Top 10 Gamification Techniques That Help to Build Sales

1
Top 10 Gamification Techniques That Help to
Build Sales
American entrepreneur, television personality,
media proprietor, and investor, Mark Cuban, has
time and time again emphasized on the importance
of sales for any company, even quoting No
Sales, No Company to business insider. It takes
simple business skills to understand that no
business can survive without sales and will lose
its value if the right decisions arent taken at
the right time. As a business person, it is also
crucial to keep up with the latest advancements
in the business industry whether they are
related to technology, finance, accounting or any
other. In this article, we are going to talk
about one of the latest trends that have taken
the tech industry by storm Yes, we are talking
about Gamification. You must be scratching your
head right now and asking yourself, What does
Gamification and sales have in common? What is
Gamification? According to Wikipedia,
gamification can be defined as The application
of game-design elements and game principles in
non-game contexts. This means that gamification
MilesWeb.in
2
takes elements from game-design and the general
principles and theories which drive gameplay and
applies them to other non-gaming contexts like
Learning Management System, Corporate Training,
eCommerce Stores Sales, Online Community, Social
Media Growth, Human Resource Management, Sales
Department Performance, Recycling Process, Food
Business Penetration, and many other scenarios.
The main objective and goal of gamification is
to increase motivation, user engagement,
productivity and loyalty. Relationship Between
Gamification and Sales Gamification is an
effective technique to grow your business
especially when youre running an ecommerce
store. It uses points, badges, ranks, and rewards
mechanisms, which encourage customers for more
engaging behavior and hence leads to more
revenue and sales for any business. Gamification
and sales have plenty of common attributes in
between them like both of the terms involve
certain goals and targets that can be
accomplished by following a level-based path.
Lets take examples from popular games like Super
Mario Bros, Pacman, Angry Birds, Counter-Strike,
Halo, Call of Duty, The Legends of Zelda, Street
Fighter, PUBG purposefully reward the player on
their achievements. These rewards are achieved
after players complete targets based on goals or
levels. Sales is another activity that follows a
similar pattern. You can drive better sales by
engaging more customers through games like
rewards, points, badges, ranks, leaderboards,
and levels in a real-life business as
well. Myths About Gamification True or
False? Business owners often perceive
Gamification or gamification implementation as a
strategy that is strictly for entertainment
purposes only. However, gamification not only
helps in creating a fun and interactive
environment for its users but also motivates them
to achieve more. People are competitive by
nature and this attribute can be converted into
better sales numbers by using gamification
techniques. Contests are a staple tool for
motivating people and encouraging customers to
buy a product or service. For example, A cinema
can start a contest The biggest cinephile in the
city and place a leaderboard strategy on its
website.
MilesWeb.in
3
Now for gaining points, you have to purchase
tickets to move a higher spot in leaderboard.
This is not an only example for using
gamification to increase sales but there are
multiple scenarios where you can apply
gamification based strategies for a better sales
result like rewarding a customer with points on
every WooCommerce store purchase, gamifying
learning management system to sell interesting
courses, badges and ranks allocation to
consumers on different shopping activities and
subscription. Like you can reward points and
badges on buying Keto diet food to create a
competition among health-conscious groups,
points, badges, and ranks on purchasing holidays
plans for traveling freaks, and gamification
based rewards for purchasing home appliances
through competition of The smartest Home for
the people who take pride in their home
decoration and facilities. Now lets discuss the
top 10 gamification techniques that can help you
to generate more sales. 1 POINTS-BASED
REWARDS A points-based loyalty program is one of
the most useful and popular loyalty programs in
the business world for sales purposes.It shows
how customers can earn points by doing some
activity, sharing, or achieving rank to get the
points. Once the users profile is improving,
theyll get multiple rewards, gift vouchers or
discount coupons from the website owner. You
can set different criteria for gaining points to
your loyal customers by involving them into
different gamification based activities. The
easiest way is to define the spending amount and
number of points a customer can gain against it.
You can show them their shopping progress in
terms of gained points and encourage them to shop
more for unlocking new rewards. As a token of
appreciation give them coupons and partial
payment options so that they can spend more to
utilize their points. You can also set the limit
of points for particular customers and product
categories. Top gamification plugins you can use
to handle points management systems are myCred,
Captain Up, and many more. 2 GAMIFIED SOCIAL
PROOF Social proof is an effective plugin
compatible for WordPress websites shows the
action or behaviour of the people, what theyre
doing or saying about the topic, that must be
correct. The implementation of social proof helps
the credibility of your website by letting the
visitors know about your registered customers.
MilesWeb.in
4
These notifications alert the website visitors of
different activities such as most-watched
products or services, most hot categories of sold
products, and products or services people are
liking and commenting on. Nothing works better
than a customer endorsing your product to an
audience much similar to what youre
targeting. You can gamify the social proof
strategy to increase your sales by giving the
visitor rewards for liking your products, leave
reviews, and make suggestions to others. These
rewards can be given in the form of points,
badges and ranks. Placing active participants on
the leaderboard to make social proof behaviour
more competitive is also a smart move. No doubt,
social proof helps in increasing your sales
tenfold through influencing others to purchase.
The top plugins you can use to gamify social
proof strategy are NotificationX, WPfomify,
Yotpo, WooCommerce Notification, and WP Social
Proof. 3 GAMIFIED SOCIAL SHARING Social Sharing
is the new word of mouth that can create a huge
impact on your online business sales. The
purpose of this amazing plugin, whenever a user
shares your posts or content on social media,
they will get points every time they share. By
applying gamified social sharing strategies you
can increase your sales graph significantly as
active social media presence for your business on
different platforms creates better exposure
chances. Ask your customers to share your
branding posts on social media platforms and get
a perfect reward for it. You can reward
redeemable points to your customers for sharing
your business posts on social media, higher
ranks on the leaderboard, and badges for advanced
levels. Social Sharing helps you in conveying
your brand messages to the biggest virtual
audience group (Active social media users have
passed the 3.8 billion mark), improve your brand
perception, and ultimately generates more sales.
