How to crush your competition like Strava

This article explores how Strava's powerful engagement strategies help them succeed in the competitive "attention economy."

Churn is becoming a larger problem for apps as we speak. In 2019 we witnessed record numbers in the churn rates with over 70% of all users abandoning an app after just three months. Why? Well, as insights firm Nielsen describes it: we’re in the “attention economy”. App engagement is a challenge all product managers need to tackle if they want to succeed.

With the average human attention span being only 8 seconds, it’s getting harder to capture and retain your audience. Additionally, we see around 5000 brand messages every day which makes us even more selective.

This graph illustrates the steep decline in app engagement over the first three months, a key challenge that effective strategies like gamification can overcome.

Some apps however manage to break through the noise because they have a sustainable app engagement strategy. Previously we discussed how gamification for apps can increase user engagement. We’ve analyzed how navigation app Waze engages over 130 million monthly active users with gamification elements.

In this blog, we will break down what makes the fitness app Strava one of the most popular apps of its kind!

Here’s what you’ll learn about Strava today:

• How Strava hooks 1 million new users every month
• The features that led to 2 billion app activities on Strava
• Eliminate churn ASAP with a smart gamification plug-in tool
• For speed readers – Here’s what you missed

How Strava hooks 1 million new users every month

Strava is a fitness app with over 55 million users. It started out as a tracking app for runners and cyclists, but it quickly evolved into a community of health enthusiasts. During the pandemic, Strava’s growth has exploded and is now adding around 1 million users per month.

You’ve probably seen some of the creative endeavors on Strava, which the founders never even imagined their app would be used for.

This image shows an example of creative "GPS art" created by a Strava user, demonstrating the app's potential for fun beyond simple tracking.

What is the most popular type of apps where users spend most of their time? You guessed it: Games! Followed by social networks and entertainment apps. If this teaches us anything it’s that we as humans like to be entertained, before doing anything else.

So what if I told you adding game-like elements to your app can make it more engaging? Gamification for apps can help you shape user behavior so you can have an app just as engaging as Strava!

This chart highlights that games are the most popular app category, which explains why incorporating game-like elements into a fitness app like Strava is so effective.

What Strava does is more than just implementing some features from a game, it uses people’s inherent motivation to become healthier or to practice sports. Strava designed an experience to change behavior through the science of motivation. It makes sports even more fun!

The features that led to 2 billion app activities on Strava

So what does app gamification actually look like? Well, next to a greatly designed user experience there are some features that push the user journey forward. These features are linked to fundamental human desires, such as curiosity, independence, or social status, so users are activated to keep coming back. In 2019 Strava reported over 2 billion app activities, securing its place as one of the largest fitness communities in the world.

Without any further ado, here are the features Strava uses to increase user engagement:

Leaderboards

Strava uses the power of competition to motivate user participation. Those who like to compare themselves against their peers can filter leaderboards to see which of their friends are the fastest. The social component is what motivates users to take action, be it to achieve status by winning or to avoid coming in last.

Challenges

To maximize user engagement, Strava hosts regular challenges. Here they organize individual and group quests like running a total of 100 kilometers. Challenges trigger users to take action through a desire for achievement. Group challenges however are even more powerful because they play on connectedness and social influence.

If you accept a challenge, the app will track your progress and reward you with an achievement badge once you complete it. Of course, this badge of honor is featured on your Strava profile for all your friends to see.

Badge reward system

People like to collect badges because it‘s a virtual representation of their achievements. Rewarding users through badges allow for positive reinforcement to the user.

Strava rewards you for a range of things. Besides competing, you can also automatically track your personal records. If you break your own record you will receive 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place medals to reward your own performances. There are also benchmark badge reward systems for running one mile, 5,000 miles, 10,000 miles, half a marathon, and a marathon.

All these achievements are again posted on your profile for the world to see! Strava makes intelligent use of social status here to promote user engagement.

Progress bars

Progress bars visualize the progress of a users’ journey towards completing a goal. It triggers the need for accomplishment and encourages the user to continue on their journey with visual feedback.

Strava allows you to track your weekly and annual goals on your profile. You can even record live sessions on the progress of your run, hike, or bicycle tour.

Strava's interface effectively uses progress bars to give users clear visual feedback on their goals, motivating them to continue their journey.

Social feed

One of the gamification mechanisms, Strava uses to build community is their social feed. This is the epicenter of their community. It allows for communication between users and adds a sense of social connectedness.

The fact that users can comment on each other’s achievements and give kudos, triggers the need for social validation.

Team function

A final feature that also contributes to building the community is Strava’s team function. Users can follow each other, compete, and join virtual clubs for a greater sense of connectedness or even accountability.

Research shows that “feeling like you’re part of a team or group makes people more motivated as they take on challenges.” When using gamification to engage groups, the best results come when there is mutual collaboration or competition.

The sense of community, captured in this graphic, is a cornerstone of Strava's strategy to eliminate churn and build a loyal user base.

Eliminate churn ASAP with a smart gamification plug-in tool

Lots of apps are struggling to capture attention, and even more so to keep it. Let’s face it. You probably didn’t design your app for people to create a profile, only to abandon it for good after just using it a few times, right?

Unfortunately, that’s what happens a lot of the time. However, it doesn’t have to be that way! StriveCloud created a gamification plug-in tool to solve exactly that problem. It takes your already existing user data and turns it into a better user experience by adding gamification elements to it.

Based on your user behavior you can leverage features like leaderboards to inspire competition, and achievement-based rewards to incentivize participation just like Strava does.

This diagram illustrates how a gamification platform like StriveCloud can turn user data into an engaging experience that reduces churn and boosts usage.

Additionally, you can create milestones and personalized challenges to keep your user moving forward. Elements like progress bars and level systems can again trigger your users’ desire for accomplishment. And if your users fall off track, behavior-based notifications will bring them back in.

Blended together it creates a fun and engaging experience that keeps your users hooked. Even more important, it helps drive your business goals and cuts churn by up to 23% while boosting daily active usage by over 58%!

StriveCloud’s team of gamification experts will help you understand what gamified approach will help you achieve your goals. Once your strategy is set up, you can simply plug-in the tool and go.

How to get started? Book a call with our specialists and find out how gamification can work for you!

For speed readers – Here’s what you missed

Churn has become a major challenge for apps. In 2019 we saw 71% of all users churn after only three months of using an app. Not for everyone though! Fitness app Strava for example logged in over 2 billion user activities by its community in the same year.

Today, they are still growing hard and adding an average of 1 million new users per month. But what is it that makes Strava one of the largest fitness communities around?

Here are some of the things Strava does to keep up app engagement:

• They use leaderboards to fuel competition in the community
• Personalized and group challenges drive user motivation and app engagement
• They use Badge reward systems to boost app engagement and user participation
• Visualizing progress through progress bars
• Strava uses a social feed to build community and keep users invested

With these gamification features, they make fitness fun! How? By modeling their app after a game with elements like leaderboards, challenges, badge reward systems, and progress bars. It’s a proven way to increase user engagement by apps like Waze and now Strava as well.

Fortunately, gamification for apps doesn’t have to be hard. StriveCloud has developed a smart gamification plug-in tool that helps you:

• Create a cohesive user journey that hooks your audience
• Make the user experience competitive to increase user engagement
• Reward engagement and active participation to keep users coming back
• Make progress visible to trigger the desired user behavior
• Create in-app personalized quests and drive app engagement

This way you can make your app just as engaging as Strava, without wasting your time on building and maintaining these features yourself. Let us know how you liked this article!

Tired of losing users? Get a free consultation tailored to your goals and needs!

Immediately improve App Acquisition, Engagement and Retention with Gamification

This visual represents how gamification elements can be integrated into a mobile app to enhance the user journey across acquisition, engagement, and retention.

Our mobile phones have become items most of us can’t imagine living without. Many businesses are competing to have their mobile app, and in extension, their service, be one of the few we use regularly. The challenge is threefold: it’s up to companies to maximize app acquisition, app engagement, and app retention. App gamification offers a toolkit of tactics that tackles each of these.

In this post, we’ll discuss :

• How gamification helps app acquisition
• How gamification boosts app engagement
• How gamification secures app retention

Looking at the growing number of available apps and actual downloads, it’s clear that the app market is growing hard. At the same time, the battle for users’ attention is becoming more and more fierce. That’s especially the case in the mobility industry, where (shared) mobility providers have little room to differentiate from each other apart from playing on price.

Product managers together with marketers face the challenge of building a strategy that successfully spans app acquisition, engagement, and retention.

This graph illustrates the consistent growth in mobile app downloads, highlighting the increasing competition for user attention in a crowded market.

While such a strategy is different for every organization, a few tools provide a solution for each aspect. In-app gamification is one of these. Let’s take a trip down the app user journey and see how gamification helps grow your user base, boosts app engagement, and fosters retention.

Gamification is a technique you can use to insert gameplay elements in non-gaming settings, enhancing user engagement with your product or service. Discover all about in this our comprehensive ‘What is Gamification?’ guide.

How gamification helps app acquisition

Sorry to break it; you can go all-in on developing an awesome app, it will fail if nobody uses it. So how do you stand out from the dozens of competitors in order to acquire users?

The first prerequisite is app store optimization. That’s the practice of driving downloads through optimizing the title, keywords, ratings, and other ranking factors. In doing so, you make sure that your app pops up when people are looking for a service like yours.

On top of that, you can promote your app with ads on different social channels. It’s important to think about who you want to target and how much budget you want to spend. Otherwise, you risk attracting the wrong users and spending a lot of money.

Another, cheaper, and more effective tactic is tapping into the power of word-of-mouth promotion and referral programs. According to Kantar Media, 93% of users trust recommendations from their friends and family. In contrast: only 38% trust ads.

This data from Kantar Media emphasizes how much more users trust recommendations from friends and family over traditional advertising, underscoring the power of referral programs.

To leverage the power of word of mouth, you first need to build a loyal user base and in a second phase incentivize them to invite friends and family.

You’ll find out more about how you can increase user loyalty in the next part, but let’s take a closer look at the incentivization process from Uber first. The ride-hailing app gives all users a free ride (up to a certain amount) for every friend they get on board.

