Did you know that businesses that incorporate gamification elements into their marketing strategy can increase closing rates by up to 88%? You can get these kinds of results too, but you need to what you’re doing.
Badges, achievements, and shareable milestones are definitely a step in the right direction, but the hype with these tactics can be short-lived. If you want to increase customer loyalty, motivate your sales team, and turn your clients into true lovers of your brand, then get started with a gamification platform.
The best gamification platforms can transform your brand into a resource that captures the mind of your audience.
We know it’s easier said than done though.
That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the best gamification platforms to help you on your journey to achieving exceptional user engagement, brand loyalty, and sales.
What is a gamification platform?
A gamification platform is a software or a digital solution that incorporates game mechanics and design into traditional non-game contexts. Gamification tools apply the key features of games to achieve a specific goal.
This technology can include gamified learning platforms for learning languages (Duolingo), customer loyalty gamification platforms (Starbucks), or gamification platforms for business marketing (Nike, M&M’s, or any other company that can take advantage of trends).
The worldwide market for gamification platforms was valued at almost 12 billion US dollars in 2021 – and it’s constantly growing, expected to reach nearly 97 billion USD by 2030.
But why have gamification tools for business become so popular?
Gamification is proven to enhance customer engagement, motivation, and participation, increasing brand loyalty and ultimately, sales.
And nobody can deny that games are an excellent way to onboard new users, as interactive onboarding sequences have also proved to be incredibly successful.
Gamification can turn virtually any product or service into something interesting that people want to engage with. This makes gamification a widely used and very effective customer retention method.
Got you thinking about using a gamification platform for your business?
Keep reading to find out what to look for in a gamification service and see what we consider the best gamification websites on the market!
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Comparing gamification platforms on features and cost
At its core, gamification is built on three simple concepts:
- Objectives
- Rewards
- Competition
Every gamification platform should work based on these fundamentals.
Key features – gamified platforms should also include features such as:
- Badges, achievements, progress bars, and rewards – these are the main gamification features you’ll find in most software. They help keep customers engaged and give them a sense of accomplishment, motivating them to spend more time with your brand.
- Leaderboards – like the previous point, leaderboards add an element of competition and can significantly increase engagement, especially when paired with a reward system.
- A variety of game types to choose from – opt for gamification tools with many game options, so you can pick the best ones that fit your strategy and audience. This also allows you to mix things up when your customers are getting bored. Bonus points if you can add your own brand to games.
- Integration with community or social media platforms – when customers share their gaming achievements on social media, it’s free advertising for your brand. When users can connect with peers and inspire and motivate each other, customer engagement also increases.
- Real-time feedback and notifications – users should receive feedback on their actions, progress, and performance. This helps to guide their decision-making and provides a sense of accomplishment. Real-time feedback and notifications can come in the form of push notifications, visual cues, or personalized messages.
- Ease of use – the best gamification sites offer a wide range of game mechanics that you can implement into your strategy, without knowing even the basics of coding. A gamification platform should be intuitive, accessible, and efficient.
- Reporting tools – gamification tools aren’t just for motivating employees, increasing user engagement, or building customer loyalty.
- A gamification platform is also an invaluable data collection tool. Metrics and analytics can help you understand how to successfully reach your audience so you can grow your customer base and expand your business.
- Pricing – gamification software vendors often don’t include this information on their websites. This is standard practice for SaaS companies. Although, as a customer, you’re probably looking to compare different offers. You can look for gamification platform pricing on gamification platform comparison sites or call companies directly.
- Free trial – with a free trial you can safely test out gamified platform features, giving you the freedom to explore options and decide which solution is right for you. Testing features is especially important since gamification platform costs can be high. Not all gamification vendors offer a free gamification platform option.
When deciding which gamification agency is best for you, consider your business processes, brand profile, and target customers. The software and specific features you opt for must meet the needs of your business and customers.
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Best gamification platforms: Top picks
Now that you have a better idea of what to look for in a gamification tool, let’s zoom in on some of the best gamification platforms available this year.
Adact
Adact is one of the best gamification software vendors out there. It specializes in game-based marketing campaigns and lead generation. The platform is very easy to use and requires no coding knowledge. It also offers a wide range of games to choose from. With the extensive editing options, you can create not only branded content, but even seasonal holiday campaigns.
Features:
- A variety of game types to choose from, including text-based, raffle-based, and competitive games.
Image source: Adact
- Drag-and-drop editor to help design branded games. Zero coding knowledge is required.
