Companies using gamification can experience up to 7 times higher conversion rates than companies that don't.
15. juli 2024
By combining people's playful instincts with basic gamification principles, we open up a playful form of marketing that creates dialogue.
If you use gamification and interactivity to engage your recipients, you typically get stronger relationships and higher loyalty at every stage of the sales funnel.
Did you know that:
Companies using gamification can see up to 7 times higher conversion rates.
60 per cent of consumers are more inclined to make a purchase if they are entertained with a game.
Adding gamification to your website can increase the time your users spend on the page by up to 30 per cent.
(Source: Gartner Group analysis, 2022)
Why is gamification so effective?
Gamification draws on behavioural psychology and appeals to people's motivation during the decision process. Positive emotions like excitement and happiness are created, while the competitive instinct is activated and sets up an expectation of some form of reward.
More than a prize wheel 🎡
Many people associate gamification with a pop-up prize wheel you can spin to win prizes. But it is so much more. The principles are about challenging, rewarding and showing the outcome immediately.
Quizzes and tests, for example, can personalise emails based on the user's answers. That creates opportunities for segmentation, automation and dynamic content in emails, across everything from lead generation to dialogue with both new and existing customers.
Perhaps you are thinking "We have tried competitions, and we just get a load of competition junkies who do not buy anything anyway".
If that is the case, I will be a little blunt and suggest you have not gone about it the right way.
If you advertise on social media and tempt people with an attractive prize for signing up to your newsletter, you can get a lot of sign-ups.
But if, right after confirming the sign-up, you simply send them the next newsletter in the queue, you are practically asking for poor results!
Those who sign up via a competition on social media, through affiliate marketing or other external channels usually could not care less about your company and your products. They sign up because they want to win a prize.
So there are a few things to consider when you plan your effort to convert competition entrants into customers.
Here are some tips on what to think about:
Always make sure the prizes you offer through external competitions are either your own products, or other prizes that are only relevant to people who also need your products.
The very best way to warm up new leads from competitions is in fact through competitions running over several weeks, which make sure entrants get to know your company as they go. The quiz format is particularly good for this.
Since it usually does not make sense to run rolling-entry competitions all year round, you can create boost periods in your advertising where rolling competitions (typically around the holidays) can serve as this optimal warm-up for new subscribers.
Outside the periods where rolling competitions serve as a warm-up, you should have a welcome flow that takes account of entrants arriving via competitions. Here you can use the principle mentioned above of giving extra entries for taking desired actions – filling in a profile, say, and answering questions about concrete needs for your products and services.
Those who answer concrete questions can then be followed up with targeted messages, which by that very fact already have a much greater chance of being heard / seen / read.
Those who do not respond to your mails in the welcome flow can be flagged to receive newsletters at a reduced frequency (if you send once or more a week – otherwise not). That way you can see whether they start responding to your newsletters without spending extra resources on it.
For subscribers from competitions who respond neither to the welcome flow nor to low-frequency newsletters, you can apply a more aggressive deletion policy – sending them a mail after just 3 months, for instance, saying they need to respond in order not to be deleted.