If you’d want to gamify this action, even more, you could make it a compulsory step in the user’s journey towards an exclusive status with special perks. Like a ‘Gold User’ who gets a discount for rides above a certain distance, for instance. Another example is to give a special “Referral Champion” badge to each user who gets a certain number of new users to install and use your app.

Uber's mobile interface provides a clear example of a user referral program, offering tangible rewards for both the referrer and the new user.

How gamification boosts app engagement

Okay, we’ve acquired users, the next challenge is to up their loyalty. Thanks to app gamification, shared mobility providers can enhance the user experience in such a way that it drives activity and loyalty, and even steers user behavior.

An example in today’s world of mobility is that of e-scooter companies like Bird and Lime. Both have deployed gamification features encouraging members of its community to hunt for scooters, take them home and charge them. To make this more interesting, users in some cases receive higher rewards for tracking down scooters that are more difficult to find.

This screenshot from a scooter app demonstrates how users are incentivized to find and charge scooters, turning a logistical need into an engaging, game-like task.

Want to know more about the possibilities of app gamification for shared mobility providers to boost app engagement? Read all about it in this article.

How gamification secures app retention

Numerous shared mobility providers are struggling to achieve sustainable profitability. One of the main reasons is the fact that, due to strict regulations, many providers can only compete at the price level.

Retention is about more than just lowering your price. If you want to prevent users from abandoning your service because a competitor is offering rides a few cents cheaper than you are, you need to work on your app user experience. So how do you build an experience that makes users stick with your brand, product, or service? By playing on both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. In short: it’s about giving rewards for a certain task or behavior and evoking positive emotions at the same time.

By integrating game-like mechanisms and, in doing so, appealing to people’s competitive nature, you can nudge them towards the actions you want them to take over and over again. One of our favorite examples here is Duolingo, a language learning app. The company’s mascot, a silly owl named Duo, is one reason why people love it, but a more important driver for the app’s retention rate is the great use of in-app gamification.

The entire learning experience is actually one big game. Each time you complete lessons or practice sessions in Duolingo, you earn experience points. Earn enough, and you’ll level up in the respective language, which in itself is gratifying but also gives you something to boast about to your Duolingo friends.

What’s more; when you meet your daily goal for consecutive days, you start (or extend) a streak. Your streak is prominently displayed whenever you’re in Duolingo, in the form of a fire icon with a number next to it. A confession from a hooked user: once you’ve earned it, you’ll do your very best to keep it.

App gamification by StriveCloud: the Kayzr story

As the largest esports online gaming platform in the Benelux region, Kayzr was struggling to keep users active on the platform at a low cost. They decided to partner up with StriveCloud and enhance the user experience with gamification.

Together with StriveCloud, Kayzr was able to:

1. Acquire 350% more users
2. Engage 60% more users to be active on the platform at least once a day
3. Increase the average session time per user per day to 1.5h

Want to know how they were able to reach these astonishing results in just a couple of weeks? Read all about it in this case study!

Long story short...

• If you want your app to be a success, you’ll need to look at more than a nice design in order to attract, engage, and bind users. And if you want to stay profitable, you can’t keep lowering your price.
• App gamification is a proven solution to keep users hooked and even grow your user base. And hey, it’s easy to start experimenting.
• There are several tactics you can pick from, based on the stage of the user journey you’re in.

The truth about killed apps and how to avoid their mistakes

What is the main blocker inhibiting your app from becoming successful? Low user app engagement. It kills every product manager’s dream: to build a product that gets users hooked.

Unfortunately, the reality is that it’s hard to captivate user attention, and even harder to keep it. People are simply not actively using your products. There are too many options out there, and if your user isn’t satisfied they won’t hesitate long before they leave your app for good.

This graph illustrates the typical steep drop-off in user retention that apps face, underscoring the challenge of maintaining long-term engagement.

You need to differentiate. But most of all, you need to avoid critical product management mistakes. To help you create a better vision for your product, we have analyzed 6 app failures and why they failed.

Here’s what you will learn more about:

• Lack of engagement
• Focus on features VS users
• Prioritizing growth over retention
• Confusing the customer with poor UX
• Falling in love with the product instead of the problem
• Lack of promotion
• How to build an app that hooks people instantly
• Wrap-up

Lack of engagement

Google is one of the big 5 leading technology companies. Next to their search engine they build and manage a range of other different applications. However, not all apps Google develops are successful. Those that aren’t get “Killed by Google.”

Probably the most famous example of an app killed by Google is their attempt to building a social media platform with Google+.

Many things have been said about what caused the project to turn south. Some say it was Facebook, others say it was due to data leakages, but at the core of where it all went wrong is simply low engagement. Google+ had almost no active users. In fact, 90% of the users spent less than 5 seconds on the social platform.

Even though Google+ had over 200 million users, it was no match for other social networks at the time. The app engagement was simply too low to keep funding the project. After 8 years of trying to increase user app engagement, Google decided to officially close the app down on April 2, 2019.

Focus on features VS users

Yik Yak was a social app where you could post an anonymous message to anyone within a 5-mile radius. The app quickly became popular in schools and colleges to share gossip, updates, or events.

Again, there is not just one reason Yik Yak failed. After strong user growth in 2013 and 2014, the app with over 1.76 million users was banned from a number of campuses.

After some bad press and legal issues due to bomb threats, cyberbullying and harassment on their platform the startup was forced to make some changes. Eventually, Yik Yak decided to cut off their underage users, leading to a great loss in users.

The final blow however came when Yik Yak abandoned their core feature of anonymity. At this point, users started churning while downloads fell by 76%. On April 28, 2017, the app was shut down.

Prioritizing growth over retention

Tilt was an online crowdfunding platform aimed at helping users fund projects or events like book sales or even birthday parties. The company would only collect and distribute the money if the end goal was met.

In 2012 Tilt launched as part of renowned Silicon Valley accelerator Y combinator. It quickly garnished up to 2000 new users per month. But if you look up tilt.com today, you won’t find anything. So what happened?

Tilt's focus on user acquisition over retention is a critical lesson; even with a clean interface, a sustainable model requires keeping users engaged long-term.

It soon became clear the management team at Tilt had a lack of focus on revenue. With a free user experience, Tilt eventually had to face payment processing fees. Additionally, they spend most of their resources on paid acquisition, which rewarded new customers at a greater cost than profitable. They weren’t focused on building a better experience that kept their users hooked for the long term.

It didn’t take long for the app to fall behind companies like Venmo, GoFundMe, Kickstarter, and Eventbrite. In 2017 Tilt was acquired by Airbnb for 12 million dollars in an acquisition-hire deal. Investors lost 80% of their investment.

Confusing the customer with poor UX

Hailo is an on-demand taxi app, similar to Uber. Their platform matched passengers and drivers through their mobile app. After empowering over 3 million rides in London, and gaining 2.5 million users they moved to New York to do the same.

The problem, however, is that New York and London are two entirely different cities. In an attempt to win over the lower-end market Hailo made a mistake on the supply side. They tried to partner up with yellow cab drivers in New York to answer the driving needs on their app.

Unfortunately, Hailo’s assumptions on New York drivers turned out false. An oversimplified user experience and technical problems with payment led to a quick demise. Statistics show they had 80% rejection on the driving orders on their app.

At the end of 2014, Hailo decided to leave the battle in North America between Uber and Lyft to focus on better serving other regions.

Falling in love with the product instead of the problem

Pierre-Olivier Latour came across the idea of Everpix when he got annoyed with muddled photo albums on his phone whilst traveling Asia. He created an app to sort and organize pics while storing them online.

By 2012 Everpix was showing some promise with over 55,000 active users and substantial investment. In 2013 however, they were shut down. Here’s why:

Their budget was poorly managed. The team at Everpix was spending almost all efforts on building the product. So much so, that they forgot to acquire new users and build traction to sustain their growth. Even though Everpix was a great product, their lack of speed and marketing focus led to their downfall.

Lack of promotion

So let’s close off with another Google example. Google Wave was a real-time collaboration and communication tool that ended up being killed by Google in 2012.

The main reason for Google Wave’s failure is the lack of promotion for the product. Wave was an invite-only service. Besides, the tool wasn’t designed for non-techies. On the Wave homepage, you could find a video of over one hour, explaining the features and use cases of the tool.

It was this poor positioning that made it so difficult to promote the tool both to new and existing customers. With no real power users on the platform, and no notification system to keep their users engaged the app was disbanded after 3 years.

How to build an app that hooks people instantly?

You want an app that keeps your users active and involved. Overcome low user app engagement first before growing your app. You need to create a cohesive user journey that hooks your audience.

When people are not actively using your product, they are more likely to churn. StriveCloud’s plug-in gamification tool is built for retention. Customers that use the platform have seen a 58% increase in daily active users.

With it, you can gamify any data point to change user behavior and slash churn. In StriveCloud’s partnership with esports platform Kayzr for instance, churn dropped by 23% without increase retention costs! This gamification tool not only guides your users to the next step, but it also motivates them to keep using your product.

This animated example from the Kayzr platform demonstrates how gamification elements like progress bars and rewards can effectively increase user activity and retention.

How our plug-in gamification tool helped Kayzr grew its userbase by 350% while cutting retention cost!

Wrap-up

Low app engagement is not just a challenge for startup apps. What we learned today is: even the great apps can fall if they can’t engage users with a cohesive and ‘sticky’ experience.

Companies like Google actively seek out failure to learn from. So let’s do the same.

Here’s how these apps got killed:

• Google+ failed 200 million users due to low user app engagement
• Yik Yak abandoned its core audience and feature, leading to its ultimate demise
• Tilt’s focus was on paid growth, but unfortunately not retention
• Hailo’s poor target group understanding and UX couldn’t win against Uber and Lyft
• Everpix was overbuilt and spent too much time and resources on aiming for perfection
• Google Wave sank down due to complexity, and lack of promotion

And there are tons of other lessons to learn from these apps. Maybe something for the future? If you would like to see more content like this, let us know!

How to build products people want to use, over and over again? Learn how we help global brands hook users!

StriveCloud vs Gametize

Low app engagement and increasingly higher retention costs are forcing companies to differentiate themselves if they want to get users hooked. At StriveCloud we’re convinced that gamification for apps is the way to go! However, finding the right gamification tool can be challenging.