- Create landing pages, and add registration forms, banners, and link banners, which you can include anywhere in your game
- Real-time advanced analytics that shows the success of your customer engagement campaign – statistics include the number of visits, unique leads, games started and completed, bounce rate, and average gameplay session length
Image source: Adact
- Measurement of traffic and button clicks
- Option to manage multiple brands from one place
- Import GDPR-compliant data straight to your CRM and email marketing software
- Prize management and automatic assignment
- Over 2000 integrations through Zapier – with a customer support team to help you with setup
- Multi-language options with automatic translations to help you reach the international market with ease
Here are some results our clients have seen with their campaigns:
- Creditstar launched a Halloween campaign using a smash game and reached a conversion rate of 20% with this approach!
- A1 Slovenia created three trivia games with Adact, increasing the number of active app users and getting nearly 20,000 unique leads.
- Atomic Wallet launched a Jeopardy campaign, attracting 246,000 unique players with 95% game completion.
Check out our blog post for more successful gamification examples.
Pricing:
Adact offers a 14-day free trial of their gamification services. For the paid product, users can choose from four pricing plans: Single, Full Limited, and Enterprise. Pricing starts at €1,500/year for the Single plan. Call for a custom quote on other pricing plans.
Book a call to see which options suit your needs best. Flexible pricing options are available on demand.
Influitive
Influitive helps turn your regular customers into loyal advocates with its advocacy and community engagement solutions.
It’s primarily a gamification tool for loyalty and can improve customer loyalty through points collection, increasing awareness, and encouraging healthy competition. Since its inception in 2010, the platform has powered over $1 billion in ROI for its customers.
Image source: G2
Features:
- Performance management and metrics with downloadable reports
- Secure data management
- Badges and leaderboards
- Activity tracking
- Contest and rewards management
- Goal setting and tracking
- Collaboration tools
- Learning games with customizable quizzes for marketing, modules, and many training options
- Push notifications, private chats, public forums, and gamified Q&A
- Social networks and CRM integration
Pricing:
Influitive doesn’t post prices on its website, but according to a third-party website, its customer advocacy platform access cost starts at $1,999/month. No free plan or trial is available, but you can schedule a demo.
Ambition
Ambition provides several services, with sales gamification being one of them. It drastically decreases the time necessary to run competitions and custom sales contests.
Admittedly, this is the only gamification element this sales gamification platform is focused around. However, it can successfully motivate users with leaderboards and help to recognize customer accomplishments to help drive long-lasting behavior changes.
Image source: G2
Features:
- CRM integration
- Reporting platform with performance management, reliability data, and user, role, and access management
- Data importing and exporting tools
- Personalized dashboards, profiles, and goal setting
- Incentivizing leaderboards, badges, triggers, and a commission calculator
- Advanced competition options with templates and custom settings
- Knowledge base for easy training
- Real-time updates, reviews, and notifications
Pricing:
Ambition doesn’t provide pricing information on its website. However, other sources state that the platform starts at $6,840/year.
Mambo.IO
Mambo.IO is a gamification platform that helps companies boost engagement, measure activities, set goals, and increase performance. Its suite of gamification APIs makes it a breeze to create in-app customer engagement experiences. The tool is fully customizable and scalable, and you can tailor it to your gamification strategy.
Image source: SaaSworthy
Features:
- Real-time feedback with notifications that positively reinforce valuable behaviors
- Advanced reporting, performance metrics, and analytics of behavioral data
- Setting KPIs for specific time periods to make long-term goals more attainable
- Custom points, levels, and a personalized reward system
- Behavioral and point-based leaderboards
- Coupon system rewards
- Customizable widget library
- Activity streams that you can personalize for specific user groups
- Built-in CRM interface
- Integrations with webhooks
Pricing:
Mambo.IO offers three plan types: On-Demand, On-Premise and Dedicated Cloud. Their On-Demand plan starts at $499/month, but the customer engagement gamification platform doesn’t include public pricing information for its other plans.
Gametize
Gametize is a simple enterprise gamification platform that focuses mainly on customer engagement, community building, and advocacy. You can also use it to automate marketing, promote customer advocacy, and create employee training modules and interactive courses. This gamification agency advertises that anyone can create their own white-labeled or mobile campaign in just five minutes.
Image source: G2
Features:
- Fun and interactive challenges and quizzes
- Leaderboard and rewards store with customizable achievement badges that you can tailor to the target audience
- Analyze metrics such as participation rates, initiated discussions, and posted replies
- Instantaneous feedback for real-time support with messaging, votes, and commenting options
- Integration with social media platforms and APIs
Unfortunately, customization options are limited and you cannot directly upload audio files to the platform.
