How To Gamify Your Customer Experience And Win
As more traditional marketing strategies fail, you have to constantly be on the lookout for new ideas to get your product out there and people interested in buying it. There are a lot of options – like content marketing and influencer marketing – but all of them pale next to the opportunities inherent in gamification.
When you successfully manage to gamify your product as well as your marketing, then you’re in a situation where you don’t have to pull people into your site. Instead, they’ll come here willingly. You might even be able to get some people hooked, with 60% of people saying they would be motivated by gamification. For that reason, 53% of technology stakeholders believe gamification will be widespread by 2020.
Of course, that will only ever work if you manage to gamify your efforts correctly. In this article, we’re going to look at how you can do that.
Make Sure It Isn’t Just Filling
A lot of companies that go in for gamification think that they can just add it on top, like whipped cream and a cherry. That’s not how it works. Use BestEssay.Education service experience. They are actively using discounts, free services, entertaining events for their customers. If you’re going to gamify your site and your product, then you have to reimagine it from the ground up. It has to become an integral part of what you’re trying to do.
The trick is not to focus on individual touchpoints or problems. The reason is that if you do that, then you’ll end up creating something that is disjointed and doesn’t feel like a cohesive whole. Instead, you have to look at the whole experience that people have on your website and then to work from there. You have to work out a plan that will actually entertain and help people, copywriting thoroughly and executed with finesse.
For example, if you’re trying to sell financial instruments to customers (Something that isn’t going to be terribly appealing to most of them) why not turn it into a quiz? Here I don’t mean one where there are right or wrong answers, but more one where you start out by asking what the customer is actually looking for. This makes it immediately relevant to them and is far more enjoyable than reading through a dozen pages of fine print (something most people won’t do). In the class, this works phenomenally well, with 70% of teachers reporting students are more engaged through games. So why not use it to educate outside of the class as well?
Add a status bar at the bottom, so that they know how well they’re doing, as well as some other sense of progress and they’ll find getting to the end (And buying your product) a breeze.
Create A Community
The only thing better than gamifying your site is gamifying it socially so that your users can show to others how experienced and clever they are. After all, we love competition. An easy way is to give people badges for achieving certain things. Perhaps if they answer a lot of questions from other users, or get a lot of upvotes. Perhaps, you base it on how well they seem to understand the different parts of your site and the different products on offer.
You can even give them some kind of loyal customer badge with different levels so that they can demonstrate how much they like your product. Often – particularly if they purchasing increments are small – people will purchase that bit more, just to get to the next rank. Then they can use that as a statement of authority when interacting with everybody else.
Another good idea is to create the opportunity for players to gain advantages by inviting others. Particularly if you make sure that these badges have no real value (so that they don’t feel like they’re selling out their friends and colleagues) this can be an effective way to draw new customers in.
How To Use It For Marketing
One of the most effective strategies for using gamification to get your brand out there is to simply create a fun game, where people learn about your product but they don’t get it shoved down their throats. Instead, what your game should do is build brand awareness and offer the opportunity to get discounts or to get some part of your product for free.
Particularly if your game isn’t that easy, people will see what they’ve won as a real reward and they will value the prize higher because it was hard to get. After all, how else are they going to square the work they put in with the reward they got out of it? Of course, this only works if the prize has some sort of value – you can only push people so far – but when it does you’re in a good position.
Last Words
Gamification can be powerful done right. The trick to doing it right is to not hold back when you’re implementing it. For if you do it half-assed, you are guaranteed that people will quickly lose interest. So do it properly. Know the underlying dynamics. And make sure that it actually enhances the user experience.
Then you’ll be golden, as you’ll both attract and retain more customers. And that’s what it’s all about, wouldn’t you say?
what do you think?