Gamification ideas for businesses

Who doesn’t love a good game? People of all ages are attracted to winning prizes and competing with each other. But besides entertaining, businesses can use gamification to teach users to utilize their products or services, reach out to a wider audience, and engage customers to stay with their companies for the long term. 

In 2021, the DOTA 2 International championship prize pool crossed the fantastic $40 million mark, along with the CS:GO tournament prize pool of over $21 million. If you want to stay up to date with the latest tech trends, you have to focus on gamification as well. In this article, we will share some statistics and show you gamification ideas for businesses to ignite your inspiration.

Why you should adopt gamification for your business

There are two main reasons to implement games into your business strategies: to retain loyal customers over time and to acquire new ones. Let’s take a closer look at these reasons:

• Customer acquisition

By gamifying your customer acquisition model, you can attract relevant leads to your company, start creating a bond to help them develop a sense of loyalty, and introduce your product or service with the help of game elements. Gamification can also help you boost customer acquisition by up to 700%.

Offer progress bars and badges for completing onboarding tasks (e.g., free shipping badge) or involve users in gamified quizzes to learn their preferences (e.g., “This or That” game with your products). Such milestones show your prospects there is always something for them to work towards. Thus, you will be able to acquire new customers in a fun and friendly manner. 

In the example below, you can see how Duolingo motivates new users to interact with the app more often by implementing skill levels. Duolingo added “cracked skills” to motivate learners to review previous lessons and “repair” their rewards.

(Source: Duolingo Blog)

• Customer retention

Gamification can help you boost your newly acquired customers’ engagement by up to 47% and motivate them to stay with your company for the long term. Games add a more personal touch to your marketing strategy and motivate customers to make repeat purchases. 

We recommend you gamify your loyalty program to provide customers with instant rewards. Allow them to collect bonus points for every purchase made and exchange these points to get discounts, special offers, free shipping, and other rewards. Such a gamified loyalty program will enable you to retain more customers and generate higher revenue. 

Monobank makes mundane transactions exciting and fun by adding achievement badges and cats. Everybody loves cats, so you can’t go wrong with them :).

(Source: Monobank)

Gamification statistics you have to know

Before we dive deep into the best gamification examples in various industries, let’s look at the numbers to see the results of incorporating game mechanics into the business world:

• companies that integrated gamification into their business processes can notice up to 7X higher conversion rate;

• 66% of employees claimed that game elements incorporated into the work processes lower their stress levels;

(Source: Finances Online)

• game-based education is expected to drive revenue of over $24M by 2024;

• game elements can enhance student test results by up to 34%;

• 67.7% of students say that gamification in eLearning motivates them more than standard courses. For instance, Elucidat turned a regular quiz into an exciting game by adding badges, audio questions, and bonus points to motivate users and add fun competition;

(Source: Elucidat)

• the US Army used a Counter-Strike-like game to attract new recruits. As a result, 30% of US citizens had a favorable impression of the Army;

• game-based learning boosts employee happiness and engagement by 89%. What’s more, businesses with engaged employees generate 22% more revenue;

(Source: Zippia)

• Extraco Bank implemented a game to tell clients more about its special offers and benefits. The bank managed to boost customer acquisition by 700%;

• 89% of users are willing to interact with an app more often if it’s equipped with game elements;

• Molton Brown, the fragrance brand, cooperated with the SMACK agency to digitize and gamify their Christmas film. The results were impressive — 47 685 new entries, 21 967 referrals, and 18 983 new subscribers to the company’s newsletter.

(Source: SMACK Agency)

Gamification ideas for your inspiration

Now that you see why it’s crucial to adopt gamification for your business, we will show you some successful examples of companies that use game elements to engage both customers and employees. 

On-site gamification ideas

1. Defi Ingenieurs: a gamified campaign to attract young engineers 

SNCF, the national railway company with a global presence, benefited from game elements to reach out to young talents and hire the most skillful and creative ones. The company invited more than 180 engineering schools and offered students to solve some engineering problems.

(Source: SNCF)

Thus, young specialists could deal with real-life situations like the viaduct construction process or rail traffic management in a fun and exciting way. Besides fantastic career opportunities, the top 5 schools won a trip around the world to meet the SNCF engineers.

(Source: SNCF)

As a result:

• the game turned out to be 10 times more effective than traditional recruitment campaigns.

2. BBVA: a game to promote online banking

This financial services company from Spain incorporated gamification to show customers the core benefits of online banking and reduce foot traffic in offline units. BBVA chose a classic yet effective approach — users had to take certain actions on the bank’s website to earn instant rewards and bonus points. They could exchange these bonus points for tickets to football events, movies, and music to download.

