Gamification: Best practices for your business

You must have heard of gamification, but are you sure you know what exactly it represents? Let’s find out the best way to define it and talk about all the benefits it might bring to your business.

We are talking about gamification when we apply elements such as competition with others, point-scoring, and rules of play – typically as an online marketing technique to improve and encourage engagement with a service or a product.

Gamification is also defined as a set of processes and activities to solve problems by applying or using the game elements. The concept is quite old. It was introduced in 2002 but began to earn widespread application eight years later.

Gamification and eLearning

Gamification is a tool to enable innovation, design behaviors, and develop skills. When combined with other trends and technologies, it promotes innovation, education, customer engagement.

It is becoming an essential feature of eLearning programs. Its engaging design, combined with its popularity, significantly increases the advantage of learning objectives. 

To incorporate gamification, consider some of these best practices:

• Be sure you are not just using gamification but measurably addressing business needs.
• Use storytelling to motivate individuals. Give your learners a reason to interact with the content.
• Use reward systems – provide a place where learners will be able to display badges to leverage the social effectiveness of gamification.
• Also, the game must have clear rules, be fair, intriguing, and transparent, get a competitive spirit, bring concrete benefits to the participants, have an element of progress, and be sustainable.

Apply it to all aspects of life and business

You can apply this principle to all aspects of life and business, especially in human resources and marketing. In marketing, it is most often used to increase customer loyalty and increase customer engagement. The application in the human resources field mainly concerns recruitment and selection and the process of evaluation and rewarding of employees.

Examples of gamification

Anything can be gamified. Collecting points and stickers (badges) during a purchase or prize game on social networks are widely known examples.

In 2008, the University of Washington launched the online game Foldit, which enabled students to create new protein structures through play and competition to accelerate research into the treatment of various diseases. Current figures show that Foldit has over 240,000 registered users and that 58,000 of them directly influenced the development of new drugs.

Starbucks used gamification to improve customer engagement and loyalty. After each purchase, customers received stars they could later exchange for a free drink or discount.

The widespread application for learning foreign languages ​​Duolingo is another excellent example of gamification in learning, with a developed system of rewards, badges, and levels in education.

How to stand out?

With more and more apps, it becomes harder for developers to stand out among other competitors.

A successful mobile app gamification strategy isn’t just about development and design. Its main goal is to retain more users and engage.