Create a Winning Gamification Strategy With Jebbit

TL;DR:

• Gamification works by using game-like elements to engage customers in experiences that prove both entertaining and rewarding.
• To create a gamification strategy that works, follow key best practices: Create a great user interface design, establish objectives for the experience, offer meaningful rewards, and implement strategies to build habits and increase loyalty.
• Jebbit offers everything you need to easily create rewarding experiences with a variety of gamification elements like quizzes, memory match games, virtual scratch-off tickets, trivia tests, and more.

You’ve just been told to add gamification to your customer journey. Now what?

Start by learning about some of the essential game design elements that you can use to create a gamification strategy. Add in customer data and behavioral psychology to learn what it is that excites and motivates your target audience. Then, find a tool that can help you create gamified experiences.

Don’t worry — it’s not as tough as it sounds. We’ve got you covered on all the bases. Read below for the best practices you’ll need to know and to discover why Jebbit is the tool you need to build engaging gamified experiences.

What Is Gamification?

As a concept, gamification is simple: It’s when you use game-like elements and mechanics to engage and motivate your customers in various non-game contexts. This includes things like awarding points, giving users badges for certain accomplishments, implementing scoring and leaderboards, and so on.

The concept is simple, but in practice, gamification in a marketing context is not always so easy. You can’t just implement a points system and hope for the best. Instead, gamification strategy takes time and thought — and a little bit of know-how about behavioral psychology. 

A gamification strategy that works is one that activates your customers’ innate desire for healthy competition — and then provides gratification in the form of immediate feedback and rewards.

6 Essential Best Practices for Your Gamification Strategy

What will your gamification strategy look like? It’s only limited by your creativity. You can create anything from spinners to trivia games to virtual scratch-off cards.

However, no matter what direction you go with your gamification strategy, it can’t just be cheap tricks that draw momentary attention. Instead, the goal should be to create intentional engagement — and the best practices below will show you how to do that.

1. Prioritize User Interface Design

It’s no secret that in the gaming world, the most popular games are those that are the most fun to play. What makes them so fun? It’s not the story — not all games have a story. And it’s not the art style, since there are popular games featuring everything from retro pixel art to ultra-realistic graphics.

The key thing that most popular games have in common is this: The gameplay mechanics don’t get in the way of the gamer’s good time. Controls are intuitive. You don’t have to hunt through menus to find commonly used things. Overall, it’s a seamless experience that allows the player to immerse themselves in whatever the game has to offer.

When you’re creating a gamified experience to reach particular marketing objectives, you need to do the same thing. Make sure the interface is intuitive and easy to use so that consumers can fully engage and enjoy themselves.

2. Establish Business Objectives

What, exactly, do you want to accomplish with a gamified experience? For every business, the answer will be different — but it’s a question that must be answered because it will guide the way you ultimately design the experience.

Here’s an example: Your business objective is to get more people sharing your brand on social media. Gamify social shares by turning them into a contest, and create a prize or reward system that gives out winnings to the people who make the most creative, funniest, or most inspiring posts about your brand.

Or let’s say that you want to bring in new business via referrals. Gamify it by setting up a leaderboard where scores go up for each user based on the number of referrals they make — then award prizes or other incentives to the winners.

Those are just a couple of examples of gamification, but you get the idea. Your specific objectives will play a major part in how you’ll end up designing a gamified experience.

3. Make Rewards Meaningful

Your favorite brand just awarded you a zillion points! Exciting, right? Maybe not. What if you need approximately a zillion points to get just 10 cents off your next $100 order? Or what if those points are worth nothing at all (except maybe bragging rights)?

The simple truth is that for most people, there are tons of ways to have fun that don’t include engaging with a brand’s marketing materials — like playing an actual video game, for example. If you want people to engage with your gamified experience, the rewards or incentives need to be meaningful enough that they’re willing to use some of their limited time on the experience. 

It’s what’s called a “genuine value exchange,” and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a monetary reward or discount. You can award virtual badges or trophies or provide things like educational content as the prize. Whatever rewards you offer, make sure they provide some sort of genuine value that makes it worth a person’s time. It can be a monetary reward, but it can also be entertainment value, educational worth, or something else that your customers want.

4. Make It Easy for Users to Track Progress

Ulta’s Beauty Rewards program is a fantastic example of a gamified loyalty program that uses progress tracking to engage users. When you’re a member of this program, a quick look at the rewards program page reveals a couple of different trackers: one that tracks how much your points are worth and another that tracks your progress toward earning Platinum and Diamond status. 

What makes trackers like these so effective is that they actively encourage people to spend more so they can hit certain milestones. If you’ve ever looked at a progress bar and thought to yourself, “Ooh, just a little bit more and I’ll hit the next tier,” then you understand what it is that makes progress trackers such a great motivator. It might be enough motivation to buy two bottles of body wash instead of just one or to try that product you’ve had on your “saved for later list” if it means you can hit the next rewards tier in doing so. Meanwhile, the brand sees key metrics like average order value (AOV) go up as people are willing to spend those extra few dollars to get the next level of rewards.

5. Help Customers Build Habits

It’s exhilarating to be on a win streak. And people love testing themselves against the odds, which is what makes challenges so much fun. You can capture the essence of these experiences through gamified, habit-forming activities that reward your customers. 

