"Gamification" Combines Business with Fun
By Walter Rogers
The social media revolution has drastically altered the expectations many people have when they interact with your company. Not only do they expect to find helpful information about on your company on your web site about your products and services, now they also expect for the experience of visiting your site to be highly engaging, even entertaining. If they don‘t feel the experience offers the value they are looking for, they are not likely to stay very long.
This is can be a big problem, seeing that eCommerce and the social media revolution have shifted enormous amounts of business to a digital presence. If your visitors aren‘t staying, they aren‘t buying, or at least they are not engaging in the kind of activities that would lead them to eventually become customers. There is also the matter of customer advocacy. Research indicates that only about 1% of the typical visitors to a company website become advocates for that company‘s products and services. However, research indicates that with the right incentives and a heightened quality of experience, this number can easily grow to at least 5%, which can be worth thousands and sometimes even millions of dollars for the corporate bottom line.
This shift in customer expectations has lead companies to invest in a variety of strategies to increase the "stickiness" of their websites, meaning they are looking for ways to make their sites more attractive to customers so they will visit more often and want to spend more time exploring everything the site has to offer during each visit. The newest innovation in this area is a concept referred to as "gamification." Simply put, gamification involves offering customers a chance to amuse themselves by playing various games when they visit your site. The concept is very simple: if you have a game or two on your site – especially if it might have the capability to involve multiple players – the number of visitors to your site is likely to go up and the number of minutes they spend on your site will increase dramatically. These visitors are likely to return more often and invite other people to visit as well. Over time, this process can lead to an increase in brand loyalty on the part of your visitors and a growth in the percentage of visitors who are advocates for your site and your products.
"Done right, gamification can make engaging a brand fun, rewarding, addictive, and benefit both brands and consumers," says Lyle Fong, CEO of Lithium - a company that specializes in helping their clients leverage social media and gamitization to uncover new business and drive revenue. "A recent survey found that 50% of consumers want brands to entertain them, and for ages 16-24, that number is more like 66%"
It will take planning and research to decide what kind of games to offer on your site. They can be as basic as one-player brain teasers or trivia challenges and graduate all the way to more complex, multi-player experiences on the order of Farmville, the blockbuster multi-player community that is the number one gaming application on Facebook.com. Experts agree that the more opportunity your game offers for users to build an interactive community, the more successful it will be.
If you want to increase the impact or stickiness of your gamification strategy, it would be good to also provide opportunities for your visitors to leave comments about the game, the site, and your products and services, and maybe even leave blog posts. All of these interactive opportunities enrich the experience for your visitors, and provide them even more reasons to come back again and again.
However, it is not enough to just decide on what kind of games or other interactive options to offer; you should also give careful consideration to how you will interact with the users while they are on your site. Do you have a plan for connecting with new users and determining which are already customers and which are prospects? What kind of follow-up or outreach will you deploy for each group? How will you leverage these contacts and convert them to new business? What metrics will you employ to track the success of your program? Who will be in charge of evaluating the program and proposing revisions as the project ages? It is of vital importance that you address these issues internally before launching any kind of gamification strategy, because no matter how cool it may sound to have a game running on your website, if you don‘t have a plan to capture and maximize the ROI, then the project can turn into a money pit that hurts business more than it helps.
According Fong, gamitization can be effective with any type of customer.
"While there is no doubt that gamitization works best for B2C brands, we have yet to find an industry or B2B where it doesn't work," he explained. "It has even worked in health insurance and financial industries. Regardless of industry, your customers are still PEOPLE, and they want their interactions with you and your website to be engaging."
No discussion of gamification would be complete without also mentioning gamification‘s cousin, "contestification." This is another way of providing incentives for customers to keep visiting your site. Contestification (holding contests on your site) provides an opportunity for your visitors to actually win something of value as a result of visiting your site. The options are endless. Here is one quick example: invite visitors to blog on your site about some industry related issue, and at the end of the month the person who provides the most useful opinions (in the eyes of whoever is judging the feedback) is declared the winner. This is just one example among hundreds of possibilities. It doesn‘t have to be complicated. As gamification clearly proves, people love to compete.
The prize doesn‘t have to be expensive – perhaps a discount on future purchases or a free limited-time subscription to a service your company offers. It could even be as simple as a restaurant gift card. The point is, by running these contests and keeping them going every month, you are encouraging visitors to keep visiting your site and making it easier for them to stay longer. Just keep in mind that all the planning and management suggestions we noted above for hosting games on your site also apply to contests.
With lingering uncertainty in the economy, and competition for customers more intense than ever, companies must find a competitive edge where ever they can. Games and contests are one way to differentiate yourself from your competitors, while at the same time attracting more prospects to your site, holding them longer, interacting with them more effectively, and building brand loyalty that might help drive even more new business. If you plan and manage the process intelligently, you will see the results where it really counts – in your bottom line.
Action Items:
- Have you considered using games or contests to enhance the stickiness of your website?
- Do you have a plan for connecting with and qualifying visitors who play games on your site?
- Do you have a plan for leveraging these contacts and converting them to new business?
- Explain how what metrics will you employ to track the success of your gamification program?
Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.
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