The top plugins you can use for your social
sharing strategy are social Snap, Easy Social
Share Buttons, Social Pug, Sassy Social Share,
and many more. Related 4 Amazing Tips to Make
Use of Social Media for B2B Sales 4
LEADERBOARDS LEVELS The main purpose of a
leaderboard is to boost engagement by creating a
competitive environment and offering better
levels and spots. It is right people are
competitive by nature and leaderboards
incentivize users to continue performing desired
actions to rank up their profiles and levels
among their competitors.
MilesWeb.in
5
You can implement a simple and straightforward
leaderboard strategy to increase your sales by
making the criteria like the more a customer does
shopping (more sales for your business), the
greater its position on the leaderboard will be
placed. By showing individual positions and
levels of certain group members on the
leaderboard, you can create healthy competition
for more shopping on your E-store. Making a
level based gamification strategy is suitable for
most of the businesses as it carries classical
gaming principles to implement in any scenario.
People feel great when their esteem is
appreciated and they are placed in a superior
position. 5 REFERRAL CONTESTS For any business,
referral contests are an excellent way to gain
new customers. You can reward your customers
with subscription or store credit for referring
your products and services to their friends. It
does not cost you much, as the reward credit can
only be used to buy your products and ultimately
give you more revenue. It will give you double
benefit, your current customer will feel rewarded
for referral and will spend your offered store
credit to shop more and secondly you will earn
new customers and hence more sales in the
future. You can also take affiliate marketers on
board to promote your business through affiliate
marketing programs and get sales your way.
Gamify the whole process of referral contests and
announce different rewards for bringing new
customers. Give referral contests participant
points, badges, and ranks. Also, show them their
progress through progress bars and shower the
best possible rewards like gifts, vouchers,
discount coupons, free shipping, and much
more. 6 SPIN TO WIN STRATEGY There are several
e-store owners who are adapting the technique to
apply spin win formulas to give discounts or
reward customers. Spinning a fortune wheel
strategy invites online visitors to enter their
email addresses to receive a coupon code for a
discount, which will then be applied to their
cart. Spinning a wheel on online stores helps
immensely in reducing abandonment cases and
encourages a customer to try its luck for coupons
and other rewards. You can take visitors email
addresses and send them further promotional
emails to increase the chances of conversion.
The top plugins you can use for spinning a wheel
strategy are OptinMonster, WP Optin Wheel,
OptinSpin, and Wheely Sales.
MilesWeb.in
6
7 SCAVENGER HUNTS Scavenger hunts, a great
gamification technique to get engagement to
engage in your WooCommerce store. So, in this
case, users can easily see multiple products or
pages on your e-stores. You can initiate it by
asking online customers to find hidden symbols
and specified items, and successful participants
will be rewarded with gamified points, badges,
ranks and other perks such as discounts and free
shipping. Scavenger Hunts are already proven
ways to increase your sales as customers go
through different sections of your online store
and get awareness about available products and
services. You can also integrate it with the
Social Proof gamification strategy and ask
scavenger hunt participants to give reviews on
products they are interested in while searching
for hidden symbols and items. 8 PROGRESS
INDICATION It is another form of gamification
technique to increase conversion rate especially
and reduce chances of cart abandonment. Whenever
your customers are checking out, they see a
progress map. Its a great way to show the
overall progress of your customer path if they
made it or they left and went. You can also
Indicate other progress of customers as well like
how long they are attached with your business,
how much they shop in a week or month from your
online site and rewards they are unlocking by
spending more. 9 SEASONAL SALES
ACTIVITIES Seasonal sales play a vital role to
attract customers with coupons, flat discounts,
and free shipping like nothing else, which may
only be available once a year, and these sales
have the ability to produce immense traffic on
e-commerce platforms. By gamifying seasonal
sales activities, you can engage your customers
and encourage them to purchase more items from
your WooCommerce store. Like you can initiate
poll activities, quizzes related to your
products/services, rolling rewards (Lottery),
selfie competition, random rewards (Mystery
Box), spinning a wheel to win, treasure hunt, and
much more. The winners of all these contests
can win points, badges, ranks, and discounted
coupons. Allowing them to redeem their points to
shop more from your online store also gives them
partial payment options too for better sales
results.
MilesWeb.in
7
Related Top 10 Tips to Boost Your eCommerce
Sales This Festive Season 10 SALES TEAM
MOTIVATION Sales is a field where your
employees can easily become unmotivated and burnt
out. Might be it is due to a lack of focus,
unclear goals, or the wrong rewards given. By
gamifying your sales team objectives, you can
drive better outcomes from them. Sales
gamification involves, out of comfort zone
challenges, and creating a healthy competition
atmosphere for sales representatives to compete
against one another for the top spot on the
leaderboard. These challenges can be as
achievable or creative as you desire. You can
reward points, badges, ranks, and monetary
benefits to your sales team performance in
sectors like revenue generated, outbound calls
target achieved, and sales pitch
delivered. WRAPPING UP!! We have discussed the
top ten gamification techniques that help for
better sales results. Different types of
businesses need different types of gamification
strategies to grow their sales number. It all
depends on what they are selling, how they are
doing it, their major target audience, and its
typical behavior. Keep the key gamification
elements in mind, like motivation, user
engagement, competitive atmosphere, and
appropriate rewards against the efforts, it all
makes a perfect gamification strategy for any
business and hence leads to an upward sales
graph.
MilesWeb.in