In this article, we’ll be breaking down two gamification solutions to see what platform might be best suited for your goals.

First, we have Gametize, a gamification and community platform for small and medium enterprises or large corporations. You can use it for employee engagement, learning & development, and consumer engagement.

Secondly, we’ll break down StriveCloud’s plug-in gamification tool. The only tool built for retention and app engagement. You can gamify any data point and add a layer of gamification on all your digital products from one simple control panel.

Here’s what we’ll break down:

• Introducing two gamification tools - Gametize & StriveCloud
• Features showdown
• Pricing faceoff
• Gametize VS StriveCloud - Which gamification tool is right for you?

Introducing two gamification tools - Gametize & StriveCloud

Who is Gametize?

Gametize was founded in 2008, originally as a gamified virtual stock exchange. It wasn’t until three years later that they reinvented their product as a web app with just two features: create and claim a digital challenge. In February 2012 they renamed their company to Gametize, to reflect their focus on gamification.

Today, Gametize is a gamification and community platform for small and medium enterprises or large corporations. Their tool includes an easy-to-use content management system with lots of templates to help you set up a gamification campaign or learning program.

Their aim is to be the world’s simplest gamification platform, accessible to everyone. The team at Gametize believes in the power of game psychology to motivate and reward positive behaviors. Things like storytelling, competition, and socializing can impact everyday lives.

Who is StriveCloud?

StriveCloud is a Belgian company that specializes in gamification technology. The story actually begins in 2016, when co-founders Freek Borghgraef and Joris De Koninck started Kayzr, an esports platform that connects brands with digital natives through gaming.

The epiphany came when they saw how the layer of gamification on Kayzr supercharged gamers' engagement on the platform. That’s when they started StriveCloud, with the goal of leveraging gamification for apps to unlock user true motivation and drive engagement.

StriveCloud has built a plug-in gamification tool built for user retention. The gamification tool takes user data from any web or mobile apps and uses it to create gamified digital experiences.

You can easily add tons of gamification elements such as personalized milestones, achievements & rewards to boost user participation or you can rely on leveling and badge reward systems to keep up app engagement. On top of this, StriveCloud’s team of gamification experts helps you set up your own gamification strategy and plan to get started.

StriveCloud’s customers see a significant increase in-app engagement such as a 58% increase in daily active users and a 23% decrease in churn rates.

Features showdown

Gametize’s Core features

We won’t go over all the features Gametize has to offer. Instead, we’ll take a look at the main features they use in gamification for apps.

Create interactive challenges to engage your users

You can use ready customizable templates to launch interactive challenges within a day. Gametize has different types of challenges that use photos, videos, QR codes, and more to put the fun in your game.

This interface shows how Gametize allows users to create and participate in various interactive challenges.

Leverage the power of competition & social elements to create a sense of community

Gametize allows you to measure the progress of your users. You can set leaderboards for challenges to spark competition between users, and add social elements such as comments, votes, and more to boost community engagement.

Keep users engaged through instant feedback mechanisms

Set progress bars, points, and feedback messages so your users always know where they’re at in their journey. Visualizing progress compels users to stay engaged.

Reward users to reinforce positive behavior

You can create achievements and rewards and link them to actions or set up challenges to motivate the users to complete them. Users can redeem their points in the online store, or collect achievement badges as they progress through the game.

The reward system in Gametize demonstrates a clear path for users to collect points and earn achievement badges.

StriveCloud’s core features

The plug-in gamification tool by StriveCloud has all the features from Gametize, plus the ability to add a layer of gamification; personalize, customize and manage all your digital products from one simple Control Panel.

StriveCloud's mobile interface illustrates how gamification can be seamlessly integrated into an existing app experience to boost engagement.

Incentivize user progress with milestones & achievements

StriveCloud’s plug-in gamification tool links game-like elements such as achievements and personalized milestones to your app usage data. You can nudge user behavior through achievements and push the user journey forward with personalized milestones. Moreover, you can link users' activity on your web or mobile apps directly to experience points and a leveling system, to reward them for staying engaged!

Reward engagement & participation to get users hooked

With StriveCloud you can reward users for behaviors that support your business goals. You can acknowledge users' engagement by rewarding participation in virtual currencies or badge reward systems. You can even allow users to redeem points for physical rewards through a built-in shop.

This example of virtual badges from StriveCloud showcases how achievement-based rewards can motivate continued user engagement.

Boost user activity & app engagement with personalized in-app quests

StriveCloud allows you to create unique user experiences at scale. We already talked about setting personalized milestones and challenges to drive the user journey forward. What you can also do with StriveCloud is send automatically trigger in-app messages based on user behavior to drastically drop churn. The plug-in gamification allows you to deliver the right message, at the right time.

Personalized in-app quests, like the one shown here, are a key feature for boosting user activity and retention.

Plug-in & manage all your digital products from one simple Control Panel

The plug-in tool takes user data from your web or mobile apps and adds a layer of gamification on top of it. You can access and manage all your digital products from one central Control Panel. Once your gamification strategy is there, it’s just a matter of clicks to bring new gamification elements to life across all your products!

The central control panel allows for easy management of gamification elements across all connected digital products.

Discover more about the plug-in gamification tool here!

Pricing faceoff

Gametize pricing

Gametize has pricing packages for companies of every size. They also offer a 7-day free trial for their Premium Plan, with all features unlocked!

On the low end, you can start for $100 per month and add up to 100 players ad-free. At the other end of the spectrum, the Premium Plus package will cost you $12 000 per year!

In between, they also offer a Regular package for $200 per month and a premium version starting at $500 per month. Both of these include the Gametize Booster Pack which allows for multiple admins and offers a range of content templates to help you get started.

At a low price range, Gametize is a good gamification tool to create basic game templates. However, if you want to get more creative, customization options, a white-label app, and service hours by the Gametize team, you need the Premium Plus package.

StriveCloud pricing

StriveCloud offers flexible pricing that scales as you grow. Its pricing plan is based on your Monthly Active Users so the cost only grows when you do.

Pricing for the plug-in gamification tool starts from €499 per month. This includes an insane amount of features. You can create an unlimited amount of gamification elements and completely customize them to your brand.

You also get access to all the features such as the reward store, achievements, the leveling system, messaging and personalization features as well as the analytics dashboard. Additionally, the team at StriveCloud will help you get started with a dedicated support team.

It’s easy, it’s simple and it’s directly linked to the results you’ll get from working with StriveCloud!

Gametize VS StriveCloud – which gamification tool is right for you?

Gametize is a great gamification platform with lots of capabilities for various use cases. They offer a wide range of templates and examples which you can use to build your own campaign. With its simplicity come restrictions as well.

The platform can be hard to customize which often limits creativity. If you’re not a gamification expert, it can be hard to get started at first.

StriveCloud on the other hand is more robust, but the team of gamification experts that work with you makes it simple. With their gamification tool, you get guaranteed app engagement.

The team is very flexible and thinks along with you on how to improve user experience and create a cohesive and engaging user journey. They also have a more extensive feature set & more enhanced customization options.

This feature comparison table visually summarizes the key differences between the StriveCloud and Gametize platforms.

So, what gamification tool should I pick?

Both tools are leading gamification solutions. However, there are lots of differences in why and how to use them!

The pros & cons of Gametize

Gametize excels in setting up personalized and interactive challenges. They allow you to set up a range of pre-built quests for various situations in no time. The gamification tool also helps you gain insights into customer behaviors with metrics such as participation rates, discussions, and more.

While Gametize comes off as simple and intuitive to its admins, its simplicity also comes with a restriction in possibilities. It’s easy to create gamified experiences with the templates that are available. Unfortunately, the user interface has limited customization options which can feel limiting for more ambitious projects.

Some reviews said the structure to set up a project on Gametize isn’t intuitive for new users. Most of them get lost and are not sure what to do next or where to click.

The project hierarchy in Gametize, with its project-topic-content structure, can be initially complex for new administrators.

Gametize is not built with app engagement in mind. This gamification tool is not something that goes hand in hand with your existing customer experience. It’s more suited for unique and temporary uses, such as event-based games, or marketing campaigns. That said, Gametize has a lot of crazy functions and templates to get you up and running in no time!

Let’s see how StriveCloud compares.

The pros & cons of StriveCloud

StriveCloud is a very powerful tool with a wide variety of features. It’s the go-to gamification tool to engage your web and mobile apps users. The software has an insane amount of features to incentivize user participation and drastically drop churn rates.

Another strong differentiator is extreme customizability. One reviewer said it took only a couple of hours to implement social features on their platform, so they could shift from a partnership-based monetization model to a media-based one.

Unfortunately, their extensive feature set also locks you into a steep learning path. To fully understand all the capabilities of the platform, you need to first understand gamification. Luckily enough, the support team at StriveCloud is super hands-on! Not only to help you set up a strategy and get started but also to keep getting more out of the platform as you go.

This makes StriveCloud the perfect gamification tool to boost app engagement and user retention.

To conclude, both Gametize and StriveCloud are advanced gamification tools in their own right. While Gametize focuses more on gamification-based campaigns and learning programs, StriveCloud finds its focus in boosting user app engagement and business growth.

Do you want to create a gamified experience in 5 minutes?

Go with Gametize! They have a variety of templates such as loyalty plans, retail templates, and even health gamification templates. You name it, they have it!

Want to create a game to spice up your event?

Go with Gametize! Their platform allows you to set up quizzes and games to engage your live audience.

Are you looking to improve app engagement & slash churn?

Go with StriveCloud! Their gamification tool, built for retention, will help you create an experience that gets your users hooked!

Would you like to motivate user behaviors that support your business goals?

Go with StriveCloud! The team will think with you to set up a gamification strategy and user experience tailored to your business to drive revenue and help you grow!

Looking for a scalable gamification solution?

Go with StriveCloud! Their flexible and growth-driven pricing is perfect for fast-growing web and mobile apps! Manage as many products as you like in one central Control Panel!

If you’re still doubting how to get started, you can book a free gamification workshop here!

