Few activities are more engaging than a well-designed game. By their nature, games encourage and facilitate exploration of virtual space and reward players when they perform tasks, achieve goals or acquire skills. When you think about it, this is precisely what your business needs to do for your customers. By encouraging your website visitors to engage in certain activities and rewarding them for doing so, you transform the conversion process into something more akin to an interactive game.
Think of it as rewarding customers for swiping a credit or debit card, staying at a particular hotel or flying a certain airline. In exchange for engaging via your website, you reward current and prospective customers with points for discounts, badges that signify status and so on. You may even have a leaderboard where customers can compete against one another to win prizes.
When you apply simple game theory to your website, visitors earn rewards for many of the things you want them to do, such as signing up for an e-newsletter, participating in an online demo, downloading a white paper, commenting on a blog post and liking your Facebook page.
The good news is that you don't have to restructure your website to include a game layer. Several companies offer turnkey solutions that enable layering an incentive or reward system on top of your current website. Here are a few of the best:
Badgeville: Provides a social rewards and analytics platform to encourage website interaction.
BigDoor: Uses a widget that appears as a "MiniBar" on your website so customers can earn badges and points and gain access to leaderboards. The MiniBar encourages exploration and sharing that leads to engagement, loyalty and viral growth.
Bunchball: Promotes participation, loyalty and revenue via games for well-known brands, including Warner Bros., Comcast, Victoria's Secret Pink, USA Network, LiveOps and Hasbro, all of which use Bunchball's Nitro platform to create entertaining experiences for consumers and employees.
IActionable: Lets you create your own game-related reward system, including how your customers earn points. IActionable follows customer progress on your website and determines whether customers have earned points.
Reputely: Offers gamification solutions aimed at user acquisition and retention.
Gamifying your website should add value to the user experience and thus motivate users to return again and again. Making a game of it not only rewards loyalty, but it also gives your customers the kind of information and experiences they will naturally want to share with their friends and colleagues.
This article was originally published in the June 2011 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Make a Game of It.
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Comments:
I learned that the MiniBar encourages exploration and sharing that leads to engagement which is just as powerful.
Hi, Its really great guys that Five New Tools to Help to Add a Game for Website.
Social gamification Trade only become more frequent. Born in the story we are building the iPhone and the iPhone to take advantage of this trend and customer engagement to drive on mobile devices. It's a win-win for companies and customers. Kamagra
Social commerce through gamification is only going to become more prevalent. At Story Born we're building iPad and iPhone apps to leverage this trend and drive customer engagement through mobile devices. It's a win-win for businesses and customers alike.
yes.. i love it the idea of including game in our websites.. as long the game won't hurt my page loading time it'll be ok...
we have implemented musical menu for user engagement. check it live at http://allevents.in
One added concept to gamification is the development of your own branded social game for Facebook and your site. This model is being used by online retailers like ShopNBC and others to improve brand recall, capture fanbase (another contact point to the customer) and to acquire new customer leads as the game is shared. Check out www.socialshoppinglabs.com
After reviewing several of the gamification companies out there, we found IActionable to have the most flexible and powerful platform and costs significantly less than Bunchball and especially Badgeville. They showed us how many different applications there are for gamification, we had no idea!
Many of these costs a pretty penny (such as badgeville) but you can use CubePoints for wordpress which is a free plugin. You also have to keep in mind how easy it is to set up - ie. bigdoor has a simple minibar widget but it is limiting (no payments system, or protection of pages) without using the API or hiring them to customize it. Some charge per use of the API.
Great post! Badgeville is working with industry-leading brands including Interscope Records & Island Def Jam (Universal Music), Bluefly.com, The Active Network and dozens more to reward user behavior using social game mechanics. Our platform including turnkey widgets is the most lightweight and flexible on the market. For more information, visit www.badgeville.com