Everything is a Game: using Gamification for User Acquisition
Use Gamification to elevate your user acquisition strategy, enhance retention and engagement.
Gamification is everywhere.
And that’s because games are engaging.
Brands and apps are looking for better ways to engage with their audience.
So here we are, from the famous Duolinguo's app to Strava & Google Reviews, they are now all using gamification.
The real questions are:
How do we better use it?
How can we effectively leverage gamification for user acquisition?
How do we integrate it into our product strategy?
In this article, we'll first give you some advices on integrating gamification into your user acquisition - then we’ll review some gamification design to effectively implement it into your app strategy.
Gamifying User Acquisition
In an ever-changing industry and an increasingly competitive market, brands and apps are striving for attention and engagement.
But the first question we should ask is:
How do we attract users in the first place?
From the upper funnel - where they see your ad - to the lower one - the onboarding experience, everything should be optimised to make the user journey frictionless.
User acquisition is often made of many channels, across several countries, using different targeting and creatives. Resources are often limited, and it’s not easy to stand out in an overly saturated market.
That’s why I strongly believe that gamification is the answer.
Playable ads
In the past months, we’re seeing more apps & brands coming to ad networks such as AppLovin and Unity, where playable ads are quite popular.
In gaming, playables are highly engaging ad format, and if done right, they tend to perform better than any other type of ads. From luck & knowledge games to match-3, you can create a short ad experience for your user, and get them engaged in a fun way.
From Netflix to KFC, many brands have now adopted playable ads to increase awareness of their product. Some of them have collaborated with Playable Factory, a leader in this field, offering creative marketing technologies with playable ads for mobiles apps & games.
Brands can incorporate interactive elements like couponing and sweepstakes, offering opportunities for personalised messaging (everything is about personalisation) and future sales. This encourages deeper interaction with the audience, keeping the ad experience enjoyable.
If you want to do more than just branding, and actually showcase some of the features within your app, you can go a a bit further to personalise the playable with your app content. Let’s give an example.
Let’s say you have a AI Photo / Video editor app. Users are given a raw photo and are tasked to quickly edit it within a set time limit (e.g., adjust brightness, add a filter, crop the image). As users successfully complete each edit, they “level up” to more advanced features like adding text, stickers, or transitions for videos. Each step showcases a key function of the app. Users are shown a “before and after” comparison of their edited work, and at the end, they can download the app to save their final edit or unlock even more advanced editing tools. This mini-game is an example of how to highlight the app’s ease of use and core features in a fun, interactive way.
On-boarding experience
So now the user has downloaded your app - then what happens?
Well, you want them to open the app, and go through the on-boarding without exiting it. Apps have gotten better at optimising their onboarding, and here are some tips to do the same.
You can gamify the onboarding with quests. Instead of traditional (and boring…) tutorials, introduce little quests where users can unlock features step by step. Each completion provides rewards, unlock additional features, earn badges…
Don’t forget the progress bar! This shows users how close they are to completing the setup process. You can also add small rewards such as personalised avatars, bonus content, free trials… at each checkpoints to motivate them to finish.
Blinkist is a great example of gamified & personalised onboarding. Within just a few minutes, the user answer questions about their interests, play a mini-game by swiping through books they might like, and see a loading screen that highlight the personalised experience they’re about to access.
Now you have new users who are fully onboarded.
How do you retain them and keep them engaged?
Effective gamification design for apps
Retention is about creating a routine
We’ve all heard it: “I don’t want to miss my streak”. In the book “The Power of Habit”, Charles Duhigg explains that more than 40% of our daily actions are governed by habits. If you manage to get your users to open your app and achieve an event each day, for a consecutive period of time, you might create an habit. Habits function like being on autopilot: you have a cue - which is a trigger so your brain goes into automatic mode. Then you have the routine, either physical, mental or emotional. And finally, the reward.
To install a new habit, you need to have simple cue, create a routine and of course the reward.
Let’s get back to our app business.
Duolinguo is the best at creating habits, retaining users and keeping them engaged.
The cue: notification alert.
The routine: do your daily exercise.
The reward: the streak keeps going! And a owl doing fun things.
What about engagement?
Increasing retention is one thing, but you can take it a step further by enhancing engagement within the app. Once users have opened the app and completed their initial tasks, there are additional features and activities they may not have considered yet.
You can put a reward system in place, giving badges to users for reaching certain milestones.
Keep users motivated with progress bars to show how much they’ve achieved and what remains to advance to the next level.
Incorporate leaderboards and challenges. For example, a meditation app could have a “7-Day Calmness Challenge” with increasing rewards for each day completed.
Offer special bonuses or perks (e.g., double rewards, special access, or discounted in-app purchases) for users who complete certain actions. Use push notification to nudge users to complete these tasks. For example, a message like, “You’ve unlocked a secret bonus! Log in now to claim it” can spark curiosity.
More recently, Duolinguo has gone even further and introduced Adventures. Users can explore settings and storylines within the Duolingo universe that follow Duolingo characters like Lily and Oscar. Adventures allows users to apply their language lessons to real-world situations, like ordering at a cafe.
As we’ve seen throughout this article, gamification is a powerful tool that can transform everything. From the user acquisition to the onboarding, and within the app itself. And it makes sense. It makes things more fun. It makes advertising less intrusive. It helps with onboarding. It keeps users engage. It makes the whole experience frictionless. But it has to be done the right way. It should be personalised. It should feel special to the user.
Gamification is not just a trend.
Remember: Everything is a game now.