Gamification in Ecommerce

 How Social is your Brand?

To innovate, requires you to be on the cutting edge and to growth-hack properly, means you have to offer a mobile service and Cx methodology that demonstrates your brand is an early-adopter of disruption science. It will take years before gamification design matures and is fully integrated in everything, but it's happening now and if you don't join, you will be left behind! 

In an age where quickly we'll be taking the “E” out of Ecommerce, adding a gamification layer and bringing online shopping to social media are two of the biggest trends we'll see in 2016.

Gamification refers to engagement techniques that promote not only customer experience but, customer satisfaction through achievement and other reinforcement feedback systems. In growth hacking, techniques of gamification are used to produce products that can grow virally and brand loyalty that is fun and stimulates user generated content (UGC).

Social commerce, or scommerce will be coming on like a storm in 2016, to facebook and all the rest will follow. But the gamification design layer will really be the key to optimize it. Pinterest’s buy pin, for example, alone won’t change the world. You need  disruptive techniques to make the next kind of engagement, fit for mobile, millennial audiences and baby boomers who are retiring on their tablets.

The age of the in-your-face CTA, the spam pop-up to sign up to your list for a free gimmick is not going to last. It will take more sophisticated engagement techniques to promote your products online.

The mobile consumer experience (MCx) is starting to revolve around video content. So how to integrate video content, gamification layers and reward systems and interactive activities with your ecommerce offering? What does your audience require to become a fan of your brand? Does it need an app that it can further experience your products, community, forums with content that is actually useful, helpful and fun?

What kind of implicit or explicit rewards are you giving your customers for visiting your landing pages? Assuming your website is mobile optimized and your social media strategy is smart, what are the next steps you can do to grow engagement & immersion around the products and services you offer?

Historically, companies like eBay integrated gamification schemes in every part of their business plan. Think about their bidding system, it engrained an experience that tapped into the sense of competition, rick-taking and sense of urgency and impulse purchases, (somewhat like gambling). With gamification you have to consider human psychology, social needs triggers, and the dopamine reward system. Bring that theory over to a mobile and SaaS information architecture. But we have to also go beyond rankings, leader board badges and customize your enterprise to the gamification design concept. You have to make gamification work in your unique business context. 

Has your company done mobile dedicated campaigns with elements of gamification? With the decrease of organic reach, you might have to. The content marketing domain is heating up, and enterprise has to learn how to differentiate itself and make its unique selling proposition (USP) stand out against its competition. What can you offer, as a fundamental part of customer engagement that your competition can’t? Are you optimized for audience with feedback systems that will work on them?

Gamification must improve the UI/UX/CX, otherwise you are doing it wrong. A simple contest by the way, done via Email marketing, is not gamification.

 Growth Hacking for Dummies 

• User experience is a commodity
• Engaging your audience is the key to driving growth of your products
• Mobile optimization is the new foundation of digital strategy
• The benefits of eRetail vs. Retail of your products have to be pronounced and obvious
• Your omni-channel strategy has to anticipate the future:

(Wearable devices, IoT, geo-targeting, video marketing).

• Your virtual showrooming has to be video (anything less is an insult to mobile viewers)
• Your retail has to have mobile triggers and personalization. They walk in the store and software (i.e. automated Email) reacts to them.
• Bluetooth beacons, must be a disruption sales technique if a base of your customers is local.
• Mobile payment methods must be fluid and easy

Gamified Ecommerce

• Loyalty points must be visible on social media
• Rewards for writing a review, rating a product, answering a Q&A section, interacting with other customers on social, for social referrals and for creating user-generated content – especially product vlogging. This is so basic, and yet your would be astounded the number of enterprises that haven’t caught on to this or don’t know how to implement it!
• Offer bonuses that don’t cost anything, like social ranking, for brand tweets for customer advocates and influencer type interactions.
• Integrate customer feedback via smart automated marketing to personalize a customer’s experience of your brand and products.
• Give rewards for social shares, any mention of your product, even comments that seem negative that you will respond to in an authentic way.
• Create more sophisticated kinds of badges, too simple and they become redundant.
• Give free products and social mentions to your top customers who generate the most and best user generated content. This is so key, to create a culture of brand advocacy.
• Target your gamification on the peers of your audience, so as to have ideal brand advocates who are happy and feel appreciated by your brand who best mirror your customer personas.

Goals of GSEC (gamified social-ecommerce).

• Improve customer engagement
• Boost customer experience of brand
• Creative positive brand association and tangible rewards
• Improve time spent on scommerce and landing pages
• Convert one-time shoppers to repeat customers
• Boost social media engagement, especially user-generated content
• Integrate gamified layers that please a) fun seekers b) reward chasers c) socialisers d) indie content creatives

Tapping into motivation, you’ll want to know your customer personas very well with extended demographic profiling and social media profiling and typing.

You’ll want to constantly be on gamified vigilance to create buzz via:

• Reward and incentive building systems
• Interaction devices on social media
• Forums & community with bonuses for participation
• Social-referral programs (including social shares, recommend a product to a friend, forward an Email)
• Limited time offers promotions
• Various Contests
• Sweepstakes
• Daily bonus points (on a specific day, specific behaviours are worth more)
• Leader boards
• Sophisticated and customer badges that matter to your audience
• Learning opportunities, e.g. free products for user-generated content

Final Thoughts

Growth-hacking via gamification is best applied via automation. Have automation tools with algorithms capable of personalizing the gamification layer to each customer as a significant traveler in the online marketplace . Each person will require a unique approach because of their individual differences in motivation, ability and triggers.