By Johann Carpio
Gamification is the utilization of the elements of game design as well as game principles to non-game contexts. It is used to maximize user engagement, learning, organizational enhancement, the usefulness of systems, crowdsourcing, productivity, and evaluation. Gamification is starting to create a huge impact on this digital world that websites are lured into using it to increase digital engagement and cope against their competitors.
However, aside from achieving your goals through digital engagements, gamification also helps in other aspects of your business which includes encouraging community building, building loyalty among customers and adjusting to consumer behavior.
There are different elements of gamification that helps in engaging users. These elements are points, badges, levels, leaderboards, and challenges.
Elements of Gamification
- Points – this is the most common elements of gamification and also the most accepted one. The concept of the point system is similar to playing games like basketball. The higher the points, the more chances of winning. Giving points to users are very helpful to engage them with your website.
- Badges – it is a good system that recognizes the skills of users. Foursquare is one of the very first sites to launch a unique way of engaging users, it’s through digital badges. These badges are assigned to users at every level of achievement. This idea from Foursquare started to spread across numerous websites and users are responding positively to
- Levels – Like any other ordinary game, gamification also has a very useful way of earning the loyalty of users, it’s through a level system. In this system, users are introduced to numerous levels where they can participate and get several skills. Getting through one level creates a satisfaction for every user.
- Leaderboard – Another very effective way to engage users to sign up and participate on your website is through leaderboard. Commonly, leaderboard system is used by big communities who wish to rank their users as per their performance and give them rewards and bonuses basing on their positions.
- Challenges – It is a very good way to ignite competition among users, allowing them to complete every challenge to unlock and get reward points. These challenges can go in different forms like quizzes, trivia or content creation that needs to be shared on different social media platforms.
- Likes and Shares – People are starting to embrace social media as part of their daily routines. If you want your target audience to know about your website, you should use social media to influence more audience especially because it is the already part of most people’s lives.
Since you already know the basic elements of gamification that is being used these days, you should now understand the benefits of gamification on your eCommerce sites.
Benefits of Gamification Into Your eCommerce Site
Amidst the pool of eCommerce sites today, it becomes a real challenge to stand out among them all. Though old-school marketing strategies like email pop-ups, live chat, and messaging bar still work in engaging shoppers, you need to upgrade into a much modern form of strategy that can optimize for the top performance of your site. That’s when gamification in marketing stands out.
Gamification in marketing has its own benefits and it is just right for you to know about it.
- Gamification Improves Customer Engagement
Being lousy and boring is a ‘No-No’ these days. Users want to get fun as much as possible and you can only do it through the use of gamification. It also encourages one of the most important social KPI’s trailed by many brands – social engagement.
- Gamification Improves Loyalty Among Customers
Believe it or not, gamification improves loyalty among your customers. This is all due to the dynamics that are used by gamification to increase the customer retention. They are also using a point system that gives incentives to users who play games through their website.
- Gamification Improves The Influencer Marketing
Once your gamification dynamics and projects both get successful, you can achieve and influence more audience, thus, forming a community that reinforces the values towards consumers.
- Gamification Provides a Good Learning Experience
Gamification is not just a simple game. It means so much more than that! It is an opportunity to improve your customer’s experience through acquiring important information that should lead to meeting their needs.
- Gamification As Viral Marketing Strategy
Once the app, website or other gamified platform goes viral, it creates instant traffic to your website simply through the word of mouth. As long as it’s fun, engaging and stimulating, it will surely become a great hit.
- Gamification Provides In-depth Data
Usually, gamification platforms start with social login as a form of authentication used by most brands. Social login is quite significant because it unlocks the user’s social interactions, giving proper knowledge of their passions and likes.
- Gamification As A Good eCommerce Marketing
It would be wise to integrate gamification into your eCommerce site. Why? It’s because the system creates a great impact towards your site’s selling process. This is a sure win digital marketing strategy.
Gamification As The Best Marketing Tool For eCommerce Sites
Now that you’ve known all the important factors about gamification, it is time to understand how it works as the BEST marketing tool for an eCommerce site.
For instance, you have basic pop-ups on your site, do you think you can engage more people to sign up? The answer would be quite devastating. Did you know that the design of pop-ups greatly affects user engagement? Aside from its design, you must also learn to be creative in terms of the words that you’ll use. You can incorporate a spin-to-win promotion on your site as it provides fun and high chances of getting conversion through your email pop-ups.
Conclusion
Gamification levels up the rate of your email capture and it’s very easy to implement. In an eCommerce site, you need to be strategic towards you conversion optimization to attract more customers. If you want to create a positive impact on your business, start using gamification now and attract more customers to your site!
Johann Carpio writes for digital marketing firm with the goal of building a company’s authentic web popularity and brand presence. He writes mostly about how inbound marketing strategies can help a company’s business.
