How to Use Gamification to Boost Your Customer Loyalty Program?

Adding games and rewards to your business marketing strategy can help you gain more sales and enhance customer loyalty. If done correctly, it can be useful for your brand’s recognition and will encourage customers to purchase your product. However, if not done right, it can waste your time, money, effort, and damage your customer base.

In this blog, we will talk about what gamification is, its various benefits. We will also talk about how gamification can help you boost your loyalty programs and shed new insight on how you can create loyal customers.

What is Gamification?

The strategy of adding game mechanics into a business website, or a non-game environment, or any online community to increase user participation and gain more sales is called gamification. The major objective of gamification is to engage with employees, partners, and consumers to inspire share, collaborate, and interact. Here are a few major benefits of gamification.

• Gives target audience a sense of progress.
• Encourages users to learn more about your brand and its products.
• Makes the customers more competitive and competitive because they learn together.
• Improves creativity, focus, and productivity to solve a challenge.
• Offers a fun learning attitude to help users remember it for a longer time.

Before you go any further to learn more about what gamification is and what tactics you can use to enhance customer loyalty and retention, here is a video to help you learn how you can turn prospects into long-term customers.(Above video is a part of a more elaborate course on Academy by Appy Pie. To access the complete course, please Click Here, or continue reading below.)

How to Use Gamification to Encourage Customer Loyalty?

Let us take an example of Starbucks and how it gamified its app. The company's efforts at gamification ended up creating a program with such a good environment that it allows them to try innovative methods to gamify their products. Through the Starbucks Loyalty Program, they have used mobile app marketing to enhance their retail experience and drive customer loyalty towards the stores. The company has gained and used ample opportunities for testing new marketing tactics and with a gamified twist to each new marketing tactic. Here are a few simple ways that you can use to increase client retention and build customer loyalty.

Discover Your Goals

Figure out what you are trying to achieve. The rewards in your loyalty program should directly relate to your brand's products and services. It helps you retain your customers for long-term. For example – Airlines Loyalty Programs. They allow their customers to earn points through reward games and then let them use these points to earn free tickets. It shows that the major goal of organizing these loyalty programs is to direct users towards the brand's products and services. To make it work, you need to identify your target audience first. Here is a video to help you with that.
(Above video is a part of a more elaborate course on Academy by Appy Pie. To access the complete course, please Click Here, or continue reading below.)

Map Your Storyline

Try to create a clear program structure that your customers can follow easily. The games in the program can only be fun if your participants understand how to play them. Before the game starts, your customers should have a clear understanding of questions like-
• What do they need to achieve to reach out to the final goal?
• What are the rewards?
• What is the ultimate end prize to strive for?

Utilize Recognition to Facilitate Participation

You can recognize participants in two ways. First, recognize the ones with high scores and keep them motivated. Secondly, keep updating the users about their scores to keep them engaged. Keep reminding them that they are close to achieving the next level or a reward to encourage them to continue playing. Here is a video for you to learn how you can make customer retention your secret weapon.
(Above video is a part of a more elaborate course on Academy by Appy Pie. To access the complete course, please Click Here, or continue reading below.)

Optimize Your Program for Mobile

To get the best out of your loyalty program, you can offer it in a mobile application. This way it will be easy for the customers to install and register to participate. It will also help your customers stay engaged with your brand. The best part about a mobile app is that you can keep sending your customers regular updates of these programs using push notifications. You can create such an app with Appy Pie’s Loyalty App Builder. Appy Pie offers various effective features including customization and push notifications. With these features, you can use the colors, fonts, and templates of your choice and customize your app as per your requirements. Get Started

Give Time to Drive Engagement

If you will mention a time limit on some reward program or a contest, it helps customers feel the sense of urgency and they tend to participate in the same. Doing this however can make you lose a few customers who may get to know later about the program. They may participate for a short time or miss the deadline and discard your product and service completely.

Encourage Social Interaction

You can also integrate social media platforms within your program. Adding social media components can develop a competitive nature among the participants. It can be appealing for many gamers to win heightened status or level in the game. With social media integration, your customers can also invite their friends and other contacts to play with them and participate in the contest. If you have a loyalty app for your program or have considered creating one, you can integrate your preferred social media platform into your app using Appy Pie’s Automation Platform – Appy Pie Connect. This integration can help your participants share their achievements on social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram when they get rewarded for a purchase.Get Started

Handle Errors Nicely

When someone plays and tries to reach the goal, there make mistakes. In the game life, there are several chances and if you have taken all of them and you failed, the game is over. To keep the users engaged, it is better that you make the failing process clear and fixable. To deal with the errors nicely, you can show the fail result with the explanation of what went wrong and the list of incorrectly answered questions. This way the game will be shown less about winning and more about learning.

Conclusion

That was it for today. I hope this article will help you better understand how you can use gamification to improve your customer retention strategy and build customer loyalty. As mentioned in the article earlier as well, you must create an app for your loyalty program to make it more efficient and effective. Try Appy Pie’s Loyalty App Builder to create an app for your loyalty program to help your business increase customer engagement levels and create strong communities. Also, you can visit our Appy Pie Academy to learn more about how you can improve your business marketing strategy.

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