Are you looking for gamification marketing ideas for your website?
Gamification marketing is a fun and easy way to boost engagement, conversions, and revenue.
In this article, you’ll learn about the benefits of gamification in marketing and 8 engaging gamification marketing ideas to use for your business.
Here’s a table of contents to help you find your way around:
- What is Gamification?
- Why Does Gamification Marketing Work?
- Benefits of Gamification Marketing
- Unique Gamification Marketing Ideas to Try
What is Gamification?
Gamification in marketing is simply adding elements from games to attract and retain customers.
Gamification elements include chance, rewards, and competition. Visitors can play against other customers or earn rewards on their own.
Marketing strategies you can gamify include advertising, list-building, referrals, affiliate programs, and even the shopping process itself.
Why Does Gamification Marketing Work?
Gamification marketing ideas work because they’re based on universal psychological principles and survival instincts.
Throughout human history, we’ve learned by playing games and imitating others. We’ve survived because of our instinct to seek rewards and avoid punishment. These same principles apply to marketing.
For example, many gamification marketing ideas appeal to the customer’s desire for a reward. They’re willing to add another item to their cart in order to get free shipping or a gift with purchase.
Other gamification strategies stoke the customer’s sense of urgency or competition. When they see a message that a promotion only lasts 3 more hours, fear of missing out (or FOMO) kicks in and they’re driven to act faster than they otherwise would.
Another reason gamification works is the Zeigarnik effect. The Zeigarnik effect is the tendency to continue a series of actions once you’ve taken the first step. Many gamification marketing ideas are interactive and start with a simple invitation to play. Once the customer says yes once, they’re more likely to say yes to the next step.
Benefits of Gamification Marketing
Gamification marketing can help your business in 5 major ways.
First, it’s a great way to get consumer attention. The average user may see thousands of ads every day with the same tired call to “Buy Now!” Adding an interactive game element makes that content or ad stand out more.
Next, gamification marketing is great for increasing customer engagement. Because gamification marketing ideas often rely on a social element like competition or cooperation, they can bring more visitors to your website, email list, or social media. Marketing gamification can also increase user’s time on site. This positively affects other important metrics like bounce rate.
Furthermore, gamification can be a great way to educate your audience. Gamification marketing ideas like trivia contests, scavenger hunts, or even simple social share giveaways all encourage customers to learn more about your product or brand.
Additionally, gamification marketing can inspire user-generated content like photos or social media posts. This organic word of mouth marketing can be incredibly valuable and may cost very little for you to acquire.
Finally, gamification is an amazing way to collect valuable data such as name and contact information. You can also learn about user behavior from the games themselves.
For example, you might have a spin to win campaign with codes for free shipping and different types of discounts. Based on coupon code usage, you have an idea of which prize is the most motivating or desirable. This can inform your other marketing strategies.
Now let’s look at some specific gamification marketing ideas.
Unique Gamification Marketing Ideas to Try
The great thing about gamification marketing is that you can apply the same ideas across industries and products. Everyone loves to win, and most people enjoy the mere chance of winning just as much.
Here are our favorite gamification marketing ideas. They’re all easy to implement without any coding required.
1. Prize Wheel
First of all, we have the classic spin-to-win prize wheel.
The game is simple: Customers spin the wheel and win a prize based on where the wheel stops.
You can find physical prize wheels in stores, at trade shows, and even on TV game shows like The Price is Right.
And it’s super easy to add a digital prize wheel to your website, even if you’re not a developer.
How? With OptinMonster.
OptinMonster is the #1 lead generation tool on the Internet. You can easily create stunning optin campaigns inviting customers to join your email list. Then use OptinMonster’s advanced targeting and trigger rules to show them to the right people at the right time.
Most importantly, you can create spin-to-win prize wheels with just a few clicks. OptinMonster has more than 20 spin-to-win wheel templates ready to go.
Setting up the prizes is super simple. You can customize the section labels and make certain prizes unwinnable if you’re out of stock or want to limit the number of big ticket prizes you give away.
You can even use a digital prize wheel to drive foot traffic to your physical location. Invite customers to take a screenshot of their winning spin and bring it in to redeem their prize. Or ask customers to spin on site!
This Gamification Marketing Idea Is Great For:
- Getting Customer Attention
- Increasing Engagement
- Increasing Traffic
- Increasing Sales
- Collecting User Information
2. Coupon Wheel
Another variation on spin-to-win is the coupon wheel.
Instead of winning prizes outright, customers earn coupon codes that they can use on their next purchase.
You can offer coupons for:
- Free shipping
- Gift with purchase
- Flat or percentage discounts
A coupon wheel can be less work and expense for you than a prize wheel. Coupon codes are easy for customers to redeem on their own. And they must make a purchase in order to redeem their coupon.
You can even send their winning code to your email marketing service along with their name and email address. That makes it easy to send them their code along with other promotions.
Check out our detailed tutorial on how to create a coupon wheel.
This Gamification Marketing Idea Is Great For:
- Getting Customer Attention
- Increasing Engagement
- Increasing Traffic
- Increasing Sales
- Collecting User Information
3. Action Wheel
A third way to use spin-to-win campaigns is to create an action wheel.
Rather than prizes or discounts, you create a wheel with actions that users can take related to your business and area of expertise.
For example, a personal trainer could create a fitness wheel with sections like, “Do 10 jumping jacks,” and “Drink a glass of water.”
An artist selling a drawing course could create a wheel with practice exercises like, “Draw the nearest object on your right,” or “Draw a horse with your eyes closed.”
You could encourage visitors to tweet or post about their action with a hashtag that gets collected into a feed. We’ll discuss hashtag feeds more later.
The action wheel is more about building brand awareness and customer engagement than converting sales.
