Almost every business today is digital. Companies tend to be online for continuity and, most importantly, user engagement. When people are afraid of stepping out of their main doors, going digital is inevitably the only way to get in touch with them.
Well, every company has a website/app now. So, how do you differentiate your business from the competition? What are some go-to strategies that would work for your business growth and achieve higher conversion rates?
Omnichannel Marketing and Gamification are our picks. These technologies are easy to implement and helps businesses convert their users with excellent user experiences. Their approach deals with the core problems of user engagement and achieves customer loyalty.
What is Omnichannel Marketing:
The omnichannel means unifying user experiences across all channels. Unlike traditional multichannel marketing, omnichannel integrates all channels data into a single user data. It provides a 360-degree view of customer behavior and provides insights for personalization and user engagement.
How different is it from Multichannel Marketing?
Multichannel marketing, as the name suggests, involves multiple channels in marketing, but not all channels are connected as in omnichannel marketing.
You may do exceptionally well on each of these individual channels, and if these channels are not connected, it will not be an omnichannel.
Why do we need Omnichannel Marketing?
Every channel has its strengths and weaknesses. When connected and unified, the user interactions across channels will also come down to a single user profile data. Businesses can derive a 360-degree view of their customers on all channels with omnichannel integrations. Thus any brand messaging can be consistently delivered to achieve business goals.
Top brands who are successfully into Omnichannel Marketing?
Amazon
When it comes to innovation, Amazon tops the list. With the “Amazon Go” stores stepping into reality, Omnichannel Marketing has also got a new use case. Users can scan their app and enter the store. The app is tagged to users’ Amazon account, and items taken out from the shelf are added to the virtual cart and removed when users place the items back on the shelf. The payments happen on the app with a quick self-checkout option. The store uses multiple devices to monitor, weigh and scan the user-picked items, and all these devices are connected without any user intervention.
This is an advanced use case of Omnichannel Marketing, connecting various devices to provide a seamless experience to the user.
Topshop
Topshop is one of the famous trendy outfits merchandise stores in the high street. It is also the only store from highstreet featured in London Fashion Week. The store made the best out of the opportunity with Omnichannel Marketing connecting its Twitter account to digital billboards, which are 10 minutes away from their physical stores.
When someone tags a post with #LFW on Twitter, Topshop displayed the tweet on the billboard with a relevant catalog outfit that matched the tweet. This particular omnichannel campaign has boosted its sales by a whopping 75%, the brand confirmed.
Panini
Panini began as an in-store company, selling their NFL, NBA, and FIFA sports cards & memorabilia in physical stores such as Wal-Mart, Target, etc.
With the onset of the digital revolution, they figured out that they could create digital versions of the sports cards, thus building a new line of business and a following for their sports card products among today’s mobile-first audience. To achieve this, they created separate apps for NFL, NBA, and FIFA on Android and iOS platforms, allowing users to collect and trade digital sports trading cards.
To reverse the slump in revenue growth, Panini aimed at increasing the paying user base while also increasing the purchase value per user. They adopted a personalization strategy to suggest a new app feature called Personalized Deals. Under this feature, every user was served fully personalized deal bundles based on their purchase history and content preferences.
As a result, there is a 20% increase in the number of paying users,40% increase in ARPPU.
There are many such successful use cases reported by businesses across the world. And it’s not just made for Amazon. Today we have tools that can facilitate similar experiences to small and mid-sized companies as well. Also, you don’t have to invest in hiring.
The omnichannel tools are easy to manage and come as a complete suite with embedded analytics, user engagement wizards, and campaign monitoring features. So, it doesn’t matter how small your business is; if you choose to go the omnichannel way, pick the right tool and get started.
Bonus: Here is a checklist for you on choosing the right omnichannel tool based on your business requirements.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is the process of using game mechanics to engage users for a better user experience.
Does Gamification mean games in the app?
It’s a myth all around. Games are a part of gamification but with game mechanics being added to any business scenario to make it more interactive. It can set users on a competitive mode to compete for better rewards, and on the business side, it helps to reach goals faster than standard approaches.
