You may have heard about businesses that have succeeded in getting fabulous results using gamification strategy in their business. In this article, you will learn how to easily add gamification to your Shopify business.

Gamification has existed in many areas of life for as long as civilization has existed. Remember when Mary Poppins said: “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and SNAP! the job’s a game!” She knew all the way back in the 1960s that anything could be turned into a fun activity by making it into a game.

What is gamification anyway?

As quoted above from Mary Poppins, gamification is simply achieved by making your activities fun by turning them into a game. In 2014 Gartner redefined gamification as “the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals”.

You can bring the game into the actions your customers take while communicating with your brand. This way you can make it fun to interact with you, and engage your customers more effectively.

Why is gamification important?

Data shows that businesses have a chance of 60-70% selling to their existing customers in comparison to the 5-20% chance of selling to a new customer.

Using gamification you can boost the motivation of your existing customers to be more engaged with your brand. You can also improve the experience of your customers, increase their engagement, and retain customers. If you’re up-and-running e-commerce, it’s very important to add gamification to your Shopify business or WooCommerce business to get the most possible profit from your customers.

Key Elements of Successful Gamification

To get the most out of your gamification system, it’s important for you to understand the key categories of gamification and apply them to your business as required.

Badges 🎖

Badges are elements that customers earn when levelling up in your gamification system. They show achievements and encourage customers to work with your system more regularly.

Points 🔢

Points show the progress of your customers. The more engaged they are, the more points they will receive in your system. By getting more points, your customers will upgrade to the next levels and therefore will get more badges.

Rewards ✨

What would remain of a game without rewards? In good gamification systems, customers gain points to be rewarded, so the ultimate goal is to get more rewards. You can reward your customers’ actions to encourage them to do more of those actions in your gamification structure.

Challenges 🚀

Challenges encourage your customers to be even more engaged with your brand to gain an extra point/badge/reward. You should choose your challenges wisely to get the most out of your gamification system.

How can you add gamification to your Shopify business?

To add your gamification system to your Shopify business, first, you should design your gamification structure. Follow this step-by-step guide to designing your gamification.

1. Understand the key elements of successful gamification

The first step to adding gamification to your business is to understand the key elements of gamification as defined above.

2. Specify the most important “Actions” in your business

Define your scoring system. How can your customers gain points? What actions are rewarded by you? The most important action for every e-commerce business is paying a certain amount of money. It’s best to give more points for bigger amounts of money paid by your customers.

3. Evaluate your most important actions

Now that you have a list of the most important actions in your system, sort them having the most important one on top. Starting from the top of the list, define how many points will your customers gain whenever they perform that action. For example, you might give 10 points for each purchase, and 1 point for every 10 dollars they spend on your website.

4. Keep in touch with your customers

Make sure your customers enjoy using your system. Keep in touch with them by email, SMS, and push notifications. Track how your customers interact with your brand, and understand which part needs improvements. Using your gamification system, you can encourage your customers to buy specific products, pay some more money, and suggest your brand to their friends. You can also test some new products and see how they work for your customers.

5. Automate all of the above steps

Finally, it’s time to program and automate the above steps. If you don’t have a developer and a data scientist on your team, you can simply use the Formaloo Customer Data Platform to automate your gamification structure. Using Formaloo you can create your actions, sort them based on your needs, and specify how many points each is worth.

Even if you need help writing the gamification structure, Formaloo provides a default gamification structure that runs automatically on your website as soon as you install Formaloo on your Shopify or WooCommerce website.

To learn more about how you can use the Formaloo gamification system, contact us and the Formaloo team will be in touch with you within 24 hours.

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