When used wisely, gamification can breathe new life into your marketing strategy. It can switch a passive audience to active participants in your brand. What makes gamification such a useful tool in marketing?
Why Gamification Is the Perfect Complement to Marketing in Today’s Digital Landscape?
The Psychology Behind Gamification
Gamification taps into primal aspects of human psychology: our love of challenge, achievement, and reward. When you use game mechanics like points, prizes, progress bars, or badges, you engage the part of the brain that’s wired for accomplishment.
The authors of a 2021 paper on enhancing user engagement, published in Journal of Business Research, advised, “To foster user engagement, mobile apps should satisfy basic psychological needs.” They noted three elements of gamified apps contributed to “psychological needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness.”
The three elements were:
- achievement and progression-oriented
- social-oriented elements
- immersion-oriented.
The authors highlighted the example of FitBit, which was effective in personalising users’ experience, helping them make progress, challenge friends, and stay motivated. They wrote that game elements “satisfy basic psychological needs and promote user engagement, ultimately results in positive marketing outcomes.”
A Mailchimp article notes that as well as improving user engagement, gamification can boost customer loyalty, increase conversion rates, and help you learn about your clientele.
Rewards
Loyalty programmes offering badges, points, and rewards work because they offer tangible perks, but also because they gamify the act of staying loyal. Starbucks’ famous Rewards programme is a good example.
Customers collect stars based on how much they spend. In the UK, for every £1 spent, a customer earns 10 stars. 130 stars earns a free drink; 500 stars earns a handcrafted drink; 2500 stars means “extra shots of espresso, selected syrups and whipped cream”, etc.
This is somewhat like betting sites and UK online slots with their offers to players with tag lines such as “Deposit £10 and get a £40 casino bonus” or similar.
Brands that follow Starbucks’ example of gamification often enjoy higher retention rates and more emotional buy-in from their customers. If you’re in an industry full of options for customers to choose from, an emotional connection can make a big difference.
Gamification vs Traditional Advertising
Traditional advertising is often a one-way conversation: the brand talks and the consumer is passive. By contrast, gamification invites interaction with your brand. Consider a spin-to-win wheel on an e-commerce site.
It turns a mundane, familiar discount into something more interesting. Your visitors aren’t merely browsing but participating. The psychology of having “won” something makes the reward feel more valuable than if it were handed out traditionally.
Data Collection
Gamification can boost data collection in a non-intrusive way. Many consumers are understandably wary of sharing their data. When apps and companies ask for too much too soon, they risk losing customers entirely. Gamification offers a more organic path to data collection.
Many companies collect data from things like personality quizzes; something as simple as a “What type of pizza eater are you?” A quiz can tell you a lot about customers’ preferences and habits. The customers see it as more of a game than filling out a form.
Mailchimp advises that widgets like spin-to-win wheels should be “strategically placed” on your website so that they don’t intrude on browsing. These games can be promoted on social media and in email newsletters.
When promotions are run for just a short amount of time, they will “improve engagement by creating a sense of urgency” and mean your customers won’t lose interest in your offers.
Social Sharing
Gamification often comes with sharing options. People enjoy showing off their achievements and want to see how their friends fare. This creates a loop: one user shares their experience, and their friend gets curious and then shares theirs. Your campaigns can spread organically with no extra ad budget.
Apps like Duolingo have done this particularly effectively. Millions of users share streaks and milestones with friends. If your campaign has social sharing built in, and if it rewards users for inviting friends, it has a better chance of going viral.