How to use gamification for improved loyalty in telecom

The telecom industry used to be on top of their markets. However, increasing competition from digital alternatives like WhatsApp and WeChat are changing consumer behaviors and loyalty. Telecom brands are forced to reinvent themselves in order to stay relevant to consumers and keep app engagement high. A report by strategy consultant Accenture found 77% of consumers are no longer loyal to any particular brand. This makes building loyalty and differentiation all the harder.

In 2019, over half of consumers canceled a phone, internet, or TV subscription. 64% cited an ongoing bad experience as the primary reason. In today’s world, you can’t afford bad experiences. Bad news spreads fast, with 72% of people sharing bad experiences with friends, family, and colleagues.

So how do you create an experience that delights your customers, without over-investing into expensive loyalty programs that don’t get enough engagement?

Here’s what we’ll get into:

• Why quick loyalty fixes won’t do the job
• Gamification – the holy grail of user engagement & loyalty
• Telecom brands that have succeeded with gamification
• A plug-in gamification tool that differentiates your brand and builds loyalty

Why quick loyalty fixes won’t do the job

The telecom industry has been struggling with churn for a while. 61% of telecom companies have initiatives in place to increase loyalty and engagement.

According to TechSee’s Telecom Churn Survey, the most common tactics were to offer the dissatisfied customer a discount (48%) or to offer an apology or explanation about the reason for poor service (37%). However, not all customers are satisfied with this approach.

TechSee 2019 Telecom Churn Survey - "They should have offered better service and showed they valued me as a customer to begin with, rather than waiting till I’d had enough and canceled my service to realize their level of service was unacceptable. If there is room to offer better rates or better service, that should happen before I’m fed up and looking for better providers."

Additionally, most customers weren’t even aware of any loyalty programs until they decided to cancel their subscriptions. Needless to say, this strategy isn’t sustainable. With operating costs increasing between 10 to 20%, reactive service just doesn’t work. If you want to truly change customer behavior and brand sentiment, you need to differentiate through your customer experience.

Consulting firm McKinsey found that improvements in the customer experience increase revenues by 15% while also lowering the costs to serve by 20%. Sounds like a dream? Keep on reading!

Gamification – The holy grail of user engagement and loyalty

What is gamification?

Gamification is the strategic process of inserting game elements into an experience to boost user activity and drive engagement and loyalty. It’s not the same as turning things into a game, but rather using what makes a game fun and engaging to improve the customer experience.

How does gamification work?

A successful gamification strategy plays on the users' intrinsic motivations. These are activities we do because we want to as the activity in itself is fun and enjoyable. To build an experience that achieves this you need to follow these 3 steps:

• Analyze customer and user data to create a gamified customer journey that supports business goals
• Leverage game elements to influence desired behaviors
• Reward behaviors that have a direct impact on business goals

If you want to learn more about gamification: here’s what you need to get started!

How can Telecom companies use gamification?

Changing a few things to your already existing loyalty efforts will help you retain customers at scale. Instead of an expensive loyalty program, you can create a personalized reward system that supports your business goals. This way gamification helps you to not only save costs but also grow user activity.

Check out how a few changes helped Kayzr cut retention costs while increasing daily active usage by 60%!

Telecom brands that have succeeded with gamification

Verizon connects social media & gamification to boost app engagement

Verizon, the largest wireless telecommunications provider in the US faces the same problems of all telecom providers: low user engagement. That’s why they decided to ramp up app engagement on their Verizon Insider Web portal using gamification.

The web portal is a hub for events, competitions, sponsorships, and other social initiatives. Users can collect points by taking actions on the site such as attending events, playing games, or writing reviews. With those points, users can earn badges and join public leaderboards to win exclusive promotions.

This showcases Verizon's gamified web portal, which uses badges and leaderboards to drive user participation and engagement effectively.

Over 50% of users participated in the new gamification features. These simple platform additions generated 15% more page views and increased log-ins to the site by 30%.

In addition to the gamification elements, Verizon personalized user experiences based on interests and location. They also added an option to log in with your social accounts. Users who did the latter spent on average 30% more time on the site.

Samsung launches the first gamified corporate site

Samsung was one of the first corporate brands to launch a gamified corporate website back in 2011. In an effort to better engage and appreciate their online community they launched Samsung Nation. Basically a social loyalty program on steroids.

Members of Samsung Nation were able to win, engage, and compete with other ‘nationals’ to win badges, points, and other rewards.

Similar to Verizon’s program, Samsung rewards many forms of user participation. To push the user experience forward they created missions that support Samsung’s business goals such as “register and review Samsung products”. In return, users could unlock new badges and more challenges!

Samsung's Nation program effectively uses missions and challenges to align user actions with key business goals, driving both engagement and product interaction.

A plug-in gamification tool that differentiates your brand and builds loyalty

Easily embed gamification elements through StriveCloud’s plug-in tool built for customer retention and app engagement. You can link it to your website, web, and mobile apps to create a cohesive customer experience and hook users across channels.

The gamification tool activates users by adding personalized milestones and challenges. You can use leaderboards to fuel an innate sense of competition, and differentiate your brand, while rewarding users for active participation to keep them coming back.

The right mix of gamification elements is crucial here. A great gamified journey is one that has challenging goals just within reach. You can add leveling systems and progress bars to serve as visual feedback to trigger the natural human desire for progress, and keep users going forward.

Not sure where to start? Let’s set up a free workshop to craft your very own gamification strategy!

Key take-aways

Consumer behavior towards telecommunication companies is changing. With digital alternatives on the rise, telecom brands need to differentiate in order to stay relevant. 77% of consumers are no longer loyal to one particular brand. This makes loyalty an important issue to tackle for all companies.

Here are the main findings of our article:

Reactive customer discounts and rewards are not sustainable

Customers don’t want excuses for bad service. They want a seamless experience that already rewards them for being a good customer, not as a last resort.

Find what makes your customers tick to boost app engagement and loyalty

The gamified customer journey should be tailored to users' motivations, behaviors, and preferences. User goals should be challenging enough to inspire action, and achievable enough to trigger motivation. Once you understand how to motivate customer behavior, you can keep them coming back to your service.

A gamified experience differentiates your brand

The right gamification tool can make your customer journey fun and engaging. It will make you stand out and allows you to encourage customer behaviors that support your goals. You can even reward users to invite their friends to use your service or spread positive sentiment.

Need help implementing your own gamification strategy? Check out our plug-in gamification tool to supercharge your customer loyalty!

How better experiences will be the most powerful move for banks

The sudden uptick in-app engagement and digital adoption due to the Covid-19 pandemic forced banks to quickly adapt in a world with few physical interactions. With digital transactions up by 20%, banks needed to step up their game to create a better digital customer experience.

Customers prefer digital. In fact, digital banking customers are more loyal to their primary bank, cost less to serve, and are more profitable! App engagement for banking apps is expected to rise to 71% by 2024.

So how can banks create digital experiences that stand out and create loyal customers at the same time? Here’s what we’ll cover:

• The loyalty problem for banks
• What are banks doing to improve customer loyalty?
• Gamification for apps & how it fuels customer loyalty
• Banks that have crushed it with gamification
• A gamification tool that boosts app engagement & customer loyalty

The loyalty problem for banks

Simple and digital experiences help direct banks outperform traditional banks. Still, technology companies like PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay have a 54% higher consumer trust according to Customer Loyalty research in Banking by management consultant Bain & Company.

This graph from a study by consulting company Accenture highlights the challenge traditional banks face. The average customer churn rate in banking rests around 11%. The rates are even higher for first-year customers, who churn at a rate of 20-25%. A staggering half of all churned customers stated dissatisfaction with their experiences or service as the number one reason.

What are banks doing to improve customer loyalty?

It’s clear banks need to reinvent their digital experience if they want to build a loyal customer base. As tech firms explore financial services, big banks can fight back by focusing on a frictionless customer experience.

Bain & Company found customers want a fun and engaging experience that simplifies their banking, saves time, and reduces anxiety. One thing you can do is deliver emotional elements of value. Appealing to emotions increases NPS (Net Promotor Score) by 150%.

Almost all banks have loyalty programs in place. However, consulting firm KPMG found the effectiveness of traditional loyalty programs in banks limited. 61% of consumers said it was very important to ‘find better ways to reward loyal customers’. Another 57% wanted better online banking and easier application processes.

Some challenger banks like Revolut and Monzo differentiate themselves with gamification. The latter of which has gained over half a million users without any physical branch. A popular badge reward system and a vibrant chat forum keep the mobile fintech app close to their customers.

What is gamification you ask? Keep on reading!

Gamification for apps & how it fuels customer loyalty

What is gamification?

Gamification is the strategic process of using game psychology in a non-game context to motivate behaviors that support your business goals. By rewarding users for their active participation, you can improve app engagement and drive behaviors such as conversions.

How does gamification work?

A great gamified experience triggers internal desires and keeps customers engaged through game elements and experiences. For instance; progress bars or badge reward systems can trigger the desire for accomplishment and boost user activity.

How can banks use gamification for apps?

Banks can use gamification to improve app engagement and drive customer loyalty. It’s a great way to slash churn and differentiate your company. Financial companies using gamification can outpace competitors in revenue, deal size, and conversion rates.

Want to get a quick introduction to gamification? Check out our What is Gamification page and get up to speed!

Banks that have crushed it with gamification

BBVA’s 100,000 loyal customers through smart rewards

BBVA, the leading digital bank in Spain created a gamification strategy to drive customer loyalty. As part of their strategy, they launched the BBVA Game, a web app with app tutorials and explanations on how to pay taxes and do transactions online.

Customers can earn points by completing challenges and redeem them for music downloads, movies, smartphones, tickets for the La Liga football league, or even auctions. After only 6 months the game had over 100,000 users and its users showed an 18% higher satisfaction rate.

Extraco Banks’ 7X higher conversion rates

Extraco Banks is the largest financial institution with headquarters in Texas, with over 1.2 billion dollars in revenue and over 140,000 customers. When they wanted to remove free checking accounts, the bank used gamification for apps to ease into the transition.

Customers got a series of questions and then got personalized tips from James, a character in the game, on how they could reduce or even eliminate their monthly fees by doing more online banking. The app generated a 7X higher conversion rate and shows how gamification can guide customer behaviors to brand loyalty.

