A key part of increasing customer conversions — getting people to a transaction of some kind — is boosting engagement and loyalty with business gamification programs. After all, to sustain your organization, people need to ante up and buy something from you. But often, increasing conversions involves more than that. Specifically, it involves proving value.
When you’re talking about conversions, you’re generally not talking about people who already use your product or site.
You’re talking about new users being introduced to your product or site. So the really important thing here is showing them all the key features of your product or site, showing them that other users are present, as well as showing how other users who login with the site are being rewarded for their participation.
In some ways, the behaviors you want to reward, then, pertain to learning. Your goal is to teach the user what the site or product is or does.
Your product must be valuable. If it’s crap, you’re not going to be able to use gamification to convince the user that it’s good.
Consider a health and fitness site where your goal is to convert a trial member to a full subscriber. To “prove” the worth of the site, you might prompt users to engage in these learning behaviors:
Exploring various program offerings
Visiting other users’ pages
Reading reviews of the site
The key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with those gameplay behaviors might include:
Number of page views of gamification program offering pages
Number of page views of other users’ pages
Number of page views of review pages
Once the user has decided to convert, you might switch to rewarding the behaviors on which the site itself is centered:
Choosing a program
Logging physical activity
Logging results
Sharing results