With the most fascinating trends seen in the online marketing world, the one making news among the brands and the IT industry is Gamification – A technique for customer engagement and customer retention. In the competitive world, brands are always trying something new to engage their customers where they are introducing techniques like gamification to make products/ services interesting for their customers. Let us first understand what is ‘Gamification’ and how it is influencing customers!
What is Gamification?
Definition of Gamification
The application of typical elements of game playing (for e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service.
In simple words, gamification is a concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate the target audience towards the desired brand goals. It is proving to be a very useful technique for customer engagement, brand marketing and customer retention.
Gamification as a term may be very new to listen at first but this has been around for a while now. Credit card companies and airline industry has been using these techniques for a long time now through rewards and points based systems. Despite the benefits, many companies and brands are still not very sure of using this technique for increasing business efficiency.
It includes a psychological perspectives, it influences motivation, behavior and personality. If you wish to gain deeper understanding of the concepts of Gamification, you must talk to your mobile app development specialist.
Benefits of Gamification
Massive Data collection
All those platforms that use gamification generally take personal information of the user through the process of log –in. This information proves very useful in a long term. This way your company can gather much information on their target audience and study their buying behavior and then further use it to strategize marketing techniques on the website.
Through gamification, each customer/ user is always using points, rewards like coupons, discounts or badges, this generates big data and thus avails companies with valuable customer information and insights. It is important for businesses to learn that they need to penetrate through customer engagement.
Crowdsourcing Increases Business Efficiency
A very big advantage of using customer information by having them logged into the website, you can use them as a sounding board. Gamification can aid businesses through the concept of ‘Crowdsourcing’. If the company uses customer feedback from games and applies it to business issues that they are trying to solve.
“Games with a purpose” is a popular gamification website that crowdsources information in order to train computers to generate better answers or interpretations. This kind of gamification is also leading to machine learning abilities.
Lets You Be Relevant
Techniques like gamification generate a stronger recall value among customers / users. It helps in reminding your customers that you are present and engaged with them. The pioneers have always pointed out ‘content’ as the key to keep your customer engaged, in this case businesses need to ensure that whatever content they are giving out always accounts the trends and relevant techniques of marketing and branding. Games are good way to bring people together, a tool that works best in case of social environment. Although a well-built strategy can make the impact of gamification even better. For a well thought strategy before you develop a gamification technique for your business, you must consult the software application specialist.
Makes Customers Feel Important!
A recognition value created among your customers will always be a treasure for any brand across the globe. How businesses give so much importance to brand tecognition, even customers like the attentions and appreciation. Recognition is one of the most important elements for customer happiness and engagement. Gamification can help in segregation of top performers and those who are progressing. This way you can make your customers feel noticed, appreciated and motivated to act or participate further.
Provides with a CTA
Enterprises are adopting gamification techniques so that enterprise apps can perform better and engage customers to establish a long term relationship. Gamification provides customers/ user with immediate performance feedback but guides for further actions. It helps in taking the customers through the roadmap of the enterprise app and drives their actions. A design that comprises series of steps can help the customer take those steps and be motivated to perform better. This way gamification can keep your customers engaged and make them act based on your design.
Gamification Works For –
- Engage Employees
- Customer Loyalty
- Tracking & Transparency
- E- Learning Tool
Supporting Facts:
Over 70% of Forbes Global 2000 companies surveyed in 2013 said that they plan to use gamification for the purposes of marketing and customer retention.
By 2015, more than 50% of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes.
(Source: Gartner)
Top Examples of Brands Resorting to Gamification Techniques:
Tinder – A Dating App
Dating & Fun
This dating application avails a very interesting feature where you swipe through profile by looking at their pictures. This process of selecting the ones you like you swipe right and the ones you don’t, you swipe them to the left. This kind of feature is more like a gaming experience.
Nike
Customer Loyalty & Retention
They use gamification in their Nike+ application. Through the techniques of gamification, they reward their customers and users for having an active lifestyle and encourage them to maintain the same.
Starbucks
Customer Engagement & Customer Loyalty
Starbucks uses this technique for customer loyalty creation. They reward their customers and users with points and incentivize them by gamification techniques.
U. S. Army
Training, Recruiting & Awareness
They have been using gamification techniques for training purposes since a long time. But now they have used the same to attract new recruits and create awareness among the U.S. armed forces. For more than a decade, the U.S. Army has they have used training games into a powerful recruiting tool.
Jillian Micheals
Motivation & Goal Tracking
Jillain Micheals, a well-known name in the field of fitness is encouraging the users to stay on track in their fitness programs through gamification techniques. She has also used the same to avail challenges to choose from where users can select a program that is meeting their lifestyle and requirements of fitness. Each challenge uses its own gamification technique like contests, badges, partners and group challenges.
Now, if you are convinced of adopting a gamification technique, we suggest you should still learn more about the topic in the context of your business. To understand how it can help your business, talk to the Enterprise Application Experts at Helios Solutions – An IT Outsourcing Company India and they will help you gamify your application. Until then, Game On! ;)