Pricing:
You can register for a seven-day free trial without providing any payment details. When your trial is up, you can choose from five payment options:
- Light – $100/month or $1,200 billed annually
- Regular – $200/month or $2,400 billed annually
- Premium – $500/month or $6,000 billed annually
- Premium Plus – $1,000/month or $12,000 billed annually
- Enterprise – custom pricing
Qualifio
This gamification solution offers over 50 interactive formats with cross-channel publication options. The platform allows users to collect high-quality data from customers. It’s targeted mainly towards large brands and enterprise companies. Qualifio is an easy-to-use enterprise gamification platform with many integration options.
Image source: TrustRadius
Features:
- Many games to choose from, including contests, quizzes, trivia, surveys, and personality tests
- Game techniques applied to marketing strategies
- Intuitive campaign builder that requires no technical or coding skills
- Advanced formats (only available as add-ons to the basic license)
- Over 40 languages to choose from
- Customizable templates that you can take to the next level with CSS, HTML, or JavaScript
- Ability to publish to every digital channel – websites, mini-sites, mobile apps, social media, emails, ads, and pop-ups
- Over 30 types of form fields, CAPTCHAs, and real-time validation allow users to collect valuable data
- Full GDPR compliance and CRM integration
- Advanced reports that are easy to export
This employee and customer engagement gamification platform provides valuable statistical insights, reliability, and data security. However, if you’re looking for advanced customization, you may find this gamification tool to be limited in that regard.
Pricing:
You can request a demo of Qualifio, but there is no free version. There are two packages to choose from: Essential and Plus. You must contact the company for a quote. The license cost is calculated individually based on:
- Number of brands using the software
- Number of users
- Level of services required
- Geography (international/national)
Gamification platform FAQ
Why should I use a gamification platform?
The main goal of gamification software is to drive desired behaviors, encourage active participation, and motivate users to achieve specific objectives. Gamification leverages the motivational aspects of games – competition, rewards, challenges, and progress tracking – to make tasks more enjoyable and engaging.
Here are the top reasons why you should invest in a gamification platform for your business:
- Improved user satisfaction – gamification can make virtually any process more enjoyable, especially when incentives are included. Keep your gamified user experience thoughtful and always focus on your customers’ needs. You’ll be rewarded with customer satisfaction, positive feedback, loyalty, and priceless word-of-mouth advertising.
- Better customer engagement – anyone who’s ever played even a mobile or party game knows how fun, and even addictive, they can be. When games include your brand values and image they can boost customer retention, leading to incredible revenue growth.
- Improved user and/or employee onboarding – every game has one thing in common: it must introduce the game rules while keeping it enticing and simple. Admittedly, that’s no easy feat. The best gamification platforms provide an intuitive user interface, onboarding checklist and completion status bar, badges, leaderboards, or even a sidekick-type character to guide users through the game. The alternative? Having your customers or employees bored and overwhelmed from the start.
- Collection of valuable customer and session data – get insight into your customers’ wants, needs, and typical behavior by collecting customer and session data.
The best gamification platforms offer robust tracking and analytics that allow users to effectively refine marketing strategies, optimize processes, personalize customer experiences, and achieve rapid growth.
How can I find the right gamification tools and services for my business needs?
The first step in finding the right gamification tool for your business is identifying your needs and goals. What do you want to achieve with gamification software? Are you looking for customer engagement? Employee onboarding? Education?
Read gamification platform software reviews to see which software fits your needs, goals, and company size. Compare software and find a gamification tool that also offers useful features and lets you add your brand to games. Sign up for a free trial to make sure the tool is a good fit before paying for a subscription.
What’s the best free gamification platform?
There’s no free gamification software, but some platforms offer free trials that allow users to test features before making a purchase.
Adact offers the best free gamification platform trial, allowing users to explore the games, analytics, and brand management capabilities of the software. Users can also test the drag-and-drop editor to see how easy it is to create custom branded games with Adact.
What’s the best gamified learning platform?
With over 30 games that users can customize to help them achieve their desired learning outcomes, Adact is the best learning gamification platform. You can use Adact to create interactive games that accelerate learning and keep students engaged.
Features such as leaderboards and rewards foster healthy competition and can make students more willing and engaged in learning.
What’s the best gamified training platform?
