Top 5 ways to engage consumers with Gamification

You might have thousands of followers across your social media and email subscriptions but are your followers and customers actually engaging with your brand? 

Many companies seem to face this issue, whereas at Gamify we are all about engagement and wish to help companies to create more engaging campaign experiences.

From B2B to B2C, we believe that gamification elements are some of the most effective ways to raise your engagement levels from employees to customers alike. 

In this blog, the Gamify team will go over the top 5 ways you can engage your users with Gamification.   

Before we begin- let’s quickly cover our bases and go over what gamification even is. Gamification is the act of integrating game mechanics into non-game processes and activities. Gamification motivates participation, engagement, and even loyalty, providing a memorable customer experience to all.

1) Inspire competition

2) Encourage users to challenge real friends

3) Provide incentives (partner with other brands for giveaways)

4) Loyalty reward programs

5) Add in timed elements (FOMO)

1) Inspire Competition

We as human beings are naturally competitive in one way or another. Be it through gaming against each other or against ourselves, we love to top our previous scores and outdo the competition. As a brand, be aware of this as you build gamification strategies inside your company and in your gamified marketing strategies.

Inspiring and creating competitive energy using leaderboards, progress bars, badges, and earning points that will create some fun, and you can watch your customers’ engagement levels soar. Having daily, weekly, or monthly competitions where you reward the top players that are playing games is a simple way to achieve this.

2) Encourage users to challenge real friends

Now this one might seem simple enough, but there needs to be a bit of strategizing behind it for sure. Encouraging users to challenge their friends and offering promo or referral codes to reward the customers who play is a great way to incentivize social engagement and help spread the word about your brand.

Offer users discount codes if they share on their socials and tag your brand, or if they sign up for your email marketing lists. The social sharing component will not only build positive brand awareness but actually raise engagement from an entirely new audience.

3) Provide incentives (partner with other brands for giveaways)                                                                                                                      

Everyone loves a chance to win a prize, and it is one of the most critical pieces to a successful gamification campaign. Great prizes keep users coming back for more, and creates fun competition when leaderboards are involved. Some of the most successful campaigns we have seen have not only offered prizes but have partnered with other brands and given away their products as well. One of our favourites was Resmed, a company that was raising awareness for sleep apnea and other sleeping disorders. 

They created a fun endless runner video game and partnered with Koala mattresses in Australia to give away pillows, and an entire bed set as the grand prize! Customers and fans not only came back and kept playing the mobile game to get the top score, but many of them also took a sleep apnea test, which was the original KPI that Resmed had for their audience.

4) Loyalty reward programs

Providing rewards and incentives outside of one-off competitions really deserves its own bullet point. Besides a highly recommended branded mini-game marketing campaign, (you can even create your own without coding with Gizmo), building reward mechanisms into your customer’s

The everyday buying process will definitely raise engagement, and keep them coming back. 

There are countless examples of this, but one of the most well-known ones is the Starbucks Loyalty program on their app. Every time you purchase a drink or snack using their app, you get rewarded points and badges. The points then accumulate to hand out rewards, such as free coffee, and users are encouraged and motivated to keep coming back and buying more. This is not a bad strategy!

5) Add in timed elements (FOMO)

FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is definitely a strategy that will raise user engagement within your gamification marketing campaign. Here are some statistics around FOMO in marketing:

• 60% of customers said they made a purchase after experiencing FOMO

• 56% of people are afraid of missing out on events and status updates if they’re not online

• 33% of millennials have deliberately tried to create FOMO among their peers

Adding in timed elements either in your branded mini-game campaign or in your sales and marketing strategy in general (think of count down timers to claim promotions or timed rewards) can raise awareness and FOMO, say if your customer has the chance to get 50% off a product upgrade if they claim the deal in the next 60 seconds.

So there you have it, 5 effective ways to engage fans with gamification. Implementing these will no doubt raise engagement levels, and produce some incredible results in your campaigns. Do you have any thoughts or ideas?

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