In today's highly competitive online landscape, user engagement has become the primary ingredient for any successful website. It is what keeps users coming back to the website. One platform that gained popularity for its innovative user engagement strategies is WordPress, with over 455 million or almost 43% of all websites built on it.
Website owners recognize the importance of keeping their users engaged, and one way to do this is by optimizing gamification strategies with gamification elements through WordPress. This approach allows website owners to develop innovative ways to create a user journey that drives desire and supports businesses' key goals.
What Is WordPress Gamification?
"Gamification" refers to incorporating gaming elements into non-gaming environments like learning management systems, online communities, and websites. It aims to engage with people to inspire, interact, collaborate, and share.
Gamification can be seen applied in health and fitness. A study conducted for older adults showed that the wearable fitness tracker enhanced with gamification elements motivates them to be more physically active. Fitness trackers with gamification encourage physical activity and healthy habits by utilizing elements like leaderboards, challenges, and rewards to motivate users to reach fitness goals and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
WordPress is known for building various types of websites. As one of the businesses' goals online is to have visitors and user engagement, WordPress gamification helps create more attractive and exciting content that engages visitors better.
The Benefits of Adding Gamification to Your WordPress Site
Gamification can significantly influence the design of a WordPress site or an entire website. By incorporating gamification elements, website owners increase user engagement, improve user retention, and increase sales, brand awareness, and loyalty.
Enhances Engagement
Gamification is a great way to improve engagement on your WordPress site. Getting people to interact with the brand encourages user engagement as they will be motivated to return for more rewards.
Improves Retention
WordPress gamification increases retention as it taps to leverage human psychology to make engaging and enjoyable activities. These gamified experiences help build loyalty and keep users interested in new content released on your site.
Higher Sales and Conversion Rates
Adding gamification to your WordPress site can boost sales and conversion rates. Users engaging in a fun and competitive environment are encouraged to earn points or rewards for completing tasks such as making purchases or signing up for newsletters. Rewarding users for their actions increases the chances of them taking action.
Increases Brand Awareness and Loyalty
Adding a custom game to your WordPress site, you can highlight or showcase information about your brand in a fun and interactive way. It encourages users to learn more about the product or service and connect emotionally with the brand.
Moreover, it can help build customer loyalty, as customers are likely to return when they know that something is engaging and exciting waiting for them. With the integration of a logo maker, your WordPress site becomes a dynamic platform for brand engagement, fostering loyalty through interactive experiences.
After understanding WordPress gamification's various benefits, let's explore implementing it on your website.
How to Implement Gamification on Your WordPress Site
Implementing gamification on your WordPress site involves defining goals and objectives, understanding users, selecting the right plugins, integrating elements, and testing the effectiveness of the gamification elements. Make use of microconversions to understand the path a user follows when visiting your page.
1. Defining Your Goals and Objectives
When implementing gamification, the first thing to do is be clear about your goals and objectives. What do you want users to do on your site? What action do you want them to take? By understanding your goals, you can identify the elements you want to integrate to motivate your users to take action.
2. Understanding Your Users
You must understand your user's preferences, needs, and behaviour. It helps you choose elements that resonate with them for effective gamification.
3. Select the Right Plugins for Gamification
A plugin is an easy path to follow to make gamification feasible. The functionality of the built-in WordPress plugin will save you time and effort, as it gives you a quick and easy application of gamification. You must choose the right plugin that aligns with your goals and objectives.
myCred - point management system
GamiPress - awarding systems
badgeos - awarding systems
GamiPress Leaderboards - ranking systems
WP Forms - entry form
Tagembed - Social Media Aggregator Plugin
4. Integrate Gamification Elements into Your Website
Gamification elements are features or activities taken from games that promote engagement and motivate users to take particular actions. It does not only help to make your WordPress site engaging but also provides an incentive for users to stay longer and keep coming back.
Some common gamification elements you can integrate into your website are points, achievements and badges, challenges and leaderboards, quizzes, surveys, entry forms, progress bars, and loyalty rewards.
Points
Points increase user engagement by providing an incentive to take specific actions and stay longer on your website. You can offer points for completing surveys, signing up for newsletters, referring friends, posting comments on blog posts, and more.
Points can be used to build customer loyalty by rewarding repeat customers with discounts or special offers. Points also provide valuable data that tracks user activity and gains better insights into user behaviour.
Achievements and Badges
Achievements and badges are an effective way to engage users and reward them for completing certain tasks. Badges represent user achievements or milestones as your website progresses, giving users a sense of accomplishment. Examples of badges may include new user badges, referral badges, expert badges, and more.
Challenges and Leaderboards
Challenges and leaderboards create a sense of user competition, thus fostering engagement. Leaderboards can show ranking information about user performance or activity on your website, like points earned and the number of posts made, and motivate them to stay longer and take more action.
