So, you’ve nailed down your product offerings and built out your eCommerce brand. Congrats! The next step is to figure out your promotion’s strategies. While you are probably familiar with social media outreach, email marketing and other popular forms of brand promotion, there might be one avenue you haven’t considers – gamification.
Gamification is a fun and challenging strategy that persuades customers to interact with your eCommerce store in a novel way. Who doesn’t like games, right? They draw people in and keep people on your site longer. It’s a win-win for shoppers and sellers.
Here’s why gamification is good for ecommerce.
It’s a Healthy Form of Competition
You guessed it; ecommerce gamification is all about competition. No, you don’t necessarily need to turn your store into a video game (that won’t drive sales). Rather the strategy focuses on creating features that supports a ‘game’ concept within your e-store.
Let’s look at an example. Imagine that you sell electronics via Shopify or another e-store platform. For every purchase completed, the buyer is entered into a raffle to win a prize. It could be a coupon for 20-percent off the winner’s next order or an HD webcam. The prize itself doesn’t matter. What matters is that the chance to win drive customers to complete their order(s).
Similarly, it might help your e-store edge out the competition. If you sell electronics for roughly the same price as your biggest competitor, but only your store offers the chance to win a Nintendo Switch, you might be able to steal some shopper away from your rivals.
It Encourages Customer Engagement
Then again, gamification doesn’t just happen on an ecommerce itself. You can also leverage gamification to keep social media followers engaged and happy.
For instance, you can invite Facebook or Instagram followers to repost an image, tag three friends or submit a video of themselves using your products in exchange for discounts, game entries, points and the like. This helps spread word of your e-store to friends and family of your existing customers and helps keep your store top of mind. Just be sure whatever game or prize you choose matches with your brand identity and offerings.
It Instills a Sense of Loyalty
People want to be rewarded for their actions. It’s just human nature. Clever ecommerce vendors know how to twist this natural inclination for their own ends. One way of doing this is to create a tiered system to reward your most loyal customers.
Say a shopper completes four orders in a month. Why not put her in the “Gold Member” program which offers free shipping, so long as she completes at least one order a month. The buyer feels happy because she is getting something for nothing (in a sense). And the seller is happy because they will likely keep the dutiful shopper.
If you let it slip that there is even a “Platinum Member” program which offers a 10-percent discount on orders over $200. The buyer might be inclined to perform whatever actions necessary to get to the next level (such as creating a profile, sharing company news on social media, passing coupon codes to friends, etc.).
This implies a level of mastery, which in gaming is a highly coveted state.
This can be used in any number of ways. For instance, if you sell NFL merchandise, you can award points to the most ardent fans who purchase your products, attend games, interact with your website or app, and the ilk. If you create a leaderboard, other super fans may be inclined to compete with one another for the top spot. After all, it’s only natural to want to beat or master the game you are playing.
Part of the enjoyment comes from the player’s ability to show off their stats to friends and family; which is why you always saw initials ranking the best players in arcade games. This drives customers to compete with one another.
Keep in mind that ecommerce gamification won’t drive sales if folks don’t get anything for their time. You must understand your customers to drive website sales. If you do this successfully, you’ll reap the benefit of skyrocketing sales!