A gamification tool that boosts app engagement & customer loyalty

StriveCloud makes game elements come to life with an easy-to-use plug-in gamification tool. It’s a great way to make your experience fun and engaging to customers. Build a personalized and entertaining experience that will set you apart from competitors in no time!

Here’s how StriveCloud’s plug-in gamification tool works:

1. Simply plug-in the gamification tool to your web or mobile apps and it will link to your customer data and gamify it.
2. Based on app goals you can set personalized challenges and milestones to trigger user actions to support them.
3. You can then reward users for active participation and behaviors that support your business goals.
4. Set behavior-triggered in-app messages, contextual notifications, and personalized emails to re-engage your users.
5. Keep users wanting more with visual feedback like progress bars, leveling systems & coins collection.

You can control the gamified experience from one Control Panel to deliver a great customer experience across platforms.

Want to learn more about StriveCloud Plug-in Gamification Tool? Check out our product page here!

Key takeaways

With digital adoption on the rise, and app engagement higher than ever, banks had to quickly adapt to the digital-only approach. And for good reason! Digital banking customers are more loyal to their primary bank, cost less to serve, and have a higher lifetime value.

That said, here are the main learnings from the article:

Customers prefer digital

It’s true. Customers prefer digital experiences because it saves them time and is often more pleasant than having to schedule a meeting with your bank, waiting in the lobby, and so on.

Loyalty programs need to be reinvented

61% of consumers find it very important that loyalty programs in banks need to be reinvented, whilst another 23% find it important that banks find new ways to reward loyal customers.

Banks need to win back consumer trust

With tech firms taking on the financial industry banks have to face a new kind of competitor. Digital companies have a 54% higher trust than traditional banks. However, some banks have built great digital experiences to fight this.

True value comes from emotional experiences

Emotional elements improve NPS by 1.5X more than functional elements. Gamification for apps plays on these deep emotional desires to keep users active and engaged.

Gamification sets you apart from the competition

There’s no better way to stand out than creating an experience that sticks, and people actively seek out. That’s what the power of gamification can do for you if implemented correctly.

Figuring out your own gamification strategy? Get a free workshop to see how gamification could work for you!

Data survival: how to handle the death of the cookie

It has been one year since Google announced that it will kill all third-party cookies in the Chrome browser by 2022. Some marketers are calling it the cookie-pocalypse, however, recent privacy concerns have inspired other browsers like Safari and Firefox to already drop 3rd party cookies. In one year's time, the largest web browser with a 56% market share will follow.

Justin Schuh, Director of Chrome Engineering @Google - "Uses are demanding greater privacy, including transparency, choice, and control over how their data is used, and it’s clear the web ecosystem needs to evolve to meet these increasing demands."

So how can marketers prepare for this shift in data availability?

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• A cookie-less experience & its implications for marketers
• Why should marketers collect 1st party data now?
• A better way to collect data with gamification
• Gather more data with gamification for apps

A cookie-less experience & its implications for marketers

Cookies are a small piece of data stored on the user’s computer to track user behavior and personalize experiences based on that data. Google’s ability to track users across websites made them the largest digital advertising network in the world.

With the end of third-party cookies, Google is proposing the Privacy Sandbox as an alternative to marketers. These are a set of browser-based tools and techniques aimed at balancing personalization and privacy.

Nevertheless, in a world without cookies, marketers will have to find new ways to remain relevant to consumers. While 91% of consumers prefer brands that customize the experience towards their preferences, they still find control over their data more important. Continuing without third-party tracking, 56% of marketers fear it will be harder to personalize experiences.

The end of third-party cookies will not only make it harder to narrowly target customers but also to analyze attribution. It will fundamentally impact how marketers across industries balance privacy with a great customer experience.

Why should marketers collect 1st party data now?

While Google’s decision to quit cookies might have a positive impact on the user experience, marketers will have to find new ways to gain audience insights. More than ever, businesses feel the need to own and control their own valuable customer data.

Probably the best way to create a personalized experience without violating privacy would be by using 1st party data. This is data created and stored by your own website or app. It tracks user behavior directly linked to your own communities.

Martin Sorell, Founder@WPP - "2020 is going to be the year the year of first-party data"

Not only is this method of data collection more privacy-friendly, but it’s also highly relevant to your business because it comes directly from your audience. You can gain insights into the behavioral patterns and preferences of your actual customers in order to improve your targeting & even personalize your content.

Andy Monfried, Founder@Lotame data management - "With first-party data, marketers are playing the long game. They are fostering an ongoing relationship with their customers and prospects by better communicating and serving them."

So how do you go about collecting first-party data?

A better way of data collection with gamification!

What is gamification?

Let’s start off with the basics. Gamification is the use of game psychology in a non-game context. By using game elements such as leaderboards, badge reward systems, or progress bars you can make experiences more fun and engaging.

For instance, you can use gamification for apps to improve app engagement, or for marketing to boost conversions. Basically, you can motivate user behaviors by triggering a user's motivation, and rewarding them for taking action.

Want to learn the ins and outs of how it works? Find everything you need to know on our ‘What is Gamification’ page!

How can you use gamification to collect data?

So, how does gamification for apps help me collect first-party data? Well, gamification motivates user behaviors by design. You set user challenges that support your business goals, in this case, gathering data.

For example, you make filling out your profile a challenge for new users. In return, users can collect points or badges. This way you’ll motivate people to fill out their profiles.

LinkedIn boosts profile completion with a simple progress bar!

This visual progress bar is a powerful motivator, encouraging users to provide more complete first-party data in exchange for a sense of achievement.

Let’s look at some gamified examples!

A gamification tool to collect ski data

An excellent example of how to use gamification to collect data is Skitude. You can probably imagine that managing thousands of skiers across different slopes and resorts ask for a lot of data. But how do you convince skiers to give away their data?

Well, skiers can get a card embedded with an RFID chip. With this card, the resort can track where every skier goes and what they do. In return, users get access to their own statistics. The skiers can share their achievements on social media.

They can also compete against their friends or other skiers in the resort. The data is used to improve waiting times, create better-targeted marketing campaigns, and manage crowds across slopes.

Making education fun with gamification

Byju is the largest educational app in India. Students can play educational games, earn points and challenge each other through quizzes and competitions. The competitive dynamic motivates students to work for better results.

Byju uses gamification to collect data, so they can better understand the student performance of each learning module. They use this data to design more effective modules.

Gather more data with gamification for apps

A plug-in gamification tool to enrich your data collection

Gamification for apps can be used to collect more user data. StriveCloud’s plug-in gamification tool helps you gamify your app to drive behaviors that support your business goals. For instance, you can guide user behavior through contextual notifications and in-app messaging

By gamifying the user journey, you get to collect first-party data with every interaction the user has on your platform. Additionally, you can add goals and milestones to motivate data collection, and reward the behaviors that help you collect that data.

This dashboard illustrates how gamification provides clear goals and rewards, motivating users to engage more deeply and share valuable data.

Reach your goals with gamification? Get a free gamification strategy workshop to see how it can work for you!

Your own gaming tournament platform

Having your own tournament platform allows you to build a community of highly engaged and loyal users. With such a userbase of fans comes a ton of first-party data. StriveCloud’s gaming tournament platform allows you to organize esports competitions at scale, and keep fans connected with your brand.

Kayzr for instance is the largest esports community in the Benelux. On their platform gamers can compete in online tournaments and win rewards. Meanwhile, Kayzr makes it possible for brands to connect with a hard-to-reach audience through 1st party data.

Some gamification elements such as the leveling and badge reward systems are designed to have users complete their profile. Other times challenges can help in gathering more data along the way. This data allows brands that advertise on Kayzr to build highly relevant and targeted campaigns.

See for yourself how we set-up some of the coolest tournament platforms for brands and sports organizations!

Key takeaways

Only one year left until the cookie-pocalypse. With Google’s announcement a year ago, there will be no more third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser by 2022. Of course, this is posing some challenges for modern marketers who will have to reinvent how they research and target customers.

Here are our main lessons from the article:

Finding the right balance between privacy and personalization

While 91% of consumers actually prefer a personalized experience, the majority of them don’t like the thought of companies processing their data. Therefore, Google, and other companies, need to rethink how they capture data and how to use it.

First-party data is the new black

Everybody seems to agree on one thing. First-party data is the future. It’s more consumer-friendly and also more relevant to your business. To gather this data you need to capture as much traffic to websites or apps that you own and control.

Gamification for apps drives data collection

You can use gamification to increase the amount of data a user shares with you. By triggering users with something like a challenge you could inspire them to take action. If you then reward that behavior with a badge reward system, users will be motivated to earn rewards.

Brands can enrich their first-party data with tournament platforms

A tournament platform can help you build a special connection with a hard-to-reach audience. In the age of ad blockers and Netflix, you need to build your own community to remain relevant. Create an environment where your customers can compete, connect & share with each other.

Want to boost your own data collection with gamification? Get a free consultation now!

StriveCloud vs Captain Up

What should you do when you’re losing users faster than you’re acquiring new ones? Churn is a major problem for apps. 1 in 4 users leaves an app after only opening it once, and app engagement is lower than ever. Which doesn’t come as a surprise when you know the average person only uses about 30 apps.

So what can you do to be one of these 30 apps? You’ll want to get your users hooked. Opening your apps once or twice a month isn’t good enough, you want to create an experience that keeps users coming back. Gamification for apps takes the elements that make video games fun, and uses them in a non-game context to boost app engagement!

Unfortunately, finding the right gamification tool can be hard. That’s why we’re comparing Captain Up’s and StriveCloud’s gamification solutions.

Here’s what we’ll dive into:

• Introducing Captain Up & StriveCloud
• Features showdown
• Pricing faceoff
• Captain Up Vs StriveCloud – Which gamification tool is right for you?

Introducing Captain Up & StriveCloud

What is Captain Up?

Captain Up is a gamification tool that turns visitors into loyal customers. Their platform allows you to gamify your website or apps to improve engagement and boost revenue. Captain Up works with brands such as Ladbrokes and Spindipity to improve customer loyalty.

By providing gamification, social, and communication layers, Captain Up improves web and app engagement to boost conversions. Their gamification tool lets you set-up a gamified layer in the form of a pop-up.

