What is app gamification?
App gamification means adding game mechanics and designs to apps that don’t relate to gaming. In the landscape where customer retention becomes a task of creativity, businesses implement gamification to encourage their audience to use the app more consistently.
Apps with gamification introduce badges, point systems, and challenges as motivating elements, turning user experience into an exciting and quantifiable journey rather than a routine task. And in terms of marketing efforts, gamification assists with boosting sales by delivering more memorable and audience-involving promotional campaigns.
Benefits of app gamification
Apps that use gamification are inherently more fun to use, and it results in numerous advantages both for businesses and customers.
Here are several key benefits of app gamification:
- Better user engagement: Gaming is a relaxing activity that people favor over tasks, chores, and obligations. Gamification in a mobile app greatly improves engagement by holding users’ attention for longer and delivering a better customer experience.
- Improved retention: By giving users awards and recognition for certain actions and achievements, businesses can encourage them to visit the app more consistently. Users are less likely to abandon the app when they have a pending level to complete. In combination with progress tracking, it can motivate users to come back daily to maintain a streak.
- Superior data collection: Gathering information about users’ behaviors is among the top benefits of gamification for analytics. It helps companies identify users’ preferences and behavior patterns and subsequently use these insights to improve customer experience.
- Increased revenue: In addition to improving app sales, gamification can lead users to interact with ads more, boosting ad revenue.
Gamification elements
Gamification can be achieved by different means, and businesses can capture customers’ attention by designing unique features users haven’t encountered before.
Still, there are some well-established app gamification elements to consider:
- In-app currencies: These are coins, points, and other forms of currencies that users can earn and spend within the app.
- Badges and awards: Granting your audience a sense of achievement can go a long way toward converting one-time users to loyal customers. This can be done by giving trophies, badges, and rewards for specific actions or milestones.
- Progress map: Another way to display a user’s progress is to create a map with previous and future milestones.
- Challenges: This app gamification strategy refers to giving users challenges, missions, and particular goals to achieve.
- Ratings and leaderboards: Creating leaderboards is an efficient way to incentivize competition and encourage users to socialize within the app.
- Level system: Enabling users to progress through levels by gaining experience points (XP) for certain actions or even daily attendance can motivate them to engage with the app more frequently.
- Mini-games: Apps gamification becomes quite literate when developers choose to add small relevant games to a non-gaming app. It can be a full mini-game or a simple game-like action, such as rolling a die.
Where can you use gamification?
Gamification strategies are so diverse that it’s easy to find implementation opportunities for any industry, from sales and business to sports and beauty. Here are several examples of gamification in apps and fields that can benefit from it the most:
- Education: Gamification helps improve learner’s engagement and encourages them to stay on track. It is already in use by platforms like Duolingo, Khan Academy, and Classcraft, to name a few.
- Sports and health: Gamification in apps for fitness motivates users to reach their health goals and maintain a consistent workout routine. A couple of examples include Zombies, Run!, Fitbit, and Sleep Town.
- Productivity: By adding gamification elements, apps like Bounty Tasker and EpicWin transform their users’ mundane tasks into worthy achievements.
- Finance: Managing one’s finances can be a tedious task, and gamified apps are going to attract more users in the sector. Apps like Mint, Fortune City, and Qapital are already leveraging this strategy.