Adact is the best gamified training platform. It integrates gaming mechanics into workplace training to improve employee engagement and motivation. Adact comes with a wide variety of games employers can use to train employees, such as quizzes, trivia, and puzzles.
Adact uses features such as leaderboards and badges to give trainees a sense of accomplishment and motivation. The software also comes with a data collection feature, so employers can monitor training courses and their employees’ progress, making necessary adjustments to the training methods or material.
What’s the best enterprise gamification platform?
Adact offers one of the most comprehensive enterprise gamification services available. When large companies use Adact, they gain access to unlimited campaigns and campaign types and can choose from a long list of game types to implement.
For international organizations, Adact is perfect. This gamification tool is available in over 50 languages and businesses can provide separate access for users in different countries. Adact also offers separate customer service support for different time zones, in case an employee needs help navigating the software.
How many gamification companies and vendors are there?
With more businesses recognizing the power of gamification, there are more and more vendors that offer gamification services, but several sources list around 20 to 30 prominent gamification software providers and platforms. This makes it difficult to know exactly how many gamification vendors are available.
When looking for a gamification company to work with, stick to our list of top gamification companies to be sure you’re getting reliable software at a fair price.
What should gamification software have to boost customer engagement?
At its core, gamification is built on three simple concepts: objectives, rewards and competition.
- Key features – some examples of what they should include are:
- Badges, achievements, progress bars and rewards – these are the primary gamification examples you typically find in most software. They help engage customers successfully and motivate them to spend more time with your brand.
- Leaderboards – this is somewhat of an extension of the previous point. They bring competition into the experience and can increase engagement more successfully than other types of incentivization, especially if paired with a reward system for the best results.
- Many game types – opt for gamification software with many options, so you can pick the best ones that fit your strategy. This also allows you to stay interesting and mix things up if needed. Bonus points if they’re white-labeled.
- Integrations with community or social media platforms – social media posts from your customers sharing their achievements are free advertising. Also, social features increase customer engagement by allowing users to connect with peers, mutually inspiring and motivating each other.
- Real-time feedback and notifications – users should receive feedback on their actions, progress and performance. This helps to guide their decision-making and provides a sense of accomplishment. Some options include push notifications, visual cues or personalized messages.
- Ease of use – the best gamification tools give you a wide range of game mechanics to implement into your strategy without knowing even the basics of coding or other technical knowledge. This kind of software should be intuitive, accessible for everyone and help to save time.
- Reporting tools – gamification software isn’t just for motivating employees, increasing user engagement and building customer loyalty. It’s an invaluable data collection tool. Metrics and analytics will help you grow more effectively and successfully meet your clients’ needs.
Image source: Adact
- Pricing – gamification software vendors often don’t include this information on their websites. This is standard practice for SaaS companies. Although, as a customer, you’re probably looking to compare different offers. You can look for pricing on software comparison sites or call companies directly.
- Free trial – this is a safe way to test out all the program’s features. The longer it is, the more freedom you have to explore and decide if the solution is right for you. Testing features is especially important since gamification platforms aren’t particularly cheap. Some vendors don’t have this option or only offer a short demo.
On top of what we’ve mentioned, consider your business processes, brand profile and target customers. The software and specific options you opt for have to match your individual needs.
What is gamification in UX?
Gamification in UX (User Experience) is using game mechanics to enhance the overall feel of a product, service or application. It’s all about integrating gamified elements into the user interface and interaction design to make the UX more fun, immersive and motivating.
You can apply it across websites, mobile applications, e-learning platforms, training software, productivity tools etc.
Can I use Adact to gamify my website?
Yes, you can use Adact to gamify your website. You can either embed a campaign directly into your website or use a widget to add game elements to your website. By gamifying your website you can drive customer engagement through challenges, competitions, and rewards.
Start your journey with the Adact gamification platform
If you’re considering giving your company the boost it deserves, there’s nothing you need more than gamification software.
The data speaks for itself – there are currently more than 2,700 million gamers worldwide, and that number is expected to grow by about 15% in the next four years.
The increasing number of gamers combined with the ever-shortening attention spans of customers, makes gamification essential in keeping your brand interesting and relevant.
Adact is the #1 gamification customer engagement platform. It comes with a vast collection of gamification elements, so there will be something to fit your unique needs. Its scalable features make it a great fit for small businesses and large enterprises alike.
Book a 30-minute call to discover how you can incorporate gaming elements into your next marketing campaign and increase your closing rate!
No time to hop on a call? Then watch the demo and sign up for a free trial to test out the software on your own time.
