A Guide to Gamification Marketing

Engaging customers is one of the most difficult aspects of marketing. How do you as an advertiser make your campaigns fun and interactive while simultaneously promoting your brand? One solution that has become increasingly more popular is gamification. Gamification marketing leverages the best aspects of advertising and gaming to create a two-pronged approach to customer engagement and retention.

This guide will define gamification, why it's an effective tool for marketers, and how you can integrate this approach into your next campaign.

What is Gamification in Marketing?

Gamification is a form of marketing that incorporates game mechanics into the user’s interaction with the brand. While gamification can come in many different forms, it has proven to be an effective and fun way to keep your customers engaging with your brand. By borrowing design elements and mechanics from popular games and loyalty programs, marketers can drive consumers to perform actions by leveraging people’s natural competitive spirit to win an implied reward, which can be anything from an actual prize to having the highest score among all players. This gives customers a fun experience while simultaneously marketing your products or services.

Gamified content creates loyal customers and drives habit-forming behaviors through interactive games and leaderboards. By introducing gamified elements into your digital marketing campaign, you can more effectively communicate with and retain your target audience giving them a reason to return and hear your brand message.

How to Gamify Your Marketing Campaign

As we discussed, gamification marketing borrows elements from mobile games, loyalty programs, simple competitions and other tried and true game mechanics to drive customer loyalty and engagement. But what elements should you incorporate into your marketing to achieve your desired result? The most important aspects of gamified marketing are those that drive retention while remaining fun and interactive. Below are some of the most popular ways that advertisers gamify their promotions.

• Leaderboards: Leaderboards are an effective way to get customers to keep coming back or repeating an action. Leaderboards allow users to compete with friends, family and other brand enthusiasts. By appealing to the user's competitive side, you increase retention by giving them their own reason to come back. You could use leaderboards to display users based on points, purchases, or other forms of engagement.
• Achievements: Achievements are another great way to drive user interactions. Offering achievements can encourage users to perform a variety of different actions in order to earn badges or trophies. Users can display their achievements on their profile, or you can incentivize them with rewards for completing certain actions associated with KPIs (such as confirming their email address).
• Levels or Tiers: Levels are a great way to drive purchase. By offering membership levels (bronze, silver, or gold) you can incentivize users based on their activities, such as spending, or engaging with the brand on social media. Each level could come with exclusive perks, such as discounts or free shipping.
• Spin to Win(or other instant win games):This gamified feature introduces a game of chance to the user's experience. Users log on everyday and are given an opportunity to spin a virtual wheel or other game of chance for the opportunity to win a variety of different prizes. These games offer a fun experience and can drive customer purchases through discounts and coupons.
• Time-Limited Events: You can host seasonal events with gamified elements such as a holiday-themed sweepstakes or contest. Limited time events create a sense of urgency and exclusivity, incentivizing users to engage quickly and frequently over a short period of time.

Examples of Gamification Marketing

There are lots of examples of great advertisers that are currently utilizing gamified content to reach their target markets. Some examples of gamification in marketing that you may have seen in the wild are:

• Duolingo: The language-learning app uses incentives and metrics like streaks, points, and badges to keep users motivated and engaged. This is a prime example of using game elements to drive consumer behavior.
• Starbucks Rewards Programs: Starbucks rewards app uses a point-based reward system. Users can earn “stars” which can be redeemed for discounts or free items. Starbucks has also used other types of gamified marketing. Recently, they released a cup flip game that resembles existing mobile games. This campaign kept users engaged and encouraged them to share results on social media for additional reach.
• Nike Run Club: Nike’s Run Club app combines fitness with competition. The app utilizes game elements like leaderboards, achievements, and challenges to motivate users to both stay active and use the Nike app.
• McDonald’s Monopoly Campaign: This is one of the most famous examples of gamification marketing. McDonald’s Monopoly turns regular purchases into a fun and engaging game of chance. Customers receive Monopoly game pieces with their food orders. Collecting these pieces offers the chance to win prizes, from food items to big-ticket rewards like vacations or even a brand-new car. By gamifying the order experience and introducing an exciting game of chance to an everyday purchase, McDonald’s made the customer experience fun and interactive and encouraged return visits during the promotion timeframe.
• Chipotle’s Guac Mode: Chipotle recently introduced this new gamified reward program that surprises members with free guacamole and other perks. One of the most exciting parts about Guac Mode is that users receive their perks at random times throughout the year. This structure drives customer loyalty and user retention by giving customers a reason to check back on the app to see if they earned a new reward.

Does Gamification Marketing Really Work?

Gamification can be an effective way to get customers to come back to your website or loyalty app. Gamification magnifies customer engagement because it gets people excited about using the app or making a purchase. Truly engaging a consumer through gamified content can lead to top-of-mind awareness, higher sales, increased retention rate, and better customer loyalty.

These methods can be particularly effective with millennials and Gen Z who are more likely to base brand loyalty on engaging brand connections. Below are some of the most shocking statistics about gamification marketing.

• Studies have shown that gamifying a loyalty program can increase brand loyalty by 22%
• Gamification is becoming increasingly more popular in the advertising space. The global gamification market is projected to grow by more than three times from 2020 to 2025, with retailers spending 2.8 billion dollars on gamification by 2025.
• Gamification can lead to a 48% increase in customer engagement. This increase in customer engagement also can result in a 30% uptick in the amount of time users spend on apps or websites.
• Gamification has been adopted by more than 70% of the Global 2,000 companies, who have integrated gamification of some form into their business strategies.

Gamification has been proven to be an effective method to drive customer retention. One study found that with gamification, in addition to increasing brand engagement, some customers who participated in gamified experiences were even willing to pay more for products.

The growth of the market in the past few years shows that it’s becoming an increasingly popular and effective method for advertisers to reach their target audiences. Adding gamified elements to your next promotion could be the difference between a good campaign and a great one.

Why Does Gamification Marketing Work?

Gamified marketing is such an effective method of reaching consumers because it taps into our psychology. Everybody wants to be a winner, and most people like playing games. Giving customers the opportunity to interact with your brand in a way that they find exciting and engaging creates a genuine experience and connection with your brand.

Additionally, by encouraging customer actions through game elements, you can more effectively motivate customers to engage in value-creating behaviors, such as sharing your promotion on social media platforms or referring a friend to download your app. If you need assistance integrating gamification into your marketing campaign, reach out to Realtime Media today. Our expert promotion administration team can assist you with your campaign and ensure that your audience is as excited as you are about your brand.

What is the Future of Gamification

As we’ve seen, gamification marketing is becoming an increasingly popular method of reaching and communicating with consumers. Gamification has expanded beyond a digital-first method of advertising and started to enter the retail space. As gamification marketing becomes more prevalent, we'll see more and more brands trying to leverage this new form of advertising online and in-store

But that's not all. As technology advances, gamification will become more complex and more interactive. The future development of technologies like AR filters and VR will make gamification marketing even more engaging and effective. Stay on the cutting edge of marketing and start implementing game elements into your marketing campaigns today.

How Can I Start?

If you’ve been compelled to start integrating gamification into your campaign, reach out to Realtime Media today. Our company specializes in creating interactive instant win games for consumers as well as managing all aspects of sweepstakes. We’ve seen that campaigns with gamification drive 5-10x more repeat visits than campaigns without gamification. Let our sweepstakes professionals create results for your brand today.