Getting your web visitors and customers to engage with your website is no small feat. One easy way to overcome this challenge is by leveraging WordPress gamification.
By implementing gamification on your WordPress or PooCommerce website, you’ll find that you can quickly improve your engagement and boost sales.
This post will give tips and steps for creating good gamification for your site. But first, what is WordPress gamification?
What is WordPress Gamification?
Gamification involves incorporating gaming elements into something that was originally not a game. So, WordPress gamification is the practice of adding gaming elements to your WordPress site to help engage your visitors better.
There’s no doubt that nowadays, people are more attracted to exciting content. WordPress gamification helps to achieve that!
Perhaps one primary reason gamification gets people hooked to your website is the exciting rewards they’ll get after completing a given task.
So, when visitors take action and engage with your posts, you must keep up the momentum by ensuring your gamified content keeps getting compelling. This will encourage them to keep coming back.
Tips for Optimizing WordPress Gamification
Adding gaming elements to your WordPress website won’t cut it; you need to put in place the needed mechanism to make it work. That said, here are tips to optimize your gamification efforts.
1. Celebrate Achievements with Badges
You can introduce gamification if your website allows users to create an account. Simply give badges as rewards to users who participate and engage with your content. Badges are visual symbols that encourage users to complete more actions on your site. They can also attach badges to their social profiles to build an online presence or get a shoutout from your brand.
You can award badges based on the number of times users visit your website or how many items they buy from your website. You can even award badges to users who have taken other important actions, such as subscribing to your newsletter.
2. Build a Points System and Include Interactive Modules on Your Website
You can add gamification to your website by awarding points to your users after they take specific actions. It can be for participating in polls and surveys, solving quizzes, spending an amount of money, and many others.
So, when users earn many points, you can decide what to give them in return. However, make sure to customize the gifts you give them to boost your brand’s awareness.
You can also include interactive modules on your WordPress site. These can be fun crossword puzzles or games that keep them glued to your website. Better still, you can attach prizes like vouchers or branded items. Whether you create the game elements manually or with a plugin, they will help to improve your website’s conversion rate over time.
3. Boost Your Visitors’ Knowledge
People search for information daily. So, leverage this by adding gamified content that can influence your visitors’ sense of discovery. Create a problem and provide tools for solving it. Then motivate your visitors to solve the problem and award them accordingly.
You can apply this method to every type of customer or visitor. It will keep them glued to your website. Who doesn’t like the thrill of solving a fun problem and getting rewarded for doing so?
4. Monitor Your Growth
Your gamification design can also be unique to your brand. You can achieve this by creating a game about your company. This way, you can learn how much your audience knows about your brand. What’s more, it’ll be exciting too.
Monitoring your growth can make it easy to identify key areas to improve your gamification. You can discover valuable customer behaviour insights and use them to improve engagement and conversions.
5. Provide Outstanding and Compelling Content for All Customer Segments
If you want to add gamification to your website, ensure to dish out compelling content to all customers. You can create campaigns matching your customers’ preferences or previous actions. Just make sure you create content for every type of customer.
The aim of creating content for all customers is so that everyone can find it engaging. So, create gamified content that will appeal to everyone who visits your website. This will help you to get results faster.
For example, you can use a spin-to-win like the one below:
6. Encourage Your Web Visitors to Share their Experience
People love to share their good and bad experiences with others. Encourage your web visitors to share their experiences and wins on social media. So, when you add gamification to your website, ensure it’s worth sharing. Also, add buttons that lead directly to your preferred social media platforms.
You can also encourage your web visitors to interact with each other. One of the best ways to do this is to create a message board on your website for all customers to interact with one another. By sharing their experience and winnings for others to see, more people will be motivated to interact with your gamified content.
7. Don’t Be Excessive
Since you’re not creating a complete game, do just what is necessary. You’re only adding some game elements to boost your website’s engagement rate, so try to strike a balance between impact and fun to have quality engagement. Appeal to your customers’ interests without choking them with unnecessary fun.
