206 – Advanced Customer Engagement & Gamification: Techniques, Tools and Tips

Engaging customer communities today is the single biggest competitive driver keeping the world’s most successful companies ahead of the pack in their categories.

But oversimplified "gamified" approaches by digital marketers have largely fallen flat, with thin points-badge-and-leaderboard mechanics, loyalty points, and rewards offering little incentive to drive customer behavior. These mechanics are often poorly understood and inappropriately applied, resulting in a failure to increase meaningful long-term customer traction and drive business outcomes.

Successful customer engagement has come primarily from sophisticated designs and technologies that rely on tried-and-tested principles drawn from advanced engagement and interactive design philosophies, making it possible to inspire deeper, more engaged relationships between brands and their customers and change their behaviors through compelling gameplay mechanics such as collaboration, competition, mastery, customization, collection.

Measurement tools such as Net Engagement Scores methodology can also uncover the relationships that exist between the degree of healthy engagement in a customer community and key enterprise/business success outcomes to shed light on critical success metrics such as sales, profit-per-customer, purchase frequency, lifetime customer value, basket size, and others.

By better understanding how to leverage your customer touchpoints, design compelling experiences, and measure and quantify engagement health, it becomes possible to create stronger customer-brand relationships towards tangible business outcomes, positive ROI, and justification for large-scale investments.