (Nucleus Accumbens), which makes us engage in tasks consistently.

But wait, why are we telling you this? It’s not a psychology class, after all. Your managers would be glad to know that surprise rewards can be a powerful retention tool, especially when clubbing with gamification.

However, before we tell you how to use gamified surprise rewards to retain users, let’s first learn how some apps use this strategy for user retention.

1. AI Writing App Streak

“Someone’s earned bragging rights”.

If you are one of the many who have used Grammarly as a writing assistant, you might find the former sentence familiar. Grammarly is a writing AI assistant app that went from 1 million daily active users in 2015 to 30 million in 2020.

The weekly user retention strategy is among the many reasons behind Grammarly’s writing app’s success. One thing that stands out is how they use gamification to improve D7 to D14.

Exactly one week after a new user signs up and begins writing, the AI communication assistant initiates a weekly writing streak, tapping into the user’s intrinsic motivation using gamification.

(Disclaimer: This image is for informational purposes only. Opinions or points expressed represent Grammarly’s view
and don’t necessarily represent the official position or policies of Gamize by OGL.)

For this, they motivate a user to engage by mapping gamified surprise rewards with the three elements of intrinsic motivation.

Autonomy: Humans engage in activities that they’ve chosen themselves. In this case, it’s choosing to write daily using Grammarly’s tool to enhance their writing skills.
Mastery: Humans like getting better at things they want. Grammarly motivates users by showing competitive progress in productivity, mastery, vocabulary, tone and achievement.
Purpose: Finally, humans are motivated to work towards a bigger goal, which in Grammarly’s case is not only to master writing but also to unlock achievement badges for up to 280 weeks.

With this, Grammarly’s gamification strategy to improve weekly retention only improves as they reward user loyalty with weekly writing streak emails on unlocked badges and milestones.

What an excellent example of AI gamification, right?

2. Language Learning App Daily Streak

Don’t we all take pride in being consistent, be it showing up to work, working out, eating healthy, or reading a few pages of a book every night?

Duolingo, a language-learning app, uses this consistency factor or, instead, the ‘Streak’ feature for user retention. The app has seen its daily active users (DAUs) increase from 9.1 million in 2020 to over 20 million users by May 2023.

(Disclaimer: This image is for informational purposes only. Opinions or points expressed represent Duolingo’s view
and don’t necessarily represent the official position or policies of Gamize by OGL.)

How do they ensure that users consume their free content so much that they get motivated further to pay for additional features? The answer is gamified learning.

Duolingo offers users daily rewards for logging into the app daily and completing a lesson, thus maintaining daily streaks.

The reason that Duolingo could see over 6 million users in 7 days or more streak in 2022 is solely because streaks attract a user due to two reasons:

Habit formation: Charles Duhigg, in his ‘The Power of Habit’ book, explains how habits are formed due to a psychological pattern called Habit Loop.
Duolingo app has mastered the same via daily streaks.Cue: The Duolingo app uses the feel-good factor of maintaining streaks as a trigger to get users motivated.Routine: The users then begin to repeat the behaviour of logging into the Duolingo app each day and learning with the motive of getting rewarded.Reward: Finally, daily rewards, boasting of a more significant streak number among peers, and becoming part of the Streak Society after reaching inevitable daily streaks keep the habit loop intact.
Loss aversion bias: As users continue to maintain daily streaks on the app, they try to sustain them due to the fear of losing something that one has invested time and energy in.
With streak gamification and more elements like a leaderboard, leagues, progress bar, badges, XP points, etc., today Duolingo app stands at over 500 million downloads!

3. Wellness App Streaks

If we ask someone whether meditation is beneficial, they’d mostly say, “Of course it is”. Then, if we ask the same person whether they practice it consistently, will it still be a yes?

Let’s face it. Consistency is a challenge. A study suggests that initial meditation practice takes more energy and effort physically.

That’s why Calm, a meditation and sleep app, motivates users to meditate daily, even for 5 minutes, by enabling a daily meditation streak calendar.

They also have daily mood, gratitude, reflection, and sleep check-in calendars.

(Disclaimer: This image is for informational purposes only. Opinions or points expressed represent Calm’s view
and don’t necessarily represent the official position or policies of Gamize by OGL.)

And if you’re thinking about how that’s supposed to motivate people, it’s again the fact that users can see their daily meditation calendar painted in green every day as they continue to achieve their tasks.

Result? This brings out the two elements of the self-determination theory of motivation:

Competence: Calm users feel successful when they maintain their meditation streak and outnumber others.
Social relatedness: People like to belong to a social environment, and this is enabled when they start talking about their streak experience amongst friends and post it on social media.

(Disclaimer: This image is for informational purposes only. Opinions or points expressed represent the user’s view of Calm on Reddit
and don’t necessarily represent the official position or policies of Gamize by OGL.)

You see, a daily routine is the core of meditation, and the Calm app is gamifying wellness to help five million+ users track consecutive meditation days and win daily rewards.

Gamize Your Retention with Daily Check-In

Name: Gamize
Rating: 4.73 (27 reviews)
Author: Gamize

Streaks gamification is the key to retaining users, but how does one implement it, especially with the technical cost and resources considered?

That’s where a SaaS gamification software like Gamize comes into the picture that lets you launch an end-to-end streak campaign in 3 simple steps. Want to know how? Let’s get started:

Step 1: Configure Offers

a. Go to the ‘Menu’ option and click ‘Rewards’. Click on the ‘Configure Offers’ tab and add your Offer Name, Description, and Redeem rules.image will come here
b. Next, select your ‘Offer Type’ from the Coins, Voucher, Customer or Points, etc., their ‘Value’ accordingly, followed by ‘Offer Validity’ and hit save.image will come here

Step 2: Create Streak Campaign

2a. After creating an offer, Go to the ‘Daily Streaks’ under ‘Campaigns’ and add a Streak name followed by a Rule name (for backend input) and the Users you want to run the campaign for.

2b. Next, select the ‘Number of days’ for streaks and add Gamification to it by selecting the Gamification Template created under ‘Gamify Engagement’ such as Scratch and Win.

If you wish to add no gamification and simply want users to do the action you define, select ‘No template’. Then, set your own template and offers for each day.

2c. You can also add a fun element by picking a Background Color or Image for your Daily Streaks campaign page. Post this, and select whether you want to repeat the daily streak campaign or not.

Lastly, add a Winning Message and a background image like “You’ve Done It!” with a trophy, add redeeming rules, and you’re all set to launch.