Gamification can be used to enhance marketing and employee training efforts. Gamification increases engagement, encourages participation and forges long-term loyalty.
Begin With Clear Goals Start by understanding your target audience’s preferences and motivations – your game must be tailored specifically to their needs.
Real-time feedback mechanisms are an effective way of keeping participants informed and engaged with your program. Nike used gamification in their Nike+ app to encourage runners by providing them with statistics regarding their performance as well as giving them a way to compete with friends.
1. Increase Engagement
Gamification in marketing and employee training can be an excellent way to increase engagement. Gamification helps break complex ideas down into more manageable pieces, makes learning engaging (often through VR technology), provides feedback in real time and motivates employees through points, badges, status or rewards.
An ongoing gamified marketing campaign provides users with new challenges and excitement, keeping them from becoming bored or disengaged with the experience. Gamification also encourages customer loyalty through offering special perks or rewards for returning customers.
One local donut shop used gamification to increase website traffic and customer contact forms filled out online. By playing games on its website, participants could win rewards such as discounts off their next purchase.
2. Involve Employees in the Process
Marketing teams face an ongoing struggle to engage their target customers and gamification can offer an easy and enjoyable way for customers to interact with your brand.
Nike developed a game on their fitness tracker that encouraged users to engage with it frequently and provided opportunities to earn badges, bonuses and merchandise as rewards for consistently using it. Furthermore, this created a sense of urgency with challenges only being available temporarily; encouraging more users to interact with it over time.
Gamification can be an effective tool for employee training when applied correctly. Gamification allows employees to make the transition from learning new skills to applying them in everyday practice more seamlessly by offering instant feedback, redo capabilities and leaderboard competitions that keep employees motivated to learn and expand in their roles.
3. Increase Productivity
Gamification to increase employee productivity can be successful when executed properly. Companies should avoid giving away external rewards such as gift cards and products as the only incentives; doing so sends the wrong message about why employees should work hard at their job.
Liveops Call Center of Scottsdale USA utilized gamification to increase efficiency within their team. By employing leaderboards and levels as game mechanics for employee engagement in daily work tasks.
Gamification was also employed to help train employees on new software. Each employee was assigned missions that provided opportunities to complete them for badges and prizes based on performance; this encouraged employees to learn quickly while building team spirit in the workplace.
4. Increase Customer Satisfaction
An effective gamification program needs top-quality content and products for it to succeed, along with incentives that appeal to customers – such as points, rewards and levels.
Starbucks provides an example of gamification by employing game mechanics to reward its loyalty program members with stars and free products, using leaderboards and progress tracking systems to keep customers motivated.
Gamification of employee training programs is another example. Companies can utilize this form of learning to train employees on new technology, software or processes. Gamification typically includes training and testing sessions with constant feedback to reinforce learning as it occurs; other elements can add social interactivity or add another engaging aspect that increases chances of retaining information and skills acquired during these experiences.
5. Increase Retention
Gaming elements into business practices help keep employees engaged and motivate them to participate more in training activities – this approach taps into Core Drives such as achievement and recognition for people.
One such online learning academy, Treehouse, uses badges and leaderboards to motivate its students. This system enables learners to track their progress as well as see where they stack up against competitors; creating an atmosphere of competitiveness and excitement among participants.
Employer training strategies may employ similar strategies. Rymax used game-based activities to motivate its sales teams through game-like events known as The Greatest Race; teams visited landmarks, received clues, and competed to win brand name products as incentives to complete training.