3 Gamification Marketing Strategies You Need to Use for Your eCommerce
Gamification, E-commerce, Customer LoyaltyThe term Gamification indicates a now widespread group of marketing strategies. In essence, through the use of typical video game dynamics, the goal is to achieve strong customer engagement with the product, eCommerce site, or brand.
As a result, the marketing strategy makes the user live an unforgettable experience. Thus, it is easier to establish a relationship of lasting value between the two sides. In this way, companies manage to increase sales and reduce the cost of acquiring new customers. As we develop plug-ins to raise funds for charity organizations, they are also useful to collect a donation and other side-goals.
The benefits of gamification strategies
Gamification strives to achieve two main objectives:
1. Drive an active interest in the message you want to communicate
2. Stimulate active and measurable behavior
These fundamental strategies allow you to leverage people's desires and needs. For instance, by providing continuous and easy-to-achieve objectives, rewards to be earned, incentivizing people to get involved, and to make them compare themselves with others. Ultimately, success is measured by involving people actively and over time.
From a marketing perspective, gamification allows eCommerce sites and organizations to obtain significant benefits:
• Greater engagement with more active users thanks to a fun experience.
• More genuine customer loyalty, due to the creation of a long-term relationship.
• Greater visibility and new customers, thanks to a possible virality of the strategy.
• Better brand awareness resulting from the psychological association between brand and feeling of pleasure.
• More conversions, by making some operations fun and less boring, such as the purchase process.
• More reliable customer profiling and additional data, extrapolated from user behavior during the experience.
# 1 - Competitions and Ranking
This is a popular strategy that, over the years, gathered new tools to be more effective. As a SaaS company, we have used this strategy to produce incredible ROIs in the past.
Competitions lengthen your contact list, generate sales, and create some action all-around your business. Overall, competitions present you as a company that cares about their customers and is ready to reward them for their interaction.
The best thing about competitions is excitement. To be precise, the excitement they create in your followers. In the process of creating the desired results, and while waiting for the announcement of winners, many of the participants will continue to check their results constantly. Thus, they will interact with your brand and keep up to date with your latest posts.
# 2 - Badges
When we talk about marketing, as well as customers, people love to show their loyalty and belonging. By encouraging them to do so, they are just recommending your brand to others.
Rewarding your customers with badges (badges, commendations, nicknames, etc.) because of their purchasing journey is a great way to encourage them to continue. At the same time, your brand offers them increasing recognition, increasingly suggesting them to share their experience with others.
Badges or medals represent such an easy and incredible way to make your proposals more interactive. They offer status, ambition, and fun to potential customers. For example, we provide a donation-based solution that can also produce badges as a reward.
#3 - User-generated content
Contests based on user-generated content are an ingenious way to make users interact, engage them, and make you appear more empathetic.
They work by asking the public (starting with your fans on social media) to post content they created following the guidelines of your contest.
By involving your customer base, several goals are attainable. The marketing strategies may range across different beneficial outcomes for your eCommerce site or physical store. Certainly, this process makes it incredibly easy for users to participate. In the end, the only requirements are a smartphone and an account on a social network.
How to get the best out of your competitions
As a bonus, it may be useful to offer something for free (the very famous giveaway) or a huge discount (even if it works less according to our experience). In exchange, the brand may ask for the participant's data in a form or another. Then, if you want to make the most of the opportunity, ask to share the competition on social networks to get an extra chance of winning.
At the end of the competition, you will have created a list of people. These prospects are interested in your brand/product. In other words, you can contact them with an appropriate retargeting strategy for more profit or donation.
On a side note, backup marketing strategies apply. For example, you could tell everyone who hasn't won that they got a prize (i.e. a discount on the product you used for the competition).