But you can still reward participation with discount codes or a raffle for visitors who opt into your spin-to-win campaign or post elsewhere about your action wheel.
This Gamification Marketing Idea Is Great For:
- Getting Customer Attention
- Increasing Engagement
- Inspiring User-Generated Content
Build your action wheel with OptinMonster!
4. Raffle
Inspired by real-life raffles where you put tickets in a jar and draw a winner, online raffles and giveaways can skyrocket engagement on your social media, email, and website.
Customers earn entries by visiting pages, engaging with content, following accounts, or completing other steps.
At the end of the contest period, you draw one or multiple winners from the entries.
This gamification marketing idea ignites people’s sense of competition and urgency as they try to increase their chances of winning.
The best part is that you don’t have to manually tally entries anymore! Instead, run your giveaway with RafflePress, the easiest online giveaway plugin you can find.
With RafflePress, you can choose from more than 20 entry types. You can even assign different point values to each entry type. This lets you align the chance of reward with the action taken.
For example, writing a detailed review about a product takes much more time than clicking a Like button. The customer who makes the effort to review a product should be rewarded more than someone who just clicks a button.
RafflePress has a codeless contest builder that you can use with zero technical knowledge or experience. You can then embed your contest anywhere with custom Gutenberg blocks, shortcodes, and auto-generated landing pages.
You can even use a social proof app like TrustPulse to show when people enter the contest. This builds even more urgency and FOMO for your giveaway.
Running an online raffle has never been easier. Get started with RafflePress today!
This Gamification Marketing Idea Is Great For:
- Getting Customer Attention
- Increasing Engagement
- Increasing Traffic
5. Scavenger Hunt
Scavenger hunts or Easter egg hunts are a great way to get customers to see parts of your website they might not look at otherwise.
Visitors look for clues like icons or codes throughout your site. They submit what they find through a form and earn a reward like a free item, discount, or gift with purchase.
You can use TrustPulse to place static Action Messages throughout your site. Visitors can then submit a form with all the pages where they found the Action Messages.
Or you can include clues or codes on each Action Message and visitors can submit what they find.
You can also just include the clues or codes in the copy of your website. This works well if you’re having customers submit a form with multiple clues to claim their prize.
Another way to do a scavenger hunt is to combine it with a raffle. Customers can submit a form entry every time they find a clue. Then you’ll pick one or more winners at specified times. The more clues they find, the better their chances of winning.
A form builder like WPForms makes it simple to create your scavenger hunt submission forms and embed them wherever you want.
This Gamification Marketing Idea Is Great For:
- Getting Customer Attention
- Increasing Engagement
- Increasing Traffic
6. Photo Contest
Another easy but effective gamification marketing idea is to run a photo contest.
Invite current customers or potential customers to submit photos with a specific contest hashtag. At the end of the contest period, you’ll pick a winner either randomly or based on specified criteria.
The best photo contest ideas create engaging content that’s also related to your business. Sure, dozens of cute dog photos are fun to look at, but that may not attract customers interested in your cake decorating course.
Instead, you could ask for creative photos with your products. You can also set up fun props or a backdrop at your storefront to encourage foot traffic.
You can increase your contest engagement by displaying your photo contest entries on your website. For this, we recommend using the best social media feeds plugin, Smash Balloon.
Smash Balloon can display a feed of Instagram posts based on your contest hashtag. Website visitors can see other people’s entries, which may motivate them to join the contest as well.
If you’re running a contest on Facebook, you can also create a hashtag feed. Or you can create a public photo album on your Facebook page. Customers can add photos to that album and use Smash Balloon to show a feed of photos from that album.
Either way, you’re showing off rich user-generated content. This can do wonders for your brand awareness and skyrocket engagement on your contest.
Run a photo contest with Smash Balloon today!
This Gamification Marketing Idea Is Great For:
- Getting Customer Attention
- Increasing Engagement
- Increasing Traffic
- Inspiring User-Generated Content
7. Trivia Contest
One gamification marketing idea that combines elements of the scavenger hunt and the photo contest is a trivia contest. (Sorry, the one above isn’t real!)
You ask questions about your brand and industry and give prizes for correct answers. This encourages customers to visit your website and social media profiles to look for the right responses.
You can use a simple website form to collect answers, or you can make the game public by asking questions on Twitter or Facebook.
Ask customers to include a contest hashtag for their answer to be eligible. Then you can use Smash Balloon to create a Twitter hashtag feed with the answers. Smash Balloon can also create a Facebook post feed filtered by hashtag.
You can even combine your trivia contest with a photo contest to generate more eye-catching user posts.
Either way, trivia contests are a great way to build engagement and educate your audience.
This Gamification Marketing Idea Is Great For:
- Getting Customer Attention
- Increasing Engagement
- Inspiring User-Generated Content
- Educating Your Audience
8. Affiliate Leaderboards
A leaderboard is a list of top-scoring competitors that shows their names and scores.
If you use affiliate marketing to get more customers, a leaderboard is a great way to motivate your affiliates with some friendly competition.
AffiliateWP is the best affiliate marketing plugin for WordPress.
You can use it to easily register, manage, and pay affiliates to promote your products and business. Check out this article to learn how to set up an affiliate program on WordPress.
Best of all, AffiliateWP comes with a free Leaderboard Add-on. Brag on your top affiliates by showing off how many referrals, earnings and visits they’ve brought in.
This can encourage all your affiliates to make you more sales.
This Gamification Marketing Idea Is Great For:
- Increasing Traffic
- Increasing Sales
And that’s a wrap! We hope you enjoyed this list of gamification marketing ideas. Try one out and let us know how it goes!
As you can see, gamification can be easily added to your marketing strategy with big results.
If you’d like to see our favorite tools for gamification, check out this list of our favorite gamification plugins.
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