What Actually is Gamification?

Gamification is the process of incorporating game mechanics into the user experience to influence consumer behaviors. Gamified consumer experiences can exist at nearly every consumer touch-point including:

  • customer acquisition
  • consumer retention
  • ratings and reviews

Why Does Gamification Marketing Work?

Gamified marketing promotions operate on a value exchange system, where consumers are willing to provide registration data for the opportunity to be rewarded with a success based achievement.

Gamification magnifies customer engagement because it triggers human emotions. Excitement, fascination, and enjoyment are all emotions that an experience implementing gamification might evoke in a consumer. Triggering emotions and truly engaging the consumer leads to top-of-mind awareness, higher sales, increased retention rate, and better customer loyalty.

Within your marketing mix, gamification can take the form of any incentivized action that can be repeated by the consumer. While instant win games are a classic example of short-term gamification, programs like Nike’s Nike+ Run Club and Starbucks’ Stars Rewards program are great examples of long-term gamification.

Short-term engagement leads to long-term consumerism

Regardless of the length of your gamification program, the key to high engagement is creating short-term micro-experiences, When looking to engage consumers with your gamification promotion it is important to keep the chance of winning close to the consumer. By leveraging the basic human trait of loss-aversion, creating a high-percent win chance for consumers increases participation.

The key to successful gamification is to place these games at key consumer touch-points to influence consumer behaviors. By incentivizing desired behaviors (in-app participation, repeat purchase, ratings & reviews, etc.) with accessible prizing. brands will not only see participation rates rise, but consumer behaviors change.

So, What Can Gamification Do For You?

Gamification helps improve your online presence as you interact, incentivize, and engage with users on a regular basis. At Realtime Media, using gamification with digital promotions makes it possible to not only increase the average time spent on your site/app, but it also gives users an experience to share with others over various social media channels.

We’ve seen that campaigns with gamification drive 5-10x more repeat visits than campaigns without a gamification. Plus, we handle every detail involved with promotions, so we can help you integrate gamification into your marketing, and handle prize fulfillment too, for the best brand experience.