How to Use Gamification for MORE Customer Engagement: 3 Expert Tips

Gamification is one of the most effective ways to boost engagement, capture leads, and drive conversions for your business. Whether you’re looking to increase email signups, reduce cart abandonment, or keep visitors on your site longer, adding game-like elements to your marketing strategy can make all the difference.

At OptinMonster, we’ve helped thousands of businesses use gamification and other strategies to turn passive visitors into active participants. We’re experts in generating leads and converting leads into sales, and we know exactly what works in onsite marketing.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to use gamification to grow your business, with real-world examples, actionable strategies, and the best tools to get started.

• How Gamification Improves Customer Engagement
• How to Use Gamification: 3 Expert Tips
  • 1. Add a Spin-to-Win Wheel
  • 2. Run an Online Contest
  • 3. Build a Customer Loyalty Program

How Gamification Improves Customer Engagement

Gamification is when marketers incorporate game-like elements into their marketing strategy to make a user’s experience (UX) with their product or services more enjoyable. These gamification elements can include:

• Keeping scores
• Tallying points
• Unlocking surprises
• Spinning a wheel for exclusive rewards
• And much more…

Gamification taps into human psychology by making interactions more interactive, rewarding, and fun. Instead of passively browsing, customers actively participate in challenges, earn rewards, and feel a sense of achievement. This keeps them engaged with your brand longer and increases the chances of conversion. Here’s how gamification enhances customer engagement:

1. Encourages Active Participation: People are more likely to engage when there’s a reward involved. Spin-to-win popups, quizzes, and point-based challenges give users a reason to interact instead of passively browsing.
2. Creates a Sense of Achievement: Badges, progress bars, and milestone rewards make customers feel accomplished. Loyalty programs like Starbucks Rewards keep users engaged by unlocking better perks as they progress.
3. Increases Time Spent on Your Website: Interactive content like quizzes and polls keeps visitors entertained longer, reducing bounce rates and improving conversions. The more time they spend, the more likely they are to take action.
4. Boosts Brand Loyalty: Rewarding repeat actions, such as purchases or referrals, builds stronger customer relationships. A well-designed gamified loyalty program keeps people coming back for more.
5. Encourages Social Sharing: Leaderboards, achievement badges, and referral contests give customers a reason to share their progress with friends. This creates organic word-of-mouth marketing and expands your reach.

By making marketing more engaging, gamification increases conversions and brand loyalty. OptinMonster makes it easy to add gamified elements like spin-to-win wheels, milestone rewards, and quizzes to your site.Let’s look at 3 gamification techniques you can start using right now to boost customer engagement.

How to Use Gamification: 3 Expert Tips

If you want to know how to apply gamification to your website, then look no further.

Because you’re about to learn how to gamify a website in a few easy steps.

Let’s dive into the list.

1. Add a Spin-to-Win Wheel

Remember the TV show The Price Is Right? It was 45 minutes of games and contests that led to 1 thing:

Spinning the wheel to enter the final showdown.

And watching that wheel spin was the most suspenseful part of the entire show.

You can create this same feeling for your store’s customers, too. Doing so builds suspense, excitement, and gets potential leads invested in buying your products.

But how do create a spin-to-win wheel that grows your subscriber list if you’re not a professional coder (or designer)?

That’s where OptinMonster steps on the scene:

OptinMonster is the easiest and most effective lead generation tool on the market. That’s because it allows anyone to quickly and easily create stunning popups, floating bars, slide-ins, and other onsite campaigns to engage your website visitors.

These campaigns help you grow your email list and encourage sales. And they can also help you improve your customer engagement through gamification.

Among OptinMonster’s 700+ premade templates are 38 Coupon Wheel templates that encourage shoppers to enter their email address for a chance to win a big discount.