(Source: BBVA)

As a result:

• BBVA managed to involve over 100 000 players from across the world and reduce foot traffic in offline units.

App gamification ideas

3. PrivatBank: New Year quest

The holiday season is a great time to entertain your audience and give them some gifts. PrivatBank offered clients to participate in a New Year quest and get valuable rewards like a car, Apple gadgets, vacuum cleaners, TVs, certificates, and more.

(Source: PrivatBank)

The user's task was to help Cardman get to PrivatLand by earning in-game kilometers. To get more kilometers, clients had to make transactions with their Mastercard (for instance, they could earn 20 km by paying a restaurant bill). To complete the game, participants had to collect 1000 in-game kilometers. 

As a result:

• with over 550 winners and thousands of participants, this quest is a great example of how gamification helps the company go viral to reach out to a wider audience and grow organically.

4. M&M’s: Eye-Spy Pretzel app to promote a new product 

M&M’s launched this campaign to promote a new candy flavor. It is an excellent example of a simple yet exciting puzzle game without too many complex elements that can overwhelm your audience. Users were offered to look at the picture filled with candies and find a pretzel among them. The game went viral and attracted thousands of new customers.

(Source: M&M’s)

As a result:

• 25 000 likes on M&M’s Facebook account;

• 10 000 comments;

• 6 000 shares.

5. Target: Wish List app to share gift ideas

One of the world’s most recognized retail stores launched a children-oriented campaign to help customers create interactive wish lists and share gift ideas. The game took place at a toy factory where players had to choose the goods they wanted to get, drag-and-drop them to wish lists, and send them to Santa.

(Source: Target)

As a result:

• 75 000 downloads;

• 1 million visits to the company’s website;

• 100 000+ wish lists.

6. Nike+ FuelBand: progress tracker to engage users

The core idea of this campaign was to help users keep themselves fit and let them monitor their progress in a fun and engaging way. Nike+ FuelBand, an activity tracker, enabled participants to compete with each other and monitor their progress toward fitness objectives. Users got rewards for their achievements in the form of bonus points and badges. Thus, people got an immediate confidence boost and shared their results on social media, increasing the brand's online presence.

(Source: Nike+ FuelBand)

As a result:

• 11 million participants;

• the company gathered lots of user data to improve and personalize its products and services.

eLearning gamification ideas

7. Deloitte Leadership Academy (DLA): a training program for employees

Here is an example of an executive training program for over 50 000 Deloitte specialists. After completing certain tasks, employees received badges that affected their positions on the leaderboard. A sense of competition, monthly webinar series, customizable learning goals, and instant rewards motivate employees to be more productive and maximize their performance.

(Source: Deloitte Leadership Academy)

As a result:

• a 75% faster completion than with a non-gamified training program;

• a 47% increase in return visitors per day and 36% per week.

User account gamification ideas

8. CleverStaff: gamification for recruiters 

CleverStaff is a Ukrainian recruitment automation software provider. The company developed a gamification system to help recruiters find joy in mundane tasks and motivate them to be more productive. 

In this example, gamification is based on a level system and instant rewards to create a sense of healthy competition among coworkers. Recruiters got rewards in the form of gems for all tasks they completed — creating a job description, reaching out to candidates, conducting interviews, delivering feedback, etc. Employees could also track their progress as the system calculated the experience gained and monitored all awards along with leaderboards.

(Source: CleverStaff)

As a result:

• recruiters became 18.6% more productive;

• by using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) combined with gamification, the company could save up to 20% of working time (10 weeks or 2.4 months per year).

9. FreshDesk: game elements for customer service agents

To bring the fun back into customer support operations and skyrocket staff engagement, the FreshDesk team created the FreshDesk Arcade for businesses. A classic system of rewards, bonus points, and leaderboards for completing work tasks motivated employees to perform better and be more engaged in the workplace.

(Source: FreshDesk)

As a result:

• 1000% higher revenue;

• positive reviews from over 2 500 clients.

Wrapping up

By implementing gamification into your business, you can teach customers or employees to use your product or services, entertain your audience, strengthen your brand's online presence, and generate more revenue. 

If you want to start your gamification journey with an email marketing campaign, Stripo is here to help! With our prebuilt email templates, you can incorporate games into your emails to impress subscribers with interactive and engaging content. Choose the one you like the most, customize it to meet your campaign objectives, and send it out!