Gamification in Contests: A Step-by-Step Guide

You want to build engagement among your business partners. A plain contest with prizes won't cut it anymore — you need something more. Enter gamification, in all its glory. What is gamification? It's the use of mechanics borrowed from games (board games, video games, and others) to build engagement and loyalty in the real world. Or, put more simply: it's injecting fun into the process of building loyalty.

Our plan has seven steps. Shall we get started?

This article is sponsored by Pluxee — a global leader in business-partner motivation and an expert in consumer incentives and sales stimulation. It provides modern rewards that work well in sales-support campaigns: contests, sweepstakes, loyalty programs, and sales-force incentive programs.

With Pluxee Nagroda prepaid virtual and physical cards, plus Pluxee Nagroda eVouchers, you can effectively engage your customers and business partners.

1. Define Your Gamification Goals

Keep one thing in mind: gamification is a tool. Its mechanics get people to do boring, repetitive tasks (like reading your newsletters or buying your products) with more enthusiasm. The problem is that if you define those tasks poorly, people will still do them with more enthusiasm — they just won't translate into anything for your business.

On the other hand, a contest with the simplest mechanic — buy as much of my product as possible and get a prize — tends to fall flat, because people treat it like an attempt to sell them something they don't need. So what works best? Promote a behavior that isn't the purchase itself, but is correlated with it. For example: once you're sitting at a bar, it's hard to sit there with a dry mouth. So you'll probably order a drink. A bar owner can promote showing up at the bar rather than buying drinks.

The same holds true in B2B. If you run a building-supplies wholesaler, use your contest to promote showing up at the warehouse rather than making a purchase. Promote visiting your trade-show booth where you're showing off a new product. Or clicking a button in your newsletter — that way you know people are actually reading it.

Another approach is promoting actions the customer is bound to take after the purchase — things like registering your product, installing it, and so on.

Think of it this way: besides buying from you, what have your customers definitely done? What behaviors do you want to see more of? In gamification, we call these actions your core action. We'll promote repeating that action, and as a result, you'll sell more.

Make a list of these core actions, because it may turn out we'll build the contest around more than one of them.

What could a core action look like for B2B?

Watching an ad or an educational video.
Signing up for a newsletter.
Downloading a demo version or a publication about your product.
Completing a knowledge quiz.
Registering a product.
Physically showing up at a store or a trade fair.

2. Analyze Your Audience

Remember that gamification is supposed to mean fun. And your customers are far more eager to talk about themselves than about you. Think about what excites them — it'll be much easier to connect what they actually want with what you're trying to offer them.

What should you take into account in this kind of analysis?

Business needs and goals. If your contest helps your partners reach their own goals, they'll be more eager to join in. So, for example, instead of rewarding distributors for buying your products, reward them for bringing as many people as possible into their store. Win-win.
Segmentation. Not all your partners are alike, and they know it too. If you run a contest for who pumps the most fuel, but some partners drive trucks while others drive passenger cars, the latter group simply won't join in.
The decision-making process. What's the point of getting your partner's rank-and-file employees engaged in a contest if they aren't the ones who decide whether to choose your product? You can reward them, you can persuade them, but… you'll have to admit it was the wrong call.
Reward systems. Different businesses can attach different value to the rewards you offer. Some value financial rewards, while others value things like a personal, hands-on approach to advice. Remember to have something for everyone — we'll get to that in a moment.
Communication preferences. Can you send everyone a text message? Or do you want participants to install an app? Think about this at the planning stage, and implementation will be a lot easier.
Levels of engagement. For some of your partners, you're their main supplier. They know you and like you. But for others, you're just one of many — they won't engage at the same level. Have an offer ready for every level of engagement.
Cultural context. What shows do they watch? What do they like doing in their free time? All of this will come in handy when you design your challenges.

3. Design Your Challenges

A challenge is simply the core action you defined earlier (showing up at a trade-show booth, clicking a newsletter link, or starting a virtual lesson), enriched with elements that make it easier to repeat without getting boring.