OptinMonster offers coupon wheel templates for a variety of holidays and scenarios, including

• General flash sales
• Halloween
• Cyber Monday
• Black Friday
• Christmas
• Holi
• Amazon Prime Day
• And more…

For example, here’s a template for Halloween:

Any template can be completely cusomized in our easy drag-and-drop builder, and your coupon wheel settings can be edited in a few clicks:

You’re also not limited to the 38 templates. You can add coupon wheels, countdown timers, and other engaging elements to any template in the drag-and-builder:

Not only will you grow your email list, but you’ll also drastically increase user engagement with your brand.

That means your customers will be more likely to stick around long-term and tell their friends about your products.

And the best part is that you can target these gamified wheels ANYWHERE on your site. OptinMonster lets you determine when, where, and to whom these popups appear for the highest conversions.

This gives you more confidence that you’re optimizing the number of leads you get without leaving any on the table.

Or feel free to get started by clicking below and creating your 100% risk-free OptinMonster account today.

Important Note: You’ll need the OptinMonster Growth Plan to access the coupon wheel features.

2. Run an Online Contest

One of the easiest ways to gamify your marekting is running a contest.

Online giveaways are effective at driving traffic, increasing your social followers, and skyrocketing user engagement.

The problem is that most small business owners don’t know how to run an online contest in the right way. That’s why we highly recommend using RafflePress:

RafflePress is an online giveaway plugin that allows you to create viral contests in minutes. It also helps you boost user engagement in more ways than one.

That’s because, with traditional online giveaways, you’re usually limited to one prize for one action.

You’ve probably seen promotions like “Leave us a review on iTunes and enter your chance to win a FREE MacBook Pro!”

These are great but, again, they have one prize (MacBook Pro) for one action (leave a review).

User engagement is boosted, but only with one specific area of your marketing strategy.

RafflePress changes that.

With RafflePress, you can create a prize and award entry points for different actions taken on your site. So you could give more points for:

• Subscribing to an email list
• Following social media platform
• Referring-a-friend through social sharing
• Watching a video

And so much more.

Plus, unlike traditional online contests, your RafflePress giveaways are safe from spambots.

They have a 1 Click Entry + Fraud Protection feature that makes it easy for real users to sign up, but difficult for spambots to flood your email list with fake subscribes.

But what if you’re not very “tech-savvy”? Will you still be able to create stunning contests that people want to participate in?

Absolutely.

RafflePress has a codeless visual contest builder that requires ZERO technical knowledge. And once you’re done, you can embed the contest across your site via:

• Custom blocks for the Gutenberg editor
• Shortcodes for the Classic editor
• Automated landing pages generated by RafflePress

That means you can have professional and highly engaging contests up and running in a matter of minutes (and with just a few clicks).

If you want to use gamification across marketing platforms to increase user engagement, running an online contest is an absolute must.

Get started with RafflePress today!

3. Build a Customer Loyalty Program

If you really want to roll out the red carpet, consider creating a gamified customer loyalty program.

Starbucks is a perfect example. They are a brick-and-mortar store that uses gamification to create one of the most popular loyalty programs on the planet. Rather than go with the traditional “Buy 6 coffees and get 1 free” approach like their competitors, Starbucks upped their game.

They created a gamification system that rewards purchases with gold stars. When customers accumulate enough of these stars, they can redeem them for other Starbucks products.

Now, in principle, this is exactly the same as a punch-out card you see from other coffee vendors. But the game-like elements make it so much more appealing.

Businesses of all times use gamified loyalty programs to encourage repeat business. Here’s an email from Box Lunch that lets customers know about a double-points shopping day and reminds them of reward money they’ve already earned:

Programs like these keep customers engaged and encourage them to shop with your brand again and again.

Start Engaging Customers With Gamification

Using any of the 3 actionable tips in this post is guaranteed to get more interaction with your customers. Or you can use all 3 techniques to build a gamification system that enhances your entire customer journey.

The easiest way to add gamification to your site is with OptinMonster’s coupon wheels. Get started with OptinMonster’s Growth Plan today!

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