Gamification Is the Future of Marketing in E-Commerce
Gamification isn’t optional for online businesses. Here’s why!
The first step in running a successful business is creating a seamless website. Without a reliable website, you’re losing visitors and your revenue potential. On an average, a visitor spends 15 seconds on a website before migrating to the next one. Your website’s performance is the key to driving and retaining customer attention.
Customers are drawn to sites that offer the best user experience. Website optimization, professional design, and clear navigation are some factors that directly affect how long the customer will stay on the website.
But as an E-commerce store owner, your job doesn’t end there. After the visitor stays, your job is to ensure that the next step is clearly marked, and inspires the visitor to engage in the desired activity.
Gamification creates a simple flow with impactful designs and incentives of rewards. This helps online businesses to improve user experience, customer satisfaction, and interactive participation on their website.
Before understanding how gamification helps with growth, engagement, and conversion, let’s understand what is gamification.
What is Gamification?
Over time, the gamification trend has transcended from physical experiences to virtual ones. Today, it’s being used in almost all aspects of the virtual world in different forms and unique ways.
Gamification in E-commerce relies on the use of gaming elements and principles on non-gaming platforms. The primary purpose is to create a fun, interactive, and seamless virtual experience for website visitors and create a hook to engage them for a longer period.
A surprising 59% of Americans play video games. Between the ages of 18–29, 81% of adults are gamers, and 48% of the group comprises women. Around 60% of Americans are online shoppers, and 73% of shoppers between 18 to 34 years prefer online shopping for all their needs. Women make up 60% of all online purchases. The overlap in demographic makes gamification an essential tool to increase the participation and engagement of prospective customers.
For e-commerce platforms, gamification is an impactful medium to create a memorable brand identity and an approachable brand personality. For customers, gamification translates into more rewards. Gamification marketing campaigns are hard for the customers to resist with various forms of rewards and loyalty points, encouraging their participation and recurrent purchases.
With pop-ups and push notifications falling short in conversions, gamification provides the solution to capture the customer’s attention with mini-gaming experiences, which leads to monetary benefits and motivation for future engagements. For e-commerce platforms, gamification helps with higher website traffic, greater engagement, increase in conversions, and gaining more subscribers.
Importance of Gamification in E-commerce
Gamification is a direct path to meeting all the goals of your online business if done effectively. Here’s why it’s important to integrate gamification into your business:
- Improves User experience
User experience is a vital part of any gaming experience. Incorporating gamification on E-commerce websites makes navigation user-friendly. This also increases the accessibility of all the products and services.
- Capture Customer leads
Gamification captures customer leads by making the customers stay longer on the website, interact with multiple aspects of the platform, and get motivated to use the rewards for their next purchase.
- Helps Reach New Customers
Gamification helps the audience engage with multiple aspects of the website. Incentives like reward points, push the customers to make another purchase in the future, refer your business to others and leave positive reviews online, which generates hype about the business and draws in new customers.
- Increases Engagement
Gamification aids in increasing the interaction of a customer with the website and incentivizes every second a customer spends on the website by offering substantial returns in the form of various rewards.
- Helps Collect Customer Data
Filling forms and entering data is tedious for customers and thus counterproductive. Gamification engages the customers through gaming tools and helps merchants collect customer data that can provide insights into their shopping behavior, habits, and requirements.
The Three Most Important Gamification Elements
Gamification is an integral part of our physical and digital life. Interactive stairways in subways or quizzes on the sidewalk, the infamous T-Rex game in Google Chrome, or the spin wheel pop-ups on every other e-commerce store, Gamification has seamlessly molded into every environment where it is applied.
E-commerce businesses have successfully integrated game elements into their businesses with pop-ups, quizzes, and rewards. According to the report by Demand Gen, 93% of marketers love gamification. Roughly 70% of marketers believe interactive content is successful at converting visitors.
With most E-commerce businesses investing in gamification, it is essential to understand which gamification elements you should add to your website.
Here are the top three gamification elements that will maximize your sales:
Attractive Flow:
The ultimate goal of any marketing activity is to navigate users to a specific goal. Gamification allows businesses to simplify the flow and guide the visitors toward the endpoint. Here are the key points to maintain the flow:
- Gradual increase in the difficulty level of the challenge.
- Dynamic rewards to maintain the excitement.
- Strategic placement of the games.
- A definite sense of accomplishment.
Effective Design:
Design is the deciding factor in determining whether the visitor will take part in the activity. Focus on adding Clear, Concise, and Creative design elements. The success of gamification depends on the effectiveness of the design.
Exciting Reward:
Gamification primarily relies on the power of earning rewards. A reward is the only reason a visitor completes the gaming journey and helps merchants meet their business goals.
It is important to consider dynamic reward options to find success in gamification.
With the ever-changing gamification trends, it is essential to upgrade and enhance the reward for it to continue working. Free shipping or cashback alone doesn’t always work. Customers are looking for autonomous purchasing power. After several surveys and interviews, we have found the easiest way to offer power is by letting the consumers decide the price they want to pay for a product.
Make an Offer was designed to empower merchants by letting them offer the best prices to their consumers. Gamification, negotiation, interaction, and the excitement of a reward helps merchants retain visitors on their website and build long-term relations with customers.
