What is Gamification?
Gamification is the subtle application of gaming elements to acquire, engage and retain customers. It optimizes human motivation in a system instead of focusing on efficiency. Gamification experience can easily influence audience behaviour pertaining to a product or service. It can be implemented in numerous ways, but the core remains the same, i.e., user engagement.
How is gamification beneficial?
Gamifying users’ and employees’ day-to-day activities is a fun way to get them to interact with you and boost your business. Implementing relevant gamification campaigns suitable to your needs and goals can yield several benefits. Some of the top benefits are as below:
- Gamification reinforces basic user behaviour. Gamifying customer experience makes it fun for the user to go through without feeling pressured and bored. Most of the users finish the user journey as they will be rewarded at the end, which highly motivates them.
- The primary goal of gamification is to improve user engagement with the Brand. Fascinating gameplay and rewards work wonders for users to interact with the platform.
- Getting instant rewards, scores, and badges improve user experience and their liking of the Brand. An option for instant gratification is much more appealing and motivating.
- Loyalty programs are part of gamification methods. Engaging activities, rewarding users through currency as well as discounts, offers, and vouchers, and personalizing their communication are a few things that have promising benefits in terms of customer loyalty.
Examples of Gamification
Gamification activities and campaigns are being successfully implemented across all industries in one form or the other. So it could be for users, employees, partners, and distributors. Many companies in various industries have proven the capability of gamification for growing successful businesses.
Learning & Education
Duolingo is an educational multilingual app that focuses on learning new languages and is one of the prominent examples in the education industry for gamification. Its most attractive features are milestone rewards, badges and quizzes, and goofy notifications. It aims to help its users learn new skills at regular intervals in short sessions with assessment at the end and turn it into daily learning streaks along with leaderboards and progress bars.
Retail
Starbucks uses a star collection-based loyalty program. Users can collect these stars by visiting Starbucks, purchasing items worth specific amounts, adding money to Starbucks cards, etc. After collecting specific points, they can avail of free store rewards and continue the same. With its prominent and most-loved loyalty program, it has got its name in the retail industry.
Media & Entertainment
Disney Plus HotStar is one of the best ones in the media industry for its gamification activities. Based on its most popular streaming titles, it launches games, play-along games and quizzes for reality shows, prediction games on sports, etc. In addition, for one of the IPL game streaming, it launched watch and play for streaming with your friends and family.
Gamification techniques
There are several gamification methods and techniques that you can use to achieve your goals – user acquisition, engagement, or retention. Each method has its advantages. You can choose the game mechanic that best suit your needs and use it to your advantage.
- Leaderboards – Motivating factor that encourages you to compete and climb to the top as it is socially visible basis the scores
- Badges – Badges act as a visual motivator as they are a symbol of achievement and are socially recognized
- Rewards – Giveaways as a token of winning, participation, or the end of completing a task
- Engagement Activities – Various luck-based, as well as skill-based activities such as spin the wheel, quiz, scratch card, etc., encourage higher engagement
- Missions, Challenges – Missions and challenges act as a motivator to win and go beyond the task to feel a sense of achievement
- Narratives – Narratives and stories add a layer of fantasy along with product information for an unforgettable experience
Gamize is a SaaS-based gamification platform that helps enterprises launch varied gamification campaigns. It provides multiple engagement campaigns – scratch cards, spin wheel, and treasure chest, as well as interactive quizzes and opinion polls. That’s not all. Gamize also provides over 50 short-format HTML5 Games to integrate into enterprise applications and websites. Users can be reached on multiple channels and user behavior can be easily tracked to enhance contextual interactions.