Remember that your WordPress website has a primary purpose, so visitors don’t expect a flashy game site. So, be simple, draw their attention with compelling content, and they’ll stick with you.
Steps to Create a Good Gamification Campaign
1. Develop Curiosity
If you want to create good gamification, curiosity is an effective method of keeping people anticipating and engaged. You can develop curiosity by creating a sequence or using a ‘cliffhanger.’ This will fuel your users’ desire to know the story’s end.
2. Initiate a Competition
You can create good gamification on your WordPress site by allowing players to compete with one another. This way, you’ll add uniqueness to your game because playing with other people is more interesting than playing alone. Competition can spur others to play as they keep challenging one another.
3. Strike a Balance
If a task is too simple, it can get boring; if it’s too complicated, it’ll be frustrating. And WordPress gamification isn’t an exception. So, to create good gamification for your website, strike a balance between the two extremes. Make sure that even if the task is challenging, users can still accomplish it.
4. Allow Users to Unlock Items
Another step on how to create good gamification for your website is to give users a chance to unlock items. Such items can be unique superpowers or secret or fun elements. This will encourage them to participate actively in your game.
Also, ensure that the secret items are displayed ahead of time so players know they have to unlock something. This will help to boost their morale and curiosity.
5. Grant Users Access to Complete a Task
To create gamification for your website, do your part of the task and leave the rest for your users to complete. Since people feel so uncomfortable with incomplete tasks, the urge for completion will motivate them to act on it.
However, make sure that the task is partly done and easy to complete for users. This will encourage them to finish it.
6. Give Players the Chance to Customize Their Experience
An important step to creating good gamification for your website is to give your users the freedom of expression. When you give players a chance to build or develop something, they will go out of their way to do it excellently.
Such tasks can be creatively developing content, a page, or a profile. When you give them the freedom to express their creativity, they will spend time and do the task well.
7. Use Familiar Elements
To implement effective gamification on your WordPress website, ensure the characters, gameplay, and other elements are familiar and easy to recognize. This will help your web visitors understand how to interact with your gamified content. You can spice things up a bit by adding new, unfamiliar elements.
8. Acknowledge Achievements
To encourage engagement with your WordPress gamified content, acknowledge users’ achievements, especially when they share it on social media. This will make them feel valued and increases their interest in your brand.
9. Create the Right Challenges
Create and incorporate simple challenges to keep your users motivated. The simplicity of the challenges will spur people to solve them. It can be an Instagram challenge where you ask your users to invite their friends and receive a gift in return.
That way, they will spend time inviting friends, which is more like playing a game. They’ll enjoy the experience and anticipate more of it.
8 Best WordPress Gamification Plugins
Gamification plugins boost engagement on your website. They help to change regular actions on your WordPress or WooCommerce websites to fun activities. So, here is a list of WordPress gamification plugins you can trust!
1. Falling Gift Game by Adoric
The Falling Gift game is the latest innovation in eCommerce created by Adoric. It helps engage your audience like never before and can boost your conversion rate by up to 30%. It allows your users to play an interactive game where they can win gifts in the form of discounts and coupons.
This tool offers the following features:
- It allows you to customize the game to decide how many trials a user can get.
- Thanks to our intuitive drag-and-drop editor, the falling gift game is very simple to create and embed on your website.
- It is mobile-friendly and responsive across all devices.
The falling gift game by Adoric is one of the best WooCommerce plugins available and is perfect for you if you’re looking to skyrocket your conversion rate.
2. Simple Giveaways
This WordPress gamification plugin helps you to organize giveaways and contests on your website, which people can participate in. You can also set guidelines for people to meet before they can stand a chance to win the contest or giveaway.
This helps to attract more users to your website and increase engagement. The following features apply to Simple giveaways:
- It is mobile-responsive
- Simple Giveaways enables you to create a landing page for your giveaway or contest.
- It can help to track your users’ participation so that you can give them prizes accordingly.
