The mobile app market is booming. The skyrocketing number of smartphone users has propelled most marketing, innovation, and cutting-edge technologies to focus on the mobile sector. As a result, 2.5 million Android apps, 1.8 million iOS apps, and another 1.2 million apps between Amazon and Windows stores are used by roughly 5.5 billion smartphone users. With so many apps vying for attention, gamification can grant your app the edge it needs to stand out. Not only are techniques like gamification marketing powerful user attraction and retention tools – should you choose to gamify your app, gamification can also drive your sales through the roof.
Many organizations have utilized gamifying techniques in the past as game-changers in their respective sectors. For example, airline companies (Delta), popular hotels (Hilton, Marriott), and large beverage chains like Starbucks leveraged gamification strategies to boost their app sales. You can, too – here’s why you should give it a try.
What is Gamification After All?
Gamification, explained in the simplest of terms, is the process of incentivizing user actions as a method of engagement. The name itself comes from games, since this is one of the popular techniques used by games as an engagement hook. Nick Pelling, a British game designer ,and programmer, used the term gamification first in 2002 while trying to develop a game-like interface for ATM and vending machines.
Gamification techniques use gaming principles to transform non-gaming, day-to-day business tasks into user-centric, rewards, and milestones-based activities.
How Can You Use Gamification as a Tour-De-Force in Boosting Your App Sales?
As a product or platform owner for your mobile app, you must have already faced the common hurdles in your business. Cart abandonment and customer loyalty continue to dominate the nightmare list of app-based sales platforms. Here’s how adopting gamified marketing and other gamification techniques can help your app sales blow past these pitfalls:
Avoid Customers Abandoning Carts:
Cart abandonment is the single biggest problem for E-commerce businesses today. Customers impulsively selecting a bevy of items to buy from an e-commerce platform and then not buying it instantly costs these organizations an astonishing $18 Billion in lost sales revenue each year.
Gamifying the product browsing and checkout experiences can help alleviate this problem. While offering rewards and purchases can further encourage the users, many organizations strategically incentivize the bigger discounts behind gamified walls like countdown times, spin-the-wheels, or even scratch cards. This sense of urgency and excitement is often instrumental in users inclining more towards completing their purchase.
Increasing Customer Loyalty:
Gamification techniques often break non-gaming tasks into several milestones and incentivize each milestone. Users can use these complete-a-step-to-get-prizes mechanisms, dubbed ‘loyalty point systems’, to collect badges, points, rewards, and discounts. Leaderboards brew a sense of competition and social collaboration among customers. Some companies even allow loyalty points to be spent on charitable causes. Increased engagement of gamified apps causes more customers to come back to them, boosting app sales.
Better Customer Engagement and Retention:
By far, the biggest plus side to gamifying your app is increased focus on users and better customer engagement. Utilizing game elements, especially a point-based system that rewards customers for completing tasks – such as adding items in the cart, placing orders, referrals. Gamified apps encourage a sense of achievement in their user base. This results in better user retention. In addition, leaderboards are a clever way to introduce healthy competition between your customers that drive sales figures up.
More Long-Term Relationships with Your Customers:
Offering prizes and rewards to your customers while they shop using your app also shows a form of gratitude towards them – further bolstering their relationship with your platform. Instant gratifications granted by gamified steps like spin-to-win, lotteries, scratch cards help your customers resonate with your app better. Long-term customer relationships thus created result in better app sales.
Better Branding and Product Recommendations:
Gamified marketing can create the buzz you need about your app and the products you sell via your app as an e-commerce platform owner. Many top gamified apps have utilized product quizzes, trivia, and mini-games as effective user engagement strategies. These techniques have boosted the brand identity; they also helped collect essential customer data and create a more personalized experience.
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Together with gamifying your business tasks, gamification marketing can be a major motivator to drive your app sales. Leveraging the power of popular gamification techniques, you can take your business to the next level as a marketer, product, or platform owner. Gamifying techniques like spin-to-win, loyalty points, and trivia increase user engagement and retention, promoting sales. Software giant Autodesk had tested the power of gamification in an exercise that ended up being a tremendous success – with a 54% increase in trial usage and 15% increased clicks on ‘buy’ links.
The industry as a whole has shifted towards mobile, and the competition has gotten more fierce in recent years. Gamifying your app can become the unique step that puts you ahead of the competition, boosting app sales and revenue that you can further invest in research, development or expansion.
Don’t forget to check out our video below for more info on what else happens when you gamify your app with Goama!