”Gamification” is considered as the most promising emerging technology across many industries. But what is it exactly?
Gamification is the process of extending the principles of game playing to a non – game related activity to increase engagement of the users with a product or service. Businesses can use gamification to drive the user behaviors and motivate them to take desired actions.
The most common technique many businesses use is to increase user engagement by rewarding their users who complete a set of tasks. For example, reward points programs by credit card providers, frequent flyer programs by airlines, referral programs and rewards.
Here are few benefits of gamification and why it is a great add on to your business.
Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is the key driver for building brand awareness, retaining customers and gaining more business from them. Increased customer engagement is one of the major benefits of gamification. It provides a medium to directly interact with your existing and potential customers. The tasks created by businesses should often focus on increasing customer’s participation in order to drive more user engagement. Gamificiation helps you in increasing the frequency of visits, time spent per visit and helps you in making your content more visible to your visitors. All these factors will lead to increased customer engagement and hence increased conversion rate.
Building Customer Data
Gamification helps your business in defining and understand the buyer personas of your customers. The various actions performed by each user on your gamification app is recorded. All these data points provide you with information on how your various customers interact with your application and helps you in understanding your target audience better. Also, majority of such apps require a social profile or an email id to sign up for the app. So, by analyzing your target audience, you can define email lists to perform lead nurturing activities to generate new business.
Influencing The Buyer Decision
Gamification induces fun into the everyday action tasks that would normally sound mundane for your users. Over a period of time, Gamification can help in influencing actions and purchasing decisions. The influence can be twofold; one, through content and second, through providing incentives for selected few. The businesses can publish relevant content for the users by motivating them to take actions they desire. Also, by providing incentives in the form of discounts for users who have completed a set of task, businesses can influence the purchase decisions of their users.
Increased Customer Loyalty
Today, customers have many options to choose the products or services they want. Businesses find it difficult to retain customers, but businesses need to engage their customers and hold their interest to drive loyalty. Gamification is an effective way of executing loyalty programs which provide more valuable customer relation than being just transactional. Apart from providing monetary rewards through loyalty programs, businesses can also provide exclusive access to their offerings, extended trail periods or undertake other such actions to drive loyalty of the customers.
Gamification is not necessarily building an app for your business. It is a process of inducing a sense competitiveness and fun into the something you currently have. It might be creating a fun story which demonstrates various uses of your product or embedding the features of your service. Businesses can use gamification to build and sustain interactions with their customers and provide meaningful content to help your customers recognize the value of your products or services.