Quizzes
Quizzes are great for engaging users. They can be used as part of a content marketing strategy or as an interactive way to test user knowledge of specific topics. Grab these customisable templates to create the first quiz for your website:
Create Your Own Quiz
Start with a template
Personality quizzes are one of the common quizzes to keep your visitors on your website. It benefits users as people want to talk about themselves and for websites to know more about users' preferences, interests, and values of the target audiences.
Surveys
Surveys are a powerful tool to gain user feedback, develop better insights into their needs and preferences, and increase the chance of a conversion. Surveys can ask users about their experience on your website, their thoughts on your products, what improvements could be made, and more.
If you want to embed a survey into your Wordpress website, grab these templates:
Create Your Own Survey
Start with a free template
Surveys allow users to share their thoughts and opinions in a safe environment where their feedback is valued and appreciated. It will make them feel like part of the community and encourage them to take action.
Entry Forms
Entry forms can be used to capture user information and encourage user participation. It could include a sign-up form for users to join your mailing list or a contest requiring users to submit a completed entry form to participate.
Creating entry forms allows you to collect valuable data about your target audience, such as their contact details, age, gender, and interests. It can then be used to create targeted content and campaigns that directly speak to the needs of your users.
Hashtag Contest
Hashtag contests are a great way to increase the awareness and engagement of your brand or products. Since its evolution, hashtags have helped the business to reach out to maximum number of customers. Not only that, hashtags also help the end user to find specific products, services or content. And this is why a lot of business owners promote hashtag campaigns on their website.
For example, you can check Go Pro Hashtag contests/campaigns. They embed Instagram feed on websites to promote their cameras and help the end user to showcase their photography talents.
Progress Bars
Progress bars provide visual feedback to users on their progress as they complete tasks or activities. They motivate and encourage users to keep going, providing a sense of accomplishment and progression.
Loyalty Rewards
Integrating loyalty rewards into your website is an excellent way to incentivize user engagement and foster customer loyalty. Offering rewards for completing certain activities or making purchases makes customers feel appreciated and encourages them to return. It could include discounts, gift cards, special offers, free shipping, and more.
Starbucks's case study of using loyalty rewards as one of its gamification created an immersive and entertaining experience for the customers. It resulted in them becoming one of the leading companies in the coffee industry.
5. Test the Effectiveness of Your Gamification Elements
When things go well, do not stop. There is always an opportunity for improvement. Keep updating and innovating your gamification elements. Testing is a good way to note what's working and what's not.
Popular Types of Websites That Can Be Gamified
For further reference, here are the popular websites that can be gamified: articles/blogs, e-commerce, and social media.
Gamification for Article or Blog Websites
Gamification for article or blog websites can make reading and learning more enjoyable. QuickSprout is a blog website that features a user-friendly leaderboard showcasing the most popular articles, determined by the number of comments and social media shares they receive.
It encourages readers to engage with and share the content with their networks. It also provides a sense of competition and accomplishment for those whose articles make it to the top of the leaderboard.
Gamification for E-commerce Websites
Gamification in e-commerce websites improves user engagement and motivation to make a purchase. By introducing game-like features, such as points, badges, or leaderboards, customers are encouraged to spend more time on the website, interact with its features, and ultimately purchase. It leads to higher customer loyalty, retention, and increased sales.
Sephora, a makeup and beauty products retailer, has a rewards program called Beauty Insider, which offers customers different perks based on their level of engagement with the site. Customers earn points for purchases and redeem them for exclusive perks such as free products, birthday gifts, and early access to new releases.
Sephora also has a "Beauty Pass" that allows customers to collect digital stamps and redeem them for discounts and more exclusive products.
Gamification for Social Media Websites
In Reddit, the term "karma" points are integrated, which others can award via upvotes on their comments or posts. Awards can also be given to each other and displayed in the profile with titles and icons.
Gamification: A Powerful Tool for Overall User Experience
Gamification is a powerful tool for the overall user experience. Designers can increase user engagement, motivation, and overall satisfaction by incorporating game-like elements into non-gaming settings. Marketers can also use gamification to incentivize customer behavior and improve loyalty and advocacy. As gamification grows in various industries, designers and marketers need to understand its benefits to effectively implement it in their products and services. Implement gamification elements in your WordPress site to make it more engaging and to encourage user interaction.
Author
Kevin is the CEO, Founder of Aemorph. A seasoned entrepreneur and digital marketing expert. Kevin started in digital marketing, specializing in Search Engine Optimisation since 2010, and is helping Finance, Insurance, E-commerce, Medical, B2B, and SaaS companies.
Kevin is also a certified adult educator in Singapore, delivering high-quality, relevant, and easy-to-implement training to ensure learners can get immediate results and build upon their knowledge. He’s currently building Mint Superteams with a mission to train 1 million people and place them into companies.