Users earn points and badges for repeatedly visiting your website and can eventually level up. There is also a feed where you can see other user activity. It serves as a tool to attract, convert and retain users across marketing, sales, and service touchpoints.

This screenshot shows the various gamification features Captain Up offers, including profiles, levels, and leaderboards, presented in a widget.

What is StriveCloud?

StriveCloud is a gamification leader, that specializes in gamification for apps. Their team built a plug-in gamification tool to turn web and mobile apps into experiences that get users hooked.

Quite literally: a gamification tool built for retention and app engagement. The tool seamlessly plugs in with your app, taking your already existing data and turning it into a gamified experience. You can set up personalized milestones to drive active usage, and reward app engagement to motivate behavior. Finally, you can send personalized in-app messages based on the user's behavior to keep them coming back.

This example showcases how StriveCloud's plug-in tool can be used to drive app engagement with various gamification elements like challenges, badges, and a point collection system.

They have worked with brands such as AB InBev, Proximus, and the Swiss Pro League to create highly engaging user experiences that drive app engagement. StriveCloud helped some of its clients cut churn by 23% while increasing daily active usage by 58%.

Features showdown

Both tools have earned their stripes in the gamification world. But let’s take a look at how their feature sets compare.

Captain Up core features

Captain Up's features can be grouped into four buckets: game elements, social elements, communication, and back-office.

Maximize user engagement with game elements

Captain Up has game elements in place such as points, rewards, and trophies to boost user engagement. While these can be useful, they’re also limited and have quite basic functions. Users can unlock achievements and collect coins. Later, they can trade these coins for scratch cards.

Other reward elements they have in place are multi-currencies and badges. They also have a leveling system to keep users motivated to go forward.

Set up a social community to activate your users

With Captain Up’s gamification tool users can access their profile, scroll through the activity feed, and engage in community discussions.

Captain Up helps you find which users are the most engaged and helps you turn them into ambassadors. By rewarding users for inviting friends or sharing their page, they leverage their community for viral growth.

Communicate with users when it matters the most

With Captain Up, you can send bulk messages, segmented messages, and create customized pop-ups for every user. This allows you to communicate with users at the exact moment they perform the desired action. Use the in-app inbox to notify wins, achievements, and special offers. You can also set trigger-based messages to ensure consistent communication for specific events.

Improve your gamified experience from a built-in back-office

From the back-office, you can manage all game elements and individual users. You can also segment your users based on behavioral insights. Additionally, you can set up rules for challenges or competitions to automate rewards.

The visual above illustrates how Captain Up combines game mechanics with social and communication features to engage users.

If you’re deliberating between two or more approaches to engage your users you can simply A/B test what works best from the platform. You can access insights and analytics from the same back-office and export the data as you wish.

StriveCloud’s core features

The main features StriveCloud uses in gamification for apps are personalized challenges, achievements, rewards, and behavior-based messaging.

Hook your users with a cohesive and gamified user journey

The plug-in gamification tool takes your app user data and gamifies it. You can set personalized milestones to push the user journey forward. Then, reward engagement and active participation through points or badges.

Besides points and badges, StriveCloud allows unlimited virtual currencies and redeemable rewards. You can simply exchange your points for physical or digital prizes in the built-in shop or create a raffle for scalable app engagement.

You can keep users moving forward with a leveling system that’s based on user activity. User progress gets rewarded with experience points and visualized through progress bars. Re-engage your users with in-app quests and personalized challenges to tie it all together.

Finally, there are some engagement boosting features such as hotzones. These are moments within the app where users can earn double the amount of points.

Leverage social elements to drive app engagement & community

People are often triggered by a sense of competition, to feel better or equal to their peers. The plug-in gamification tool allows you to set up competitions within your own app. Users can compare their rankings in leaderboards.

Adding a social feed to your app enables users to see how other users are doing while rewarding interactions will motivate them to communicate with each other. This can be a great way of reinforcing competition or fostering collaboration. Users can ask each other questions or work together towards completing a challenge.

Boost user engagement with personalized communication at scale

With StriveCloud’s plug-in gamification tool you can automatically send behavior-triggered in-app messages, notifications, and emails. This allows you to send the right messages at the right time and to the right user!

You can target users based on their level of engagement to prevent churn or set contextual notifications to activate users at a time that’s best for them. Use it to improve your onboarding experience or to guide users through your app.

Add gamified in-app experiences with an advanced page builder CMS

With the plug-in gamification tool comes an advanced page builder that you can customize without limits. Basically, it’s your own CMS which you can use to add and customize pages in your own app. You can easily add text and image blocks, section sliders, gamification elements, polls & bets in just a few clicks.

Easily manage all your digital products from one simple control panel

Once you plug-in the gamification tool you can gamify any data point from a central control panel. Manage all your web and mobile apps from one place, and add as many digital products as you like! You can continuously analyze real-time user behavior through the analytics dashboard to keep improving your user experience and app engagement.

Learn more about the plug-in gamification tool from StriveCloud on our product page!

Pricing faceoff

Captain Up pricing

Captain Up has a complex and rather untransparent pricing system. First of all, we couldn’t find any pricing on their site so the following information comes from reviews only. Starting from $19 to $99 per license, prices increase up to $ 5,000 per month as you pay for customization, product training, and data import.

StriveCloud pricing

StriveCloud’s pricing, on the other hand, is clear and straightforward. It’s also directly linked to your success. Pricing starts at € 499 per month and grows as you retain more monthly active users to your app. For this price you get access to all the features mentioned above, and more!

This means StriveCloud only grows when you do!

Captain Up VS StriveCloud – which gamification tool is right for you?

Both tools have an incredible amount of possibilities. While Captain Up has an easy and intuitive platform, its features are rather basic. The pop-up format doesn’t feel native to your app and often makes for an interruptive user experience. However, for website engagement and social growth, they seem to do the job.

StriveCloud’s gamification tool plugs into your app and is completely customizable. Additionally, their team will help you set up your own gamification strategy through workshops and a hands-on attitude. Based on their previous experiences with clients they continuously improve the features which creates a lot of opportunities within the platform.

If you want to supercharge your app engagement in a scalable way, go with StriveCloud.

The pros & cons of Captain Up

Captain Up adds a layer of gamification to your website or app to boost user interaction! You can use it to convert your website traffic or boost social media growth. It is intuitive to use and has lots of documentation to help you get started.

Unfortunately, the platform has its customization limits and the game elements are rather basic. The pop-up doesn’t feel like a part of your app and their strictly rewards-based approach might cause users to drop out eventually due to the Overjustification effect.

If you’re looking for a long-term app engagement solution this platform might not be right for you.

The pros & cons of StriveCloud

The plug-in gamification tool by StriveCloud makes every digital experience better. You can easily link it to your web or mobile app and provide a 360-degree gamified user journey from one central control panel.

The tool takes user data and uses it to create gamified user journeys that drive any desired behavior or product KPI. That being said if you don’t have a lot of data, opportunities are lost here. On the other hand, you can use other StriveCloud products to collect more data.

There is also a steep learning curve that comes with their gamification tool. Luckily, they also have a team of experts that come with the tool. The team will help you design and set up an engaging gamified experience that plays on deep human desires and gets users hooked.

So, what gamification tool should I pick?

In conclusion, I would say you get more bang for your buck with StriveCloud. However, picking the right tool depends on the goals you have with it. Do you want to:

Drive website traffic?

Go with Captain Up! Their engagement platform attracts and converts visitors through a simple reward system. It’s ideal to stand out between other sites but becomes less effective in the long term as motivation for external rewards decreases over time.

Grow your social reach?

Go with Captain Up! Their tool helps you boost social interaction. You can link your Facebook or Twitter page to your profile and create challenges to boost the number of likes or shares you get.

Boost app engagement & active participation?

Go with StriveCloud! Their plug-in gamification tool helps you drive the behaviors that make you grow. It’s by far the number one tool to level-up interaction and active usage, as you get to reward users based on their behaviors.

Say goodbye to churn?

Go with StriveCloud! The plug-in gamification tool is built for retention! Making the user experience more cohesive and engaging can slash churn by 23%. Finally, you can put gamification mechanisms in place to prevent dropout or re-engage users with personalized messages and in-app quests.

Find a gamification tool that scales with you?

Go with StriveCloud! Their tool is best used in gamification for apps. Their flexible and growth-oriented model is perfect for apps that want to scale! Boost active usage and app engagement across all your digital products, from a simple control panel!

Want to get started with gamification for apps? Get a free workshop to see how it might work for you!

10 tried & tested ways to increase banking app engagement

Banking apps are the third most-used apps after social media and weather apps. However, banks and product managers are having a hard time keeping up a good retention rate. Research by Leanplum and Liftoff states that after one day of signing up for a financial app, only 34% of users stay. Add another week to that, and the number drops to 15%. A total of 90 days later only 3.4% is left. With app engagement this low, creating a better user experience has become a major priority for banks.

So what are some actionable things you can do? We’ve put together 10 hacks you can try to supercharge your app engagement!

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Boost app engagement with gamification for apps
• Re-engage users with personalized push notifications
• Personalize the user experience for higher app retention
• Create better onboarding to slash churn
• Use in-app messaging to guide your users to value
• Give users a head start to trigger their motivation
• Embed social elements to fuel community feeling
• Incentivize user behavior through variable rewards
• Allow user feedback & interaction
• Learn and improve

Boost app engagement with gamification for apps

Gamification is the use of game elements and psychology in a non-game context. Essentially, it draws from what makes a game fun and engaging, and puts it into apps to get users hooked. Game elements such as leaderboards and progress bars can drive app engagement by responding to a user’s inherent motivations and desires.

Monobank, a leading neobank from Ukraine uses gamification for apps to boost active user engagement. Its users can have fun and earn rewards while using the banks’ services. The bank has a badge reward system in place to reward actions like using your card in different cities or spending in certain categories. Along with the badges, users can earn points that they can later redeem for branded clothing. Lastly, the game offers some in-app games and hidden easter eggs.

Want to learn more about gamification? Here’s our “what is gamification” page to help you get started!

StriveCloud created a plug-in gamification tool built for retention. It helps product managers add a layer of gamification to their web and mobile apps to drive user activity and app engagement. When used correctly it can boost app usage by 54%!