There are two gamification mechanics you can apply here. The first is called the collection. A collection turns a single behavior into a closed, finite multiple of itself. Think of the bubble-gum stickers we used to collect as kids. What did the shopkeeper do when he wanted us to buy more gum? He showed us an album full of empty slots. And suddenly, instead of just being happy to own one sticker, I wanted to track down the missing ninety-nine.

The simplest implementation of a collection is a progress bar. Visit my store nine more times to claim your prize. Click through the newsletter five more times.

The second mechanic you can use is the streak. A streak turns a single behavior into an open-ended multiple — the longest run you can manage. Have people log into your learning platform once a week, for example, and reward whoever has the most consecutive weeks.

4. Design Your Reward System

Let's start with a basic distinction: effort rewards and achievement rewards.

An effort reward doesn't depend on how well anyone else did. If I open every one of your newsletters in a month, I get my reward, and no one but me can ruin that. But if you're rewarding whoever posts the most replies on a product forum, my effort can be undone by someone who posted even more. An achievement reward depends on how others performed.

Basic rule: design your effort rewards first, and only then your achievement rewards. That means an activation program's reward system should have guaranteed rewards for anyone who makes a specific effort (like showing up at your store once a week).

Here's the catch: if everyone is supposed to get a reward, what happens the moment a huge number of people decide to join your program? The solution to this problem is fun rewards — ones that have no real value outside the game itself.

Physical rewards have a problem: segmentation. If your audience isn't a hugely homogeneous group with the exact same interests, it's very hard to pick a reward that's valuable to everyone. That's why we invented money. But… money has a different problem. It's fungible. One unit of currency is indistinguishable from another. Research shows that giving people cash they'll just tuck into their wallet makes them forget about it! Because a hundred bucks they got as a reward from you looks exactly the same, sitting in their wallet, as a hundred bucks from their paycheck.

The solution?

Pluxee also offers eVouchers, but we'll talk about those another time.

5. Design Your Feedback System

Good feedback should be as immediate as possible. That means if your partner clicks through a newsletter or finishes a lesson on your learning platform, they should hear back right away that they did something right. Ideally, a reward should travel alongside that feedback.

One of the bigger challenges in good partner programs is precisely building a reliable channel for delivering that feedback. It could be email, a text message, a push notification in an app, or… a notification that a balance has just gone up.

6. Evaluate and Adjust Your Promotional Campaigns

A one-off program builds a relationship with your business partner over the short term. But the real key is running longer programs — ones that last months or years.

How do you keep your promotional campaign from boring your partners? The answer is the flow theory, developed by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (yes, I can't pronounce it either). Mihály argues that flow is a mental state in which we're completely absorbed in the task in front of us. But to reach that level of focus, we need balance between two things: our perceived level of the task's difficulty and our perceived level of skill.

As your promotional campaign repeats and runs longer, your players' skills grow. That means you need to raise the difficulty of the tasks. How do you do that? A mechanic you can apply here is challenge dimensions. You take the core task (open the newsletter, come to my store, log into the learning platform) and add a dimension to it:

Time (log in after 5 pm);
Place (visit two stores in two different cities);
Product (watch the lesson about product X, or click a specific link in the email);
Community (bring a friend into the contest).

Instead of thinking in terms of dimensions, it might be easier to think in terms of levels. And remember: dimensions can be combined at higher levels. So if your contest has been running for a while, you might have players who need to click a specific link at a specific time — combining the time and product dimensions.

Keep one more thing in mind: higher-level challenges mean higher-level rewards. And here I'd like to bring up Pluxee again, because if you're handing out physical rewards, you run into two problems:

at every level, you have to find something of the right value;
and whatever you find has to actually appeal to your business partners.

That's a lot of brainstorming if you've got several partner segments and several reward tiers on top of that. A prepaid card topped up with progressively more cash suits everyone, at every level.

Gamifying a promotional campaign takes a lot of planning. That's why I'd strongly recommend eliminating at least one headache — planning the reward system. Pluxee can genuinely help with that.