Simple Giveaways allows you to incorporate social media sharing and email sign-ups to your website
3. MyRewards
This is a WordPress gamification plugin for WooCommerce. It allows you to give points to customers when they perform certain actions on your website.
MyRewards awards credits or points on purchases. You have the right to decide when and how the points expire too. This encourages your customers to maximize the points while they’re still valid.
These are the features of MyRewards:
- It has time-conscious loyalty programs for particular occasions
- MyRewards gives points based on actions such as newsletter subscription, product review, or first order.
- It predicts point value when applied to a cart for a discount.
MyRewards is great for building an ambassador or loyalty program for your brand or business. It will also help you significantly if you have a WooCommerce shop.
4. MyCred
Just like other WordPress gamification plugins, MyCred gives you a chance to award badges, points, and ranks to visitors. It stands out because it has easy-to-use point-management features.
Also, your visitors can use its points to purchase actual items. It also allows you to add or reduce points from a user’s profile.
The following are features of MyCred:
- It allows for point exchange between a user and another
- MyCred automatically awards points to visitors’ profiles on a preset date.
- It allows users to use their points to make purchases.
5. BadgeOS LearnDash Add-On
This WordPress gamification plugin is mainly for professionals and educators who create courses with LearnDash. The BadgeOS plugin helps to gamify your website so that students can have an amazing experience with the curriculum.
Also, students can be awarded badges for lessons, quizzes, and course-related activities. You can also transform customers by giving awards just for purchasing your course. These are the features of BadgeOS:
- It works together with Credly so that learners can share badges on websites or social media
- BadgeOS has specific steps for receiving awards
- It customized badges, requirements, and achievements
BadgeOS is the best if you’re searching for a way to get more students to buy your course. It is also for you if you use the LearnDash management system to create courses.
6. WP Optin Wheel
WP Optin Wheel is a great gamification plugin for WordPress, as it allows customers to spin the wheel to win prizes or coupons. Also, you have the right to ask them to subscribe before they can win. This helps to boost your newsletter subscriptions and purchases.
The features of the WP Optin Wheel are:
- It creates many wheels for A/B testing and allows you to place them on various pages.
- WP Optin Wheel adds discounts, links, or loses to 12 slices
- Allows you to set the winning probability of each wheel
WP Optin Wheel is a great option if you’re okay with having just a type of gamification on your site. It also allows you to build an email marketing list.
7. GamiPress
GamiPress is a WordPress gamification plugin that allows your customers to earn awards based on how they engage with your website. The plugin is simple to use. It will enable you to set different criteria for visitors to meet before they have access to the awards.
Your criteria can be that a visitor frequently visits the website, comments on a blog post, etc. Users who meet your preset criteria can earn ranks, points, or other achievements.
These are the features of GamiPress:
- It assigns ranks to visitors to encourage them to keep engaging with your gamified content.
- With GamiPress, you can fix time limits for users to meet the criteria for winning.
- It customizes achievements, ranks, and points.
8. H5P
This WordPress gamification plugin has different interactive content that you can use to boost engagement on your WordPress or WooCommerce site. For instance, H5P has quizzes and fill-in-the-blanks, which are awesome tools for gathering information.
Also, memory games and flashcards can help your visitors remember all they’ve learned.
Features of H5P include:
- You can view most of its content on various devices
- H5P has compelling content like presentations, hotspot timelines, videos, collages, and audio recorders.
- You can recycle content instead of always building them from scratch.
H5P is best for you if you want to try different interactive content to know the best one for your audience. It’s also a great option if you’re an educator or professional who has students with various learning styles.
Conclusion
Implementing gamification on your WordPress website doesn’t have to be difficult if you know the right tools to use. With the many perks of increased engagement and conversion rates that come with gamification, it’s worth trying out.
Better still, the falling gift game by Adoric is a great way to start implementing gamification on your WordPress or WooCommerce website. Sign up for an account with Adoric right away.