With this gamification tool, you can gamify any data point to change user behaviors, without having to hire a product studio. Here’s what StriveCloud’s plug-in gamification tool could do for you:

• Plug-in your mobile or web app and choose what metrics drive the user journey forward
• Set personalized milestones and challenges to trigger user activation
• Visualize user progress with progress bars to fuel their motivation
• Reward active participation and app engagement to keep users coming back
• Target users with in-app messages based on previous interactions and behavior

Want to build an app that keeps your users coming back? Learn more about our plug-in gamification tool!

Re-engage users with personalized push notifications

If you use notifications correctly, it will activate users when they’re most likely to engage. According to Localytics, notifications can increase in-app engagement by 88%. Users that enable push notifications are nearly 3 times more likely to return to your app within 30 days.

Axis Bank from India put this to the test when they created personalized web notifications, based on online user behavior. They only targeted specific customers that had shown interest in their credit card service, instead of reaching out to every single customer. Among the users who received the notification, a whopping 36% became positive leads.

Personalize the user experience for higher app retention

Every user will have different goals, and therefore different use cases within your app. For banking apps that could be one user being focused on saving, and another user on investing. It seems obvious these two would want a different experience, tailored to their goals. In fact, 72% of consumers confirm this.

Once you understand behavioral data, you can use it to improve the user experience. For instance, you can use personalized reminders to encourage savings or market alerts for investments. It all depends on what your users need from you.

Create better onboarding to slash churn

Poor onboarding is the number one cause of customer churn! In fact, 80% of people have deleted an app because they didn’t know how to use it.

The key to great onboarding is to keep it simple. Give the users instructions step by step, but leave them in control. You can set milestones, use progress bars or checklists, create product walkthroughs, and many more things. However, simplicity is key. Don’t overwhelm your customer. Here’s a great example from the couponing extension Honey.

This onboarding example from Honey highlights how a simple, guided walkthrough can quickly show value to new users.

Use in-app messaging to guide your users to value

In-app messages improve app engagement by 26%. Highly used apps do even better with an increase in-app engagement of 44%. You can use them to help users discover new features or use cases for your app. Or maybe you want to share your latest updates, promote relevant offers, or deliver proactive support?

The possibilities are endless. In-app messages can be hyper-targeted without forcing the user to leave the app. It can simply boost interaction in the right place, at the right time.

Give users a head start to trigger their motivation

When a user needs to fulfill a certain set of tasks to get value from your app, you can motivate them by giving a head start. For instance, when a user needs to fill out a form, you can already add the information you know about them.

Additionally, you could use it in onboarding like the payment app PayPal does. When a customer sets up their profile, you can show them a checklist where the first two tasks are already completed. Even if those tasks are as simple as opening the app and signing up! Doing so creates something called the “endowed progress” effect.

Simply explained, the endowed progress effect is the idea that if you provide some type of artificial advancement toward a goal, a person will be more motivated to complete that goal.

PayPal's onboarding checklist is a perfect example of the endowed progress effect, making users feel invested from the very start.

Embed social elements to fuel community feeling

A lot of banking apps are leveraging the power of social to improve app engagement. Some banks are sharing financial tips on their feeds, while others have an active forum to debate on finance. The great thing is you get to speak with your users directly.

According to amity, in-app communities makes users 2.7 times more likely to stay due to a sense of community and belonging. Users not only feel more involved but are also 4 times more likely to refer their friends.

Incentivize user behavior through variable rewards

Reward your users for behaviors that support your business goals. This creates positive reinforcement in the users' mind and conditions them to do it again. It’s the same theory used in online games and slot machines to keep users actively engaged. Google, Facebook, and Twitter all have been using these techniques, often referred to as Skinnerian marketing.

Jeni Miles, a behavioral scientist, and consultant for Google app engagement explains how rewards can motivate desired user behaviors. You can reward users through badges, points, or freebies. However, focusing on other types of rewards such as exclusive access and status is more effective over the long term and turns your app into a habit-forming product.

Allow user feedback & interaction

Sometimes, allowing users to give their opinion on their experience gives you all the information you need to improve your app. It also gives users the sense of being heard, which is becoming increasingly important among digital natives.

In-app feedback often has higher response rates and gives you context-based feedback. You can ask for ratings, surveys to discover key metrics about your app. What is your Net Promotor Score? How did your users find you? Above all, consider the overall experience and don’t overwhelm your users with questions.

Learn and improve

It’s important to keep working on your app to create better user experiences. There are many principles you can apply here. For instance, start with a minimum viable product, and then build new features around it. With every iteration you learn, your app improves and your users become more engaged.

Use A/B testing to test different approaches for your audience. Maybe you can even test out this top 10 list to see how it improves your app engagement?

Key takeaways

In 2020 the usage of digital banking apps skyrocketed. However, lots of product managers in banks and other financial institutions still struggle to keep their users engaged. Luckily, there are lots of things you can do to pimp your user experience and build a product that gets users hooked!

Here are the key learnings:

Find what triggers your users

A trigger puts your users into action. Figuring out how to personalize and target these triggers is often a make or break step within your user experience. You can use in-app messaging, smart push notifications, or give your users a head start in your onboarding.

Put your users into action

What is the simplest action a user can take to get value from your app? On Facebook, this would be scrolling in the anticipation of a cool post. To succeed here your user needs to have two things: motivation and ability. Therefore, simplifying your action with step-by-step instructions, and boosting motivation through rewards is a great way to enhance user participation.

Build anticipation through variable rewards

The secret to app engagement lies in variable rewards. It helps you to turn motivation for a reward, into a deep intrinsic desire. Research shows dopamine goes through the roof when the brain is expecting a reward. Making those rewards variable puts users into some kind of hunting state similar to a slot machine.

Mechanisms like a badge reward system and leaderboards build on inherent desires for status, achievement, and progress.

Simplify the users’ investment

An investment from users is often a combination of time, data, effort, social capital or money. As a user, however, you don’t want to do things that don’t add value to your experience. However, it is proven that users who do this kind of investment are more likely to return.

The key is to derive value from users’ investments by using it to improve future triggers, actions, and rewards! The more someone will use your app, the better their experience will become!

Want to turn your banking app into a user loyalty machine? Book a free consultation today and we’ll show you how to get started!

What makes Robinhood and Revolut remarkable? The truth about investment app success.

The investment banking landscape has changed a lot over the years. With new financial regulations and more market democratization, industry disruptors are on the rise. As digital adoption keeps increasing, so does mobile app engagement. Challenger brands like Robinhood and Revolut make use of this by operating online only.

And they do so with great success. In the last four years, investment-based apps have grown downloads by 126%. One of those apps is Robinhood, whose mobile app engagement is higher than the top legacy providers combined.

So how do these apps compete against established financial corporations like Charles Schwab?

Take a look, here’s what we’ll cover:

This graph illustrates the significant growth in downloads for investment-based mobile apps over the last four years, highlighting the trend that disruptors like Robinhood capitalize on.

• How do investment apps distinguish themselves?
• Gamification for apps – your app engagement booster!
• How the disruptors of the investment industry use gamification to stay ahead
• A plug-in gamification tool for your investment app

How do investment apps distinguish themselves?

There are lots of things that got to do with the success of challenger banks. However, using technology as leverage seems to be the general thread here. A lot of the new age investment banks operate online only. These often referred to as Neobanks or challenger banks.

This allows them to keep operational costs much lower while providing a better customer experience. Customers often find online investment apps more accessible, and easier to get into. Apps like Revolut, Stash, and many more all confirm that a large percentage of their users are completely new to investing.

Sudev Balakrishnan, Chief Product Officer@Stash - "Before fintech platforms like Stash, financial services, particularly the stock market, felt intimidating and inaccessible to so many Americans."

A potential reason for this could be the promised returns and low-cost barrier to getting started. In Australia for instance, the second-largest bank offers an interest rate of only 0.05%. In contrast, Australian neobank Xinja offers a 2.25% interest rate. That’s a 45 times higher return!

Another common trend among challengers is fee-free trading. “High minimums and fees kept hundreds of people on the sidelines for years,” says Balakrishnan. Stash is very focused on ease-of-use which has brought them over 2 billion dollars in assets under management.

Andre Mohammed co-founder@Freetrade and head of wealth and trading@Revolut - "The competitive landscape is definitely heating up and ultimately this is great for the customer and only serves to validate what we have put effort into building. Zero commission trading will soon become table stakes and investment apps will have to up their game to differentiate in other ways."

Competing for app engagement

There aren’t any signs of the disruption slowing down. Benjamin Belais, former country manager at Revolut shared his secret on gaining 1.5 million new users without spending any money on marketing: app engagement.

He stated the importance of daily interactions and getting your users hooked. This philosophy successfully shifted the focus from marketing to product. Two years later app engagement is through the roof with over 1 million daily active users and a grand total of 12 million users.

The same goes for Robinhood, which has recently been under fire for making their app too addictive. They accredit their high app engagement to the use of gamification. At the core of Robinhood’s app is a fun, game-like experience that helps you learn how to invest without charging any trade fees.

But what is gamification, and how can it help your investment app grow?

Gamification for apps – Your app engagement booster

What is gamification for apps?

Gamification is the use of game mechanisms in a non-game context. In other words, they take the psychology and triggers that make games fun and engaging and inject them into a digital experience. The result? A better experience that differentiates you from competitors and keeps your users hooked!

How does gamification for apps work?

True engagement stems from the inherent motivation to do something. That’s why a gamification strategy relies on the user's desires and emotional states to trigger behaviors that support your business goals. Once a user carries out the desired action you can reward them to reinforce their emotional state and increase the likeliness of them coming back to your app.

Want to learn more about gamification? Here’s our “What is Gamification” page to help you get started!

How can investment apps leverage gamification?

Gamification for apps can nudge user behaviors to be more active. Robinhood for example immediately activates new users by giving them a free stock when signing up. Later on, personalized notifications and recommendations keep their users engaged. The possibilities of what you can do are endless.

How the disruptors of the investment industry use gamification to stay ahead

Robinhood’s rise to the top

What sets Robinhood apart besides their fee-free trading model, is their beginner-friendly experience. In contrast to other investment apps, you can almost instantly open an account without any previous knowledge of investing. They even give you a free stock to get started.

