Gamification Strategies to Engage and Retain Users

What should you work on when you establish a business? It’s increasing your customers’ lifetime value. If you can gamify correctly, it will add value to your customer’s lifetime. Moreover, when you do it the right way, it will also help you lower your overall marketing budget.

Effective customer retention strategies have become crucial for businesses. But acquiring new ones via a reliable platform can prove to be extra fruitful as long as you are able to retain your older ones.

You can boost your user retention by including user engagement games in your business. Gamification paves the way for experimenting and trying, which can eventually help in your business growth. Moreover, gamification helps to make the entire content exciting, which is why most businesses will stick around.

So, how exactly does gamification boost user retention? Continue reading this article to find out more!

What is Gamification?

Contrary to your probable conception, gamification refers to using game mechanics to increase channel user retention. Performing gamification correctly can play an essential role in boosting customer happiness and loyalty. When game elements are included in non-gaming activities, things become extremely fun.

Implementing gamification for customer engagement can also play an essential role in cutting costs and boosting sales. As a result, around 70% of the global 2000 companies use gamification. Gamification has been a part of our lives for a long time. You will notice achievable results if you implement the same strategy in your business.

How to Apply Gamification to Customer Retention Strategies?

Since you want to ensure that your customers keep coming back to your business, you must work on gamification. This will also play an important role in increasing revenue for your business.

Below are some of the prominent ways of how gamification increases user engagement:

1. Know Your Customers

If you want to retain your customers, you should understand what their preferences are. You might as well conduct surveys to know your customers better. If you provide your customers with exactly what they’re looking for via gamified content, they will keep coming back to you. 

2. Implement Loyalty Programs

Customers gravitate towards buying from brands that offer loyalty programs. When you provide extra perks such as points or discounts, it can help you attract the attention of your users. You may run these loyalty programs around some important events. It will keep your audience hooked. You can include games and ask your customers to play them in order to collect these loyalty points.

3. Mobile Compatibility

Mobile compatibility is important for retaining customers. Around 92.3% of users use the internet and social media sites via their phones. When you include a gamification program compatible with mobile devices, it will promote better customer retention.

4. Integrate Program Across Social Media

You should keep your customers aware of your programs at all times. Posting gamified content on social media can be a great way to reach out to a larger audience. When your customers engage with your social media posts, you provide them with benefits. Apart from that, you might as well ask them to promote further to receive additional perks.

Why is Gamification Important?

Companies using gamification for customer engagement tend to be seven times more profitable than usual. This technique can play an important role in boosting their actions towards your brand. Some of the prominent reasons why gamification is important are as follows:

Gamification can play an important role in increasing engagement. By implementing gaming strategies, you promote participation and exploration, which helps in understanding how to proceed. If people participate and interact, they will be higher up on the global scale.

Modern life can be hectic, and people may not have enough time to process much information. When you provide users with information about your business or brand in a regular way, they are likely to forget it. However, when you implement user engagement games, users find a fun way to interact with brands.

Gamification can improve collaboration between brands and users. This helps improve the productivity of brands, especially in terms of educating users about products. As a result, gamification can play an important role in building and maintaining  team culture.

When there is constant competition, there will be various modes of communication. Therefore, the customers may reach out more to you to learn about the brand. It helps to create a positive and healthy atmosphere that keeps your customers educated and fosters a healthy learning environment.

When your leads convert into customers, it is a very positive thing for your brand. Moreover, if these become loyal customers, it can significantly help with your brand growth. Brand loyalty is a key way to onboard new customers.

Gamified content ensures customers are engaged and motivated. As a result, brand loyalty eventually increases too. When your company has loyal customers, it comes off as a professional business. When you show your loyal customers that you appreciate them by providing small tokens, they will keep doing business with you. As a result, you will constantly get returns on your investment.

It’s surprising how gamification can also increase conversion rates. Conversion rates are an important aspect of the digital marketing world, especially for business growth. People become more interested in gamified content because it hardly feels like marketing content.

In the online world, your customers are likely to see a lot of promotional posts. Well, they may become bored after some time. On the other hand, if they find something interesting and different from the previous promotional content, they become more interested. Gamification or interactive content not  only play an important role in generating leads but also in converting the leads into customers.

What are the Best Gamification Practices to Boost User Engagement?

Do you wish to scale your business and retain your users via gamification? In that case, you cannot stick to the old methods and follow them. Below are some of the gamification best practices that will promote user retention:

1. Clear Objectives and Goals

It is important that your gamification objectives and goals are clear. This will help the users understand what they must achieve. Furthermore, it will also allow users to stay focused.

For instance, the Nike Club app has set clear goals for the users where they can achieve badges and prizes on completing specific milestones like completing a run of either 5K or specific distance. As the goal is clearly specified, it continuously encourages the users to proceed further and keep doing better in order to unlock a newer badge.

Source: GoodUX

2. Intuitive Design and User Experience

When you are posting user engagement games, you must ensure that they are easy to navigate and have an attractive design. It must create a space where customers easily understand the rules in order to promote engagement. The expertise of a graphic designer plays a vital role in crafting visually appealing and intuitive interfaces, making the gaming experience enjoyable and user-friendly. With well-designed visuals and clear instructions, participants can quickly grasp the mechanics of the game, encouraging them to participate actively and enhancing their overall engagement.

For example, Captain Up has a simple user interface that makes it extremely beneficial to use. As a result, you can keep a check on the scoreboard and move from time to time.

Source: ResearchGate

3. Offer Good Rewards

Since your main aim is to retain customers, it is always advisable to keep them hooked. It is for this reason that you must provide them with good rewards in your gamified content. When the audience connects with the rewards you’re offering, they will keep coming back, thereby promoting engagement.

For example, Amazon is a leading brand that keeps providing great benefits to its audience via its loyalty programs. Every time you make a purchase with Amazon, you will receive Amazon points, which you can later use to make more purchases after collecting a certain number of points.

Source: PC Risk

4. Social Interaction

When you provide a sense of belonging to your customers, they will stick with you. It is important that you provide a space for friendly competition. As a result, you may integrate different social features like collaborative tasks and leaderboards to keep your audience engaged, thereby paving the way for good results. You can alternatively use social media monitoring tools to keep track of brand-relevant keywords.

When Starbucks interacts with its audience very often via social media platforms, its tweets about interacting with customers often go viral.

Source: Mention

5. Balance Challenges and Skill levels

As a part of gamification, it is advisable to strike a balance between challenge and skills. All the tasks in the game must be designed for different difficulty levels, especially for people with different skill sets. The gamified content should be designed so that it is achievable but still has some challenges.

6. Provide Feedback

In order to keep your users intact, you must interact with them. You should provide them with real-time feedback on their performance. Furthermore, you can also offer them tips on how they can improve later on.

Duolingo provides constant feedback to its customers as per their learning skills. It lets users play games and then eventually bring about changes.

Source: CitrusBits

Conclusion

Gamification has very strong potential, especially in terms of promoting user engagement and customer onboarding. With the help of gamification, you will be able to achieve one of the most important aspects of your business- user loyalty.

You must integrate a strong user interface and experience into the gamified content in order to cater to your audience’s needs. There are several brands that tried gamified content but failed miserably because they weren’t able to do it the right way. On the other hand, several brands have been able to leverage the power of gamification and increase user engagement.

Engagement, experience, and retention are very crucial aspects of your business. This is an achievable feat, especially with gamification best practices. Therefore, you must carefully implement all the strategies in the interest of your users.