If your business wants to ramp up user engagement and create an interactive experience for your users, you need to look into gamification. With the right strategies, you can use fun games and rewards to encourage users to take action and engage with your products or services.
Many businesses employ gamification to attract new potential users and increase the loyalty of already existing users. Continue reading if you’re interested in learning about five gamification strategies.
Gamification Defined
App gamification involves incorporating game-like elements into a non-game app. These features boost user engagement, drive targeted user actions, and enhance user enjoyment.
Gamification aims to incentivize users to continue using your mobile app by enhancing the experience with enjoyable and interactive elements. This is accomplished by incorporating different game-like features like rewards, points, badges, and levels.
The benefits of gamification include a boost in user engagement, increased user motivation, instant feedback for users, and a feeling of being part of a larger community of fellow users.
While conceptual explanations are valuable, nothing beats learning about app gamification from companies and brands with compelling examples.
Gamification Strategies
Let’s look at the top five gamification strategies currently used in popular apps and loved by users. Each strategy explanation includes an example of an app that uses it successfully!
Badges
Since our early days, badges have played a significant role in our lives. However, they have now evolved into powerful tools for app gamification.
Badges are virtual rewards that users acquire by completing specific actions or reaching important milestones within an app. Usually represented by icons or images, badges can be collected and showcased on user profiles or shared with friends through social media.
These badges offer several advantages to app developers, including promoting a sense of achievement, recognition, and user engagement. Moreover, badges encourage friendly competition as users aim to earn more and compare their collections with friends.
One app that uses badges for gamification is Honeygain – the first-ever app that allows users to make free money online by sharing their Internet connection.
Honeygain introduced a gamification called Achievements in 2023, making earning passive income a more exciting experience.
This release involves achievements, which are dependent on active participation and games. You can now collect in-app achievements and earn points, stickers, and badges to show off your money-making journey.
The app introduced entertainment into the money-making process.
User Rewards
Rewards for users play a vital role in app gamification and are proven to enhance user engagement and retention.
User rewards amplify app engagement by fostering a feeling of progress and achievement. Unlocking rewards and progressing towards goals encourages users to remain active on the app, leading to longer sessions, frequent use, and heightened brand loyalty.
To provide a clearer picture, let’s examine how user rewards contribute to the gamification strategy of the Claudia Dean app. Claudia Dean, a former dancer at the Royal Ballet School, wanted a fitness app that combines her dance expertise to help others improve their skills.
The Claudia Dean app gained rapid popularity, with ten thousand downloads within the first week, trending status, and an impressive 4.9-star rating based on over 200 reviews on the Apple App Store.
Users earn collection coins whenever they engage in practice sessions within the app. They can use these coins to purchase merchandise available within the app. In the case of Claudia Dean, the app was able to track the number of Collection Coins users earned, which gave the company insights into which features were most popular.
Progress Display
You might have encountered a progress bar in popular games like Candy Crush or Farmville – where you feel advancement as you complete levels or tasks.
In the context of app gamification, it refers to a visual representation of the user’s progress within the app. This can be done through different methods, such as progress bars, level-dependent progress, or unlocking achievements.
Duolingo, the wildly popular language-learning app, effortlessly displays progress using a color-coded bar at the top of the screen. When users answer questions correctly, the bar moves to the right, giving them a sense of achievement and progress.
Delightful animated messages additionally inspire and support users in their accomplishments. Seeing a visual of their progress motivates users to keep using the app. It gives them a sense of accomplishment and positive reinforcement.
Quizzes
Quizzes are popular for engaging users and fostering interactivity in mobile applications. When incorporating game elements into apps, quizzes are frequently utilized to encourage users to remain engaged and actively participate in the app’s offerings.
Simply put, app gamification quizzes present users with questions or challenges to correctly answer to earn points, rewards, or other in-app perks. These quizzes can come in various forms, including trivia games, personality tests, or mini-games.
Kids Academy, a prominent educational app for children, leverages gamified quizzes to enrich the learning experience. These quizzes test knowledge and maintain the interest and motivation to learn more.
The interactive quizzes within the app reinforce the curriculum and effectively engage young learners in a fun and meaningful way. The critical takeaway from Kids Academy is that gamifying an app necessitates balancing fun, education, and incentives to sustain user engagement.
It’s essential to be creative and strategic in crafting the overall user experience, particularly when the target audience has a limited attention span, which can be common among many children.
Leaderboards
Now that we’ve covered quizzes, let’s explore another widely used gamification feature – leaderboards.
A leaderboard serves as a visual representation of the top performers in a game or application. It displays the current rankings and scores of all players. Rewards accompany these rankings, including virtual goods, real-world prizes, or bragging rights.
The leaderboard ranks users’ scores, which are updated daily based on their accumulated results. Tracking their progress and witnessing their name climb the leaderboard inspires players to aim for higher scores.
An instance of a leaderboard in action can be found in the fitness app Nike+ Run Club. Users can compete against one another, challenging themselves to run the most significant number of miles in a week or month.
The strength of the Nike+ Run Club app lies in the thrill of competition and the satisfaction of climbing the leaderboard. It keeps users engaged and motivated by immersing them in a competitive environment. Moreover, it aids in progress tracking and allows users to witness the results of their dedication.
Try implementing some of the strategies we discussed today to increase user engagement, boost loyalty, and create an unforgettable experience for your users. See which tactics work best for your business and measure the success rate of those techniques to optimize your gamification processes.
Do you care about the users’ experience on your app? Show that with gamification! With these steps in place, you’re well on creating a successful gamification strategy to attract more customers.