If we’ve learned anything from years of capturing leads, it’s that capture can—and should—be fun! And not just because we like to have fun at work, but because creating interactive and engaging experiences for site visitors is effective. In fact, the gamification market is expected to grow to more than $32 billion by 2025. By bringing gamification to your eCommerce site with pop-ups and widgets, you can bring value to your audience, increasing time on site, brand affinity, and conversions.
How to Bring Gamification to Your eCommerce Marketing
Your visitors probably aren’t coming to your website to play Doom in your footer (although… they absolutely could), but there are ways to gamify your site that make things fun, engaging, and rewarding for your customers.
Here are some examples of how gamification can be used in marketing:
- Interactivity: Come up with creative ways to engage your users that go beyond filling a form. That could be as simple as asking a fun question, implementing a spin-to-win widget, or letting visitors choose a mystery prize.
- Points: Award points for completing certain actions or answering trivia questions correctly.
- Leaderboards: Take points to the next level by displaying leaderboards to encourage friendly competition.
- Public Polls: Similar to leaderboards, displaying how others answered poll questions can encourage engagement.
- Badges and Achievements: Give virtual badges or trophies to celebrate important milestones, and encourage customers to unlock more.
- Progress Tracking: A visual representation of how close a customer is to their next achievement can be really motivating!
- Rewards and Prizes: Of course, the best incentive is to get an actual prize, whether that’s a discount, exclusive content, or virtual currency.
- Quizzes and Surveys: Incorporate multiple gamification elements together with a marketing quiz or survey, such as points, milestones, progress, and rewards.
- Contests: The prize for leaderboards is usually bragging rights, but up the stakes for competition with actual prizes.
Why Does Gamification Work for eCommerce?
Gamification encourages users to interact with your site, keeping them engaged longer. eCommerce gamification marketing taps into that “5 more minutes” mentality, holding attention longer because it’s enjoyable and interactive. Gamified pop-ups and widgets also provide clear incentives like points, prizes, and a sense of accomplishment.
Use gamification to build stronger customer relationships, encourage certain behaviors with incentives and rewards, and collect powerful insights. For example, you can encourage customers to complete a profile, shop more often, share content on social media, or refer a friend if they can unlock a new milestone or earn points.
Examples of eCommerce Gamification
There are many ways to gamify your pop-ups and website widgets that create excitement, encourage engagement, and make your customer experience memorable.
Choose a Mystery Prize
Shoppers are used to seeing the same welcome offers on every site. In fact, email capture pop-ups are less effective than they were a few years ago because users take for granted that the same stale 10% off offer will always be there. One way to excite shoppers is with mystery offers.
Adding a game of chance to your email offer might be the nudge someone needs to sign up.
Polls
People love to share their opinions and compare themselves to the popular consensus. An on-site poll can be a great way to engage your audience while learning about their tastes.
And with live polling, visitors can see how their tastes stack up to others in real-time.
Mini-Surveys
You can also gain valuable visitor insights with a mini-survey. Then, offer a reward, like a one-time use coupon code.
Gamified Personality Quizzes
We know firsthand that quizzes are popular! More than a quarter of site visitors will take a quiz. While many eCommerce merchants use product recommendation quizzes to engage shoppers while driving sales, a personality quiz can be just as effective for gamifying engagement. Digioh customer Karl Lagerfeld's "What's Your Style" quiz allows shoppers to learn about their style, and in the meantime, Karl Lagerfeld learns about their shoppers. Plus, shoppers who complete the quiz earn a chance to win a $50 gift card, making for a double dose of marketing gamification.
Mini-Quizzes
You don’t have to build a complex quiz for engagement. A one-question mini-quiz can be enough to catch customer attention and provide satisfying results.
In the example above, visitors answer a single question about what occasion they’re shopping for, and the quiz instantly redirects them to a product catalog page with the right filters.
Contests
Whether it’s an epic boss battle or an essay-writing contest, it feels good to win! Contests are great for gamification marketing because they incentivize competition with a prize.
Allrecipes offered a $5,000 prize for the best mushroom and ground meat recipe, then added another layer by giving $1000 to voters. Not a bad incentive for participation!
Add Gamification Elements to Your Marketing Surveys and Quizzes
Quizzes and surveys are inherently great for marketing gamification because they’re interactive, engaging, and rewarding. But there are ways you can apply gamification concepts to make them even more fun and captivating.
Here are some ways you can use gamification in quizzes and surveys:
- Provide points to users for answering questions.
- Score quiz answers and provide a total score at the end.
- Create milestones based on how many sections or steps are completed.
- Use progress bars to encourage users to keep going.
- Award a virtual trophy or badge for completing the quiz or survey.
- Reward quiz and survey completions with a prize or discount.
Up Your Marketing Game with Gamification!
Ready to up your marketing game and increase engagement? Here are some more tips to captivate your viewers with gamification and other interactive content.
- Engagement Rate Optimization: Best Practices for Promoting Your Quiz
- Increase Conversion Rates with Digioh’s AI Headline Generator
- Which Widget? Strategies and Best Practices for Website Widgets
- Don't Lose the Sale! Understanding Cart Abandonment and How to Prevent It
Digioh makes capturing data fun and integrates tightly with your technology. Want to learn more? Contact us, and we're happy to help.
