You are scrolling through your news feed on Facebook or Instagram, and suddenly an ad grabs your attention. Since you like the ad, you click on it and go to the store.

You were looking at different products. You navigate through different pages on the website, and all of a sudden climate of the website start changing, it's like something is about to pop out, but it's stuck probably loading the high-quality image.

That is when you see a website pop up, at least you would have seen 50% off it since the high-quality image added to it takes time to load. Pop up is fully visible now and ask for your email address in exchange for a 10% discount on your order. 

Your first visit to a website and it is asking for your email address already. 90% of the time you will close the pop-up without subscribing because it's your first visit and you are not sure about the brand, the trust level is not enough to share your email address to a website you just discovered. 

Now looking at this from the store owner's point of view, you just made a potential customer nervous on his first visit to your website and lost a valuable chance of turning that visitor/potential customer into your subscriber. Would that mean pop-ups have become obsolete, and there is no use of them anymore? No!

The world we are living in, businesses try to be better than they were the day before, and the same goes for marketing and lead generation efforts.  It is the era of gamification pop up where you have to engage your visitor, earn their trust and make their journey comfortable and mentally satisfied enough, so they trust you with the end goal "Purchase."

Getting Started With Gamification

One thing you need to understand before you begin implementing gamification in your store is to know your audience. You have to look closely at your current site visitor and understand every action they take on your website and the psychology behind it. 

Once you understand this and have enough data to make decisions based on it, you are ready to take your customer journey to the next level. 

Now that you know the basics let’s get started with the actual gamification. Here are a few ways to easily gamify the shopping experience for your site visitors that can ultimately increase your overall store conversions. 

Email Pop-ups 

You are familiar with the commonly used pop-ups that will give you a discount coupon in exchange for your email address. Now instead of using those annoying pop-ups, you can create gamified pop-ups using apps like Milk The Lead. 

The best part about gamified pop-ups is that it engages your site visitor with your brand and reward them with a coupon. Engaging with the site before making any money related transactions and understanding the brand through gamified pop-ups build a level of trust and understanding between your site and customer. 

Here are some gamified pop-ups that top stores in the market are using and increasing their customer interaction and getting more and more into their target audience. 

Spin To Win

One game that each one of us has played at least once is spin to win. 

Instead of one line pop-ups having the usual line (Leave your email and get 10% off), you can use spin to win. Ask the visitor to spin the wheel to win the coupons. They will get the coupon when the wheel stops on a particular coupon. Since you are in control of what they will get, you can adjust it for a 5% or 10% discount. Just make sure you don’t set it for Try Again, You lose or better luck next time options as that might upset your visitors. 

Lucky Lever

You know why casino games are always addictive, and no one can say no to a Lucky Lever. 

Your potential customers can see this, and there is no way they won’t pull that lever, to pull the lever they have to enter their email address, and that’s it. You got a subscriber in your email list and an engaged customer on your website. 

Now you can make product-specific or collection specific discounts bundles offers or buy x get y coupons to turn the engaged visitor into a customer.

Scratch & Win

This one is my favorite, and I am sure everyone is familiar with it.

Scratch and Win gamified pop up create a sense of winning relationship between your brand and potential customers. 

Everyone likes rewards, gifts, freebies, or something off as it gives them a sense of satisfaction that they are winning.

The psychology behind the gamified pop-ups is that it creates a winning situation for your customer at the end of a fun activity they did on your website. At this moment, purchasing on your website is the goal you want and what could be better than getting purchases on your site and your customer thinking of it as a victory and feeling satisfied with their purchase. 

Gamified Emails

Email is one of the best ways to convert your site visitors into customers. Adding a gamification touch to your emails is precisely what you need to increase open rates, click-through ratio, and, best of all, increased revenue. 

Instead of a regular newsletter or new product promotion, you can start engaging your audience in taking action, asking them to do something, and reward them in return. 

Need verified reviews on your products send an email making it a fun activity. Place a review on our website for a 20% off next order. You can also make a series of site activities that they have to do to earn store credit that can be used to make store purchases. Another exciting way to engage your customers is to send them surveys in the gamification form. You can ask different questions. 

-How did they find you? 

-Which ad do they saw? 

-What made them trust your site? 

-What could be a better option

a)Giving them a real opportunity that can be, would you prefer a 10% discount

 OR

b)Free shipping on your order, and at the end rewarding them for all the answers. 

Extract the data from surveys, analyze your audience, and understand your buying personas in depth. 

Benefit Of Gamification

Have you ever noticed that one store you always go-to for buying different products that can easily be available anywhere, but you still go to that one store? Have you ever realized the reason? Well, let me tell you, and you will notice this on your next visit. 

That store must have something different from other stores when it comes to the buying experience. When you purchase there, you will feel comfortable. That’s the effort that the store employees have made to make your buying experience easy and mentally satisfying. 

The human brain is engineered in such a way that we tend to interact and engage with patterns and what we find exciting or different. 

The same principle applies to your online store. Add a little fun to the customer journey making it comfortable for them. It will not only help you in increasing your conversion rate for new visitors but the core value you will get with gamification pop-ups is the recurring customer. Same as you go to the same store again and again. 

See, it’s not that hard; all your customers are looking for is trust and comfort. They saw your ad, clicked on it, and they are on your website, that right there proves that they are interested in your product, it’s just something out of the box and trust they are looking for to seal the deal. 

Stores like Qayse did an A/B test to check a regular pop up with gamified pop up from Milk The Lead. Qayse saw a 9.4% increase in their capture rate as compared to the regular pop up, which reflected in overall conversions and revenue for the store. 

You can do a lot more than just building your email list from pop-ups, and that’s possible only through gamified pop-ups. Make pop up games more exciting and higher rewards to engage more visitors. 

Wrapping Up 

There is no limit to what you can do with gamified pop-ups. You will see a significant change in your cart abandonment and product page drop rate. Your customers will return to your website for more purchases and will happily recommend your store to other friends. Remember, no matter how advanced marketing gets, word of mouth is still the best marketing you can get. You can do all this without sounding like a salesperson pop up who has no value for the customer and want an email for exchange of discount. 

If you are not sure if it would be best for your business, Try any app from the app store that has gamified pop-ups and has a Free plan that you can try. I would recommend you to try Milk The Leads and use the Lucky lever in particular and see how it works out for you.