Companies and organizations are increasingly applying the elements of game playing in order to grow and enhance their business. According to Gartner, 70 percent of America's top 2,000 companies are using gamification tactics—and research shows it leads to 47% more customer engagement. Is gamification the secret to growing your business faster?
According to Kate Gorman, CEO of Fort Mason Games and former Director of Product at Zynga, businesses should take a lesson from game companies and integrate techniques to increase their own user engagement and loyalty. She offers five gamification tactics you can implement now.
- Appointment Mechanics: Create habits to foster loyalty. Create a reason for your users to come back every day at a certain time to foster engagement. Letting them know exactly when they can expect something new makes them intrinsically driven to return.
- Perks Make It Work: Help your users feel special. Users love to know their loyalty matters, so create ways for them to show off their status and give them special perks. This creates a sense of achievement, challenge and accomplishment that drives long-term engagement.
- Loss Aversion: Use streaks to keep them coming back. You've already created habits with appointment mechanics. Now enforce them by offering rewards if they perform the habit for days in a row. Streaks create a sense of loss if the user stops engaging.
- Leaderboards: Up the competition to up engagement. Leaderboards are natural drivers of urgency. Seeing how other users are engaging with your service creates a sense of activity which attracts them to continually come back.
- Quests: Guide your users to conversion. Quests motivate users to discover new features of your product, and to see their progress overall. It also helps you guide the user exactly to what you want them to engage with! iBi