To understand how well this can work, imagine that you’re a sports drink brand. One of your goals is to get more social media interactions — and you want to use gamification to do it. You can create a challenge that asks customers to send in selfies of themselves enjoying your drink wherever they happen to be. From there, you can award prizes to people who send in selfies from the most remote locations, the most famous locations, the tallest locations, or any other category you can imagine.

In this gamification example, you’d be accomplishing three things:

• Activating your customers’ natural competitiveness as they vie with each other to get the best selfies
• Introducing a fun challenge, which is to find the best locations for taking selfies with your drink
• Helping customers make it a habit to have a bottle of your beverage on hand just in case they find a great selfie spot

That’s one way you can implement habit-forming game mechanics, but there are others you can try, too. For example, daily login bonuses are a good way to keep customers coming back for more day after day.

6. Implement Strategies to Build Loyalty

Gamification isn’t just about engaging and enthralling your customers. It’s also a valuable opportunity to build loyalty — and loyalty is a crucial component to customer retention. If you’re wondering how you can capitalize on this opportunity, there are a couple of ways to go about it.

First up is to create a sense of community. This commonly means using gamification to encourage people to follow your brand on social media platforms, share content, or even create user-generated content in exchange for awards, rewards, or other incentives.

However, keep in mind that community doesn’t always mean social media. Brands have also leveraged forums, chats, and messaging to great effect. For example, Sephora’s Beauty Insider Community is an active forum that gamifies things by awarding badges for interacting with the community. 

Keep in mind that not everyone is particularly active on social media or within online communities — and that’s why personalization is another great way to build a sense of loyalty. You can give customers the ability to personalize their profiles, for example.

Another way to approach personalization is through customer data. Use it to create personalized challenges and activities tailored to the interests and preferences of the individual user.

How Jebbit Fits Into Your Gamification Strategy

You’ve learned what gamification is, plus the best practices you’ll need to implement an effective gamification strategy — but you’re still missing one key component, and that’s a tool that lets you create gamified experiences with ease.

Jebbit is that tool. Our platform delivers a no-code experience builder that lets you create everything from custom branded quizzes to interactive minigames that your customers can play to earn rewards. Once you’ve created a gamified experience through Jebbit, our platform gives you the ability to easily launch it across all platforms — your website, social media, your mobile app, email, and elsewhere.

Even better, Jebbit gives you the capability to gather zero- and first-party data from the users who interact with your experiences — and you can channel that data back into your marketing efforts to make an even bigger impact. You can also leverage integrations with providers like Yotpo so that you can add points and other rewards to your gamification initiatives.

We could go on all day about the reasons why you need Jebbit in your life — but instead of telling you, let’s just show you. Below, you’ll find a few examples of the kinds of gamified experiences you can create with Jebbit.

Create a Memory Match Game

Memory match games are classic for a reason: Because they take a bit of brainpower. With this type of game, winning is its own reward because it affirms that you have a good memory — especially if it’s a timed memory match game or one that only lets you see the images briefly before asking you to find the matches.

This is the type of challenge that can really activate your customers’ competitive natures. Except instead of competing with each other, they’re competing against their own memories — and maybe a timer, too.

Make Mood Boards

Don’t know what to make for dinner? Or where to go on vacation? Or what to wear for an upcoming event? These minor bouts of analysis paralysis are annoying — and with a mood board, you can help your customers through them. Mood boards are a great way to gamify decisions — especially when, after years of making the same decisions day in and day out, your customers have completely run out of ideas.

That’s part of what makes mood boards so engaging and rewarding. They’re an easy way to get inspiration and ideas. Beautifully designed mood board creators are a visual feast, too. It’s fun to just click through and see all of the curated imagery.

And if you want to add an element of social sharing to your gamification strategy, it’s super easy to do with a mood board. Just add social sharing options at the end so that customers can share their custom boards to social media with just a click or two.

Create Virtual Scratchers

Even if you don’t buy lotto tickets very often, you’ve probably gotten scratch-off tickets as a gift or maybe you’ve even gotten one of those car dealership advertisements in the mail that features a scratch-off section. Either way, you know one thing is true: Scratch-off tickets, or “scratchers,” are irresistible. 

It’s one part mystery (What’s under the scratcher ink?!), and one part random chance (Will I hit the jackpot?!). On top of that, while we wouldn’t recommend scratchers as an investment choice, the chances that you’ll win something — even if it’s only a buck or two — are high enough to make it exciting and emotionally rewarding.

Create virtual scratch-off tickets through Jebbit, and you can capture that same sense of excitement and gamification — while offering your customers real, tangible rewards like discounts, loyalty points, or other perks.

Jebbit Can Help You Excite, Delight, and Engage Your Customers

A gamification strategy is a great way to get your customers excited and to build the kind of user engagement and loyalty that drives conversions. However, you can’t just add various game elements to your user experience and call it a day. Building customer engagement will require careful thought about what motivates your customers — and how you can apply gamification techniques that are appropriate both for your brand and your customers’ interests.

When it comes to building out a successful gamification strategy, you’ll need a powerful tool that can help you design amazing experiences tailored to your customers needs. Jebbit is that tool, giving you everything needed to create quizzes, spinners, scratch-off tickets, trivia tests, mood boards, and other types of gamified experiences.

Ready to learn more and get help building out your gamification strategy? Already a Jebbit customer? Reach out to your CSM, or schedule a call with one of our Experience Experts to learn how we can help!