Adding Gamification to Your Business

Whatever your business or team may look like, you can apply the principles of gamification to keep your customers engaged, and to build a habit-forming product. Every team in your company can be involved in an effective gamification strategy – be it product, design, tech, marketing, or social media.

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You can introduce gamification to any product or service workflow to enhance a desirable outcome. This could be anything from reducing Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) to increasing the amount of time a user spends on your website. How you gamify often changes based on what your business objectives are. Your gamification strategy should be closely tied with the product DNA. It will help you achieve your business objectives at a minimal cost. With gamification, you’re able to significantly lower your costs and increase your ROI. For example, a refer-and-earn programme will lower your CAC but gets you a large volume of new customers.

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So, where do you begin?

Identify Your Goals

Start by knowing what you want to achieve before incorporating gamification into your business. Are you designing it for acquisitions (for example, Google Pay) or time spent on your app (for example, Instagram)? Once you’ve defined these objectives, narrow down on the action you want your consumer to take. This action should be tied to a habit that you want them to form. Double tapping on Instagram or swiping left or right on Tinder – it's such simple actions that become habits! The trick to successfully gamifying an experience is to latch onto behaviour that comes naturally to people. You want to design your experience around those habits such that your customer forms an associated habit around your product.

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Anything can be gamified. This is all the more reason for you to be careful about being very specific about your objectives. Your objectives will also impact the way you measure the efficacy of your gamification campaigns. Are they being met? If not, you need to go back and rethink whether you’re working with gamification in the right way.