What is Gamification?

Gamification is where you incorporate a game system into an already existing website or an online community for the purpose of inspiring participation, consumer loyalty, and user engagement. 

Why Does Gamification Motivate?

People are naturally influenced to engage in competition, collaboration, achievement as well as charity. The non-game experience motivates the actions that improve the value of the business. 

What are the Principles of Gamification?

Also, there are principles that apply to gamification. These principles are essential when setting up your apps or websites. They are as follows:

• Rewards
• Leaderboards
• Loss Aversion
• Feedback

Why are Rewards Important in Gamification?

• Rewards: The gamification should include rewards. The rewards can be something which makes the recipient feels motivated about something. Making someone feel positive is key if your goal is to change behavior. A consumer, for instance, can be awarded say virtual points. The virtual points awarded to the consumer should be attached to exclusive privileges and rewards such as prizes.

Why are Leaderboards Important in Gamification?

Leaderboards motivate people to set clear goals and work towards achieving these goals. Most people would want to experience high status, have a good reputation as well as being part of the competitive world. That urge to out-doing others or wanting to be at the top (rising up the ranks) increases the level of participation since everyone wants to achieve just that. 

Why is Loss Aversion Important in Gamification?

Loss Aversion is losing is not something that people like experiencing. For this reason, people will work hard to ensure that they prevent losses and acquire gain in the process. When designing gamification, introduce something that they can lose and which can only be avoided by ensuring hard work. The loss version, therefore, motivates people to work hard so as to avoid experiencing losses.

Why is Feedback Important in Gamification?

What may make gamification addictive is to ensure that there is proper feedback to the users. It must show the results of a certain action. For instance, you can have an automated point reward system where the user can see and also witness the action being taken in that direction. The users will be motivated to continue engaging in that particular activity so as to accumulate as many points as they can. They may even become addicted to using a certain service or product in the long run which is beneficial to the business.

Elements in Gamification

When employing gamification, there are various elements that you need to put into consideration. These factors MUST be applied at the same time so that they can effectively influence a behavior you are targeting to motivate or trigger. The gamification system elements include the following:

• Ability Motivate an action: The gamification should be able to drive users into doing something that adds value to the business. In other words, it should be capable of emotional investment.
• Ability to Complete an action: Gamification should ensure that one is able to carry on with a task to the end. If it is the action of buying, then the gamification should ensure that the purchasing action materializes.
• Ability to trigger and complete an action: Finally, the gamification should be able to trigger an action and ensure that the action is completed.

Note that for the above factors to work well, the key thing is to ensure proper timing when applying these elements. They must always be applied simultaneously or else the user may get frustrated.

What you can Achieve with Gamification?

So, how does gamification help businesses? Gamification can help businesses to achieve many things. It reduces the engagement crisis by ensuring that there is an increased attention span as well as retention. Well-structured gamification if well applied, can help a business to achieve the following:

• Drives user-engagement
• Increase loyalty
• Motivating the desire for action amongst employees.
• Increases sales
• Improves data collection strategies
• Changes a particular behavior or solving a business problem

Gamification Benefits to Small Online Businesses

Gamification delivers results that are tangible. This means that the vendor can measure the outcome using analytical tools. Gamification has ensured that there is increased engagement across all social media platforms both internally as well as externally. Some of the benefits that businesses have been able to experience after making use of gamification include the following:

• More traffic on the websites
• Reduced time for adoption
• Reduced time for onboarding
• A conversation which includes free trial to people purchasing products and services.

However, there are drawbacks that may result from the use of gamification. This is so especially where there is no proper management. One major drawback is that it may bring about high-levels of expectations. This may create a false set of motivation, which may be detrimental to your online business. Generally, it is important to note that for any gamification system to work well, it should complement, and not substitute the already existing systems. Also, in this millennial generation, you should not use money as the only center for motivation. There are other various types of motivation that are more influential besides money that you can use as an incentive. So, if you want to increase the level of motivation, ensure that you employ different sets of motivation.

Advantages of Gamification in eLearning

Apart from helping the business to scale the heights, gamification is also beneficial when it comes to e-learning. The following are some of the advantages of using gamification in e-learning: It ensures a better learning experience. In other words, the learner is able to experience fun, and at the same time, learn especially where there are high levels of engagement. It increases the level of knowledge retention in that it is easy for users to remember what they have learned. The gamification ensures instant feedback. This way the learners are able to gauge their level of understanding. It promotes behavior change among users. For instance, when you introduce things such as points, leaderboards or badges, it makes the learning more engaging and interesting too. There will be an increased competition level as everyone wants to win. However, this requires that you include other principles such as a well spread out repetition for it to work effectively. It accomplishes most learning needs. For example, it can be used to fulfill needs such as:

• Onboarding
• Customer support
• Induction
• Product sales
• Soft skills
• Compliance
• Awareness creation

Summary It is true that gamification may not help you achieve all you want for your business. However, it is a tool that can prove to be powerful when it comes to business solutions. It can help move your business to the next level if well designed, implemented, and managed. All you need is to ensure that the system consists of varied methods as well as provide information that is valuable to your business. You can integrate gamification in an area like marketing or use it to motivate employees. Note that the standards (quality) you set when executing the gamification is a key determinant of how successful your business can be. It should, therefore, be fan enough to convert users to customers, motivate employees, make learning fun, and awesome.