Gamification is a rising trend in areas ranging from business training to app development, and it can go to work for you too! When you develop a mobile app for your up-and-coming business, consider gamifying it to increase user participation by your target demographic.
Rather than just referring to your app when they have a specific question, your customers will start treating it like a game and keep returning to it, meaning you can continually reach them with rewards, reminders, specials, and other advertising outreach.
These days people constantly have access to their phones, no matter where they are. When you gamify an app for your business, you can ensure that the phones in their hands are working for you!
So how do you go about doing that? Here are 5 different ideas to Gamify a Business App, and they’re amazingly simple to apply.
#1. Offer Reward Points and Levels
It may seem almost childish or simplistic, but the fact remains that people enjoy the challenge of achieving points, and will strive even more to earn those points when there is a tangible reward possible with accumulation. The trick here is to let your customers get into the habit of keeping your app open and engage them in the activities that earn points in your app.
You can integrate your app into your users’ lives in simple ways. Bawell water ionizer company, for example, can offer points when users track the amount of water they drink in the course of a day– awarding points for every glass consumed. Making this app the go-to app for a practical purpose (like tracking water intake) will increase customer engagement even more.
Combining that practicality with a points system and gamification is a sure-fire way to keep your customers coming back to your app. Health and fitness apps have a long standing tradition of using reward systems to keep users motivated, and other industries can follow their footsteps as well.
Users also love measurements of their progress toward a goal, including incremental rewards and progress bars to show a percentage of achievement with an end goal in sight. There is a whole mass of scholarly literature available on the effectiveness of gamification in training, advertising, and consumer involvement.
To ensure ongoing involvement by your engaged customers, you should offer the game in different levels, keeping people hooked onto the goal of making that next level and gaining its rewards. The progress bars can show how close a player is to achieving that next level. You can also mix virtual and real life rewards for “leveling up” as players continue to play. Increasing levels with different elements of play will help insure against a player getting bored with a too-familiar scenario and moving on to different entertainments.
#2. Create Competition with Leaderboards
Competition is an additional driving factor for involvement in your mobile app. When you have created a game and engaged your target demographic, you need to keep their attention and involvement intact. There’s no denying that nothing works so effectively as a spirit of competition, whether among existing friends or online avatars. You must allow your users to display their scores and achievements and measure up against the competition!
#3. Gifts and Rewards
You can tie your sales and promotions to rewards within the gamified app, allowing your customers to use some of their game points toward a real life reward. You can create a combination of virtual rewards within the game, such as badges and prizes, combined with occasional real world rewards, such as a percentage savings during a sale period.
And the percentage of discount you offer can be correlated to the number of points your players have accumulated. You can also make the offer good during a sale or promotional event when you are particularly trying to draw consumers in to visit your retail space or use your service. You can think of a hundred of other creative ways to tie in your app’s game with your ongoing real life promotions.
#4. In-Game Gifting & Social Media Sharing
As you familiarize yourself with the interactive online gaming environment, you will find that a popular tactic is to enable your players to send virtual “gifts” to their contacts who are not (yet) involved in the game. Their friends can accept the gifts, thereby becoming engaged in the game themselves. During the process, your customers are handling recruitment for you, extending invitations through their networks of social contacts– through social media like Facebook or Twitter.
You can also offer in-game incentives to your existing players when their friends accept the gifts and become involved in play. You will be amazed at the exponential growth you might see in downloads of your gamified app. It’s a classic example of the organic growth that can happen when you present your company’s image and information in game format.
Today’s consumers engage with social media all day, every day, so incorporating social media sharing into your game is a straightforward way to meet your potential customers where they already are.
#5. Quizzes
A regular feature in many gamified apps is the opportunity for users to play quiz games for points or other rewards. Quizzes are ideally suited for your customers to become informed about your company, your products, your promotions, and lighthearted related subjects. It takes a subtle touch to effectively integrate promotional information with the kinds of materials that engage players, which is probably exactly why it is such an effective approach.
People love quizzes about everything – from personality types (“What type of fill-in-the-blank are you?”) to testing themselves on current knowledge or pop culture.
When you use a gamified mobile app to support your business, you create a virtual playground where your customers can enjoy themselves in an environment you create. You can provide information and enhance your users’ experiences, and you will find that your customers will bring other customers to you. In addition to increasing your existing customers’ involvement with your company, you will gain a population of new customers who find you through the game itself.