How to get started with gamification:
To gamify any business application – depends on the need/cause for gamification and what Businesses report many such successful use cases businesses to expect out of gamification. Here are the few cases where companies because can opt for gamification:
Bridge the user engagement gap: Games and game mechanics do wonders when it comes to engaging users. So if a business is looking for better user engagement options, gamification is the right choice.
Build habit-forming: Game mechanics create competitiveness among the users to get hooked to the product and complete the tasks naturally as a habit. Hence gamification is convenient because feature to initiate habit formation among the user base.
Improve social sharing
Users love to share their achievements and rewards over their peer groups. Hence it will create brand awareness without any efforts in marketing.
Infuse a sense of progression: Progression drives users to do better. Gamification facilitates such healthy competition to progress for a benefit or recognition.
Thus gamification can be used for many business scenarios where business owners are expecting higher returns with improved user experience and satisfaction.
Companies that won the race with gamification:
CRED
CRED is an Indian startup that simplifies “Credit Card Payment.”The potential unicorn has successfully used gamification as a strategy in increasing adoption and engagement across their app.
CRED rewards its users for paying their credit card bills. It is a members-only app with “exclusivity” as a strategy. Thus anyone with a score above 750 can join as a member. A good credit score is synonymous with a regular credit payer; the app restricts the app from using this. The other strategy is to increase product adoption, which is a gamification of the process.
CRED Coins: Every time someone uses an app to make payments, the users earn coins, and these coins can be redeemed for discounts from partners, pay for Experian credit scores, etc.
Or you can use coins to buy slots and play games. Games can offer variable rewards. That’s a hook framework. Users are motivated to do better and score higher.
Thus gamification is a real thing in today’s business that can engage users with high retention rates. CRED is doing it in the right way.
Amway
Amway business leaders wanted their sales force, called Independent Business Owners or IBOs, to be trained more efficiently to learn about Amway products faster and sell more types of products. This became important because Amway invests heavily in innovation and creates new products continually.
To achieve this, Amway created a digital learning platform (LMS) on mobile and web for its 3+ million IBOs living in 100 countries.
To motivate the IBOs to access the LMS platform and complete more courses regularly, Amway used Upshot.ai to gamify the learning experience by awarding badges to IBOs based on their course access and completion behavior. These badges became a visible status symbol among the IBO community and drove more of them to complete the courses.
To add an element of surprise, the Amway LMS administrators did not reveal the path to win these coveted badges. As a result, it drove the curiosity of the learners and caused a buzz among them. To further strengthen learner engagement, Amway is considering attaching a monetary value to each badge.
Additionally, the LMS product team creates and runs multilingual Web and mobile surveys using Upshot.ai and collects valuable learner feedback. They use these learnings to improve the product experience and inform the content variety and quality.
Thus Amway leveraged gamification to increase its employee engagement and at the same time reached its business goals.
What are different gamification options available:
Badges
Badges and stickers are the visual representations of the user’s accomplishments that they can collect, share and add to their profiles.
Leaderboards
Leaders maintain a sense of competition by listing all the individual’s progress and often allowing them to perform better.
Points
Point-based rewards are the results of the user’s progress in your app. Rewarding users generate more leads and bolster your ROI.
Progress bars
Bars tracks the individual’s progress toward a goal. Mapping progress motivates them to improve their score by completing more tasks.
Trivia
Trivia helps users engage in a fun and entertaining way. Interactive quizzes boost engagement and deliver
Opinion polls
Polls allow you to find out what your users think and how they feel—asking your audience for their opinion signals that you care what they have to say.
Mini-Games
Leverage games to educate and know your user’s needs. These provide a fun experience and improve daily active users.
The above-listed features can do wonders for your gamification strategy, provided that you find the best use case to use the same.
Wrapping up:
Gamification is like a wand in the hands of a business wizard. Be it E-commerce or Insurance, when gamified, the platform looks more attractive and welcoming to the end-users. The effectiveness of gamification is directly proportional to what problem it is solving. You can double the impact when gamification gets coupled with Omnichannel Marketing. “Success” – redefined for many brands across the globe with these remarkable strategies of user engagement.