Additionally, they use a range of game elements to encourage user participation and app engagement. For instance, when a user makes their first trade, confetti falls down the screen. The app also has a leaderboard with the most popular stocks on its platform.

Robinhood’s personalized notifications also boost activity on their platform. In the first three months of 2020, Robinhood users traded nine times more shares than its competitor E-Trade, and 40 times as many as Charles Schwab customers. They also bought and sold 88 times more risky options.

Lastly, Robinhood amplifies referrals by using a reward program that can get you and your friends' free stocks. The stock you get is shown at random, which increases anticipation even further.

The focus on products has allowed Revolut to grow at a fast pace. They rely on the users' motivation to have an easy and cost-efficient experience. Their investment platform is built to help users get more out of their savings.

Similar to Robinhood, setting up an account only takes 60 seconds and the Standard plan is completely free. This low commitment approach seemed to appeal to millennials and Generation Z, which is the hardest to reach the audience for traditional banks.

That’s why, back in 2017, Revolut organized a competition called Race among different universities where students could get a free premium account to compete in trading. A leaderboard of all schools was published on Revolut’s social media. Their gamified onboarding helped them to quickly boost app engagement and adoption in a cost-effective manner.

Revolut used this university competition, complete with a public leaderboard, to drive engagement and adoption among students through gamification.

Another gamification principle Revolut uses well is instant feedback. After making a trade, you will receive a notification to confirm your transaction. Lastly, Revolut offers a personal dashboard that allows you to track progress and achievements.

This personal dashboard provides users with instant feedback, allowing them to track their investment progress and achievements effectively.

A plug-in gamification tool for your investment app

StriveCloud has built a plug-in gamification tool to supercharge app engagement. You can link it with your web and mobile apps to gamify any digital touchpoint you want to. This way you can make your app just as engaging as some of the challenger banks, without having to spend lots of resources on a product studio, or your own development team.

The plug-in gamification tool takes user data and turns it into a gamified experience.

Here are some of the things you can do with it:

• Set personalized milestones to encourage user activation
• Create challenges and leaderboards to trigger a sense of competition between users
• Visualize progress with leaderboards and leveling systems to keep users engaged
• Reward active participation with points or badge reward systems to keep users hooked
• Set up in-app messages and quests to drive engagement and behaviors that help you grow

And the best part about it? Once you have a gamification strategy, it only takes a few clicks to set up new elements!

Want to learn more about our plug-in gamification tool? Check it out here!

Key takeaways

So, we can conclude the investment industry is only starting to reshape itself with new brands coming up. Investment apps like Robinhood and Stash allow users with little to no experience to invest online.

The rise in digital adoption and app engagement is what’s driving growth for these apps. However, their customer-first approach helps them stay on top.

Here’s what we learned from this article:

Leverage technology for innovation

These investment apps or neobanks can cut down significantly on operational costs due to being fully online. Their focus on technology allows them to create better experiences, and automate services which usually take more manpower.

The future of investment banking is fee-free

Robinhood was one of the first apps to come up with this policy, which led the company to quickly rise to the top. In today’s world, it’s almost an industry standard. As traditional banks such as Charles Schwab are following the footsteps of their industry disruptors.

App engagement equals growth

Two of the largest investment apps in the world: Robinhood, the American market leader, and Revolut, the European market leader both state app engagement as their main driver for growth. The data for these companies tells the same story, as higher engagement also indicated higher revenue.

Gamification drives app engagement

Both Revolut and Robinhood use gamification to boost app engagement. This way they can nudge user behaviors to grow their userbase and to increase user engagement on their app.

Want to get started on your own gamification strategy? Get a free workshop to kickstart the process!

7 gamification secrets to give better experiences on your health app

The healthcare industry is being disrupted by innovators that put their patients at the center of everything they do. After 90 days 60% of patients stop taking their prescribed medicine. It’s even worse for other medical advice such as diet or sleep. Unfortunately, the same goes for mhealth apps. On average, after 30 days only 10% of users keep using the app.

Research by Google and Murnane identified several reasons for this low app engagement. Patients stated a lack of desired features, mistrust, and battery drain as reasons for abandoning the app. However, the primary reason underlying churn was the patients (35%) abandoning their health goal altogether.

Fixing this problem is about more than technical optimization. Users need the motivation to keep working towards their health goals. That’s where gamification for apps comes in. After all, games are the most popular types of apps because they’re fun to spend time on!

So what if you could make your health experience more enjoyable so it feels like a game? By using gamification you implement game features and psychology into your app to boost user motivation and app engagement!

Here are the 7 features we’ll cover:

1. Recognize user achievements with badges
2. Motivate users with personal challenges
3. Boost desired user behaviors with in-app currencies
4. Reward app engagement with experience points
5. Drive & reward progress with a leveling system
6. Trigger a sense of competition with a leaderboard
7. Keep your users engaged with personalized notifications

Need a quick crash-course in gamification? Check out our ‘What is Gamification’ page!

Recognize user achievements with badges

Badges are a visual indication of achievements. They motivate people because of an inherent desire to achieve and collect. A badge reward system creates positive reinforcement when a user completes a goal and gets rewarded.

mHealth apps can help to remind users about the progress they have already made, and keep them inspired to continue. Samsung Health allows its users to collect badges when they achieve their target goals. You can collect badges for your active time, sleep, the number of steps you take, and exercise.

Motivate users with personal challenges

Challenges motivate users by triggering their motivational driver of development and accomplishment. People are driven by a sense of growth towards accomplishing a goal. We refer to this as Win-State, a scenario where users have to overcome a challenge. Without a challenge, rewarding users won’t work.

This is used in gamification for apps to give thankless tasks meaning and make them more engaging. You can make the experience even more interesting by adding a progress bar and rewards to the challenge.

Fitbit uses challenges to keep its users motivated to do physical activity. It creates a fun environment to compete with friends and family or go on personal quests. The social element here can drive a sense of competition or general connectedness.

Boost desired user behaviors with in-app currencies

In-app currencies are a virtual representation of money inside your app. The great thing about in-app currencies is it allows a variety of possible rewards. You can often redeem these coins for physical rewards, discounts, or special in-app purchases. Sometimes you can even enter a lottery system to win epic prizes.

You can use in-app currencies to tie real-world rewards to health goals. Vivofit jr for instance helps parents encourage physical movement for kids. It tracks steps, sleep, and 60 minutes of daily recommended activity. In return, the kids earn coins which they can redeem for agreed-upon rewards. It even helps them manage chores and homework time!

The Vivofit jr. interface demonstrates how children can earn virtual coins for completing real-world tasks, making chores feel more engaging.

Reward app engagement with experience points

Points represent the progress a user is making towards a specific goal. It provides visual feedback and keeps the user moving forward. You can reward users for interacting with your health app. It will keep them motivated to stay active and improves app engagement.

The American Red Cross developed Monster Guard, which used gamification for apps to prepare children for emergencies. It teaches them how to stay safe during hurricanes, floods, or other disasters. The kids get points for completing tasks on the mhealth app. When they’ve earned enough points they can collect medals and unlock new parts of the game.

Drive & reward progress with a leveling system

With a leveling system, you can reward users for earning a specific amount of experience points. When users level up they get an extra boost of motivation and reinforcement of their previous investment in the app. The leveling system is anchored in unlocking milestones. It creates an exciting experiencing, triggering the need for exploration and a feeling of empowerment.

Adding a leveling system to your mhealth app can boost long-term app engagement and user retention. Plant nanny uses it to reinforce its users to drink more water. For every glass of water you drink, a virtual plant will grow and mature. All you have to do is drink your daily dose and you will level up.

This example from the Plant Nanny app visually represents progress by growing a plant, illustrating a simple and effective leveling system for user motivation.

Trigger a sense of competition with a leaderboard

A leaderboard shows the top performers in a set challenge or community. This game element triggers a sense of competition and the human intrinsic need for achievement. By seeing your peers complete their health goals, you’re automatically compelled to do so too.

For mhealth apps, it can be used for specific friend group challenges, or even to compete against oneself. It creates a context where users want to improve.

Bayer’s Didget glucose found 70% of parents find game playing the best way to establish a daily routine with their children. Their glucose meter helps kids between 4 and 14 manage their illness by rewarding consistent blood testing with points. Next to points and levels, kids can compete for a place on the leaderboard in an online community.

Keep your users engaged with personalized notifications

Sending a personal message can help to activate or re-engage users. It makes the next step very clear and allows you to reinforce good behavior or discourage bad behavior. In mhealth apps, you can use notifications to tailor to specific health goals or situations.

Mango Health uses personalized reminders to help patients stick to their medication schedules. Users can earn points for taking their medication correctly. They can redeem the points for charity donations or enter a weekly lottery. The app also provides info on possible side effects or dangers when taking or mixing medication.

Differentiate your app with StriveCloud!

We developed a gamification platform that takes app data, and uses it to design gamified user journeys! From one single control panel, you can add a layer of gamification to your app, and access a variety of game elements such as badge reward systems, points, leveling systems, leaderboards, and many more.

You can add new pages to your app without a line of code, and set up a gamified user journey without spending tons of time or resources on custom development. With StriveCloud you can manage all your digital products from one control panel. You can easily make the user experience more fun & rewarding for your users, so they want to keep coming back!

Check out what our gamification platform can do for your app!

Recap

Just like in health treatments, we see patients abandoning mhealth apps due to a lack of motivation. Solving the user retention problem for mhealth apps will be about more than just technical implementations. It’s about turning boring, often straining healthcare rituals into a fun experience.

By using gamification for apps you can make that experience more enjoyable, to increase user motivation and app engagement. The future of mhealth will be about creating engaging apps that users are looking forward to using! Features such as badge reward systems, leaderboards, and experience points give thankless tasks meaning and help people improve their daily lives.

Is gamification something for your business? Get a free consultation now to find out your next steps!

This banner serves as a final call to action, encouraging readers to explore how gamification can directly benefit their business goals.

Why unlocking user motivation is the key to mHealth success?

Mobile health or mHealth refers to mobile-supported public health and treatment. Today, over 100,000 mHealth apps are available. These apps empower patients by allowing them to manage their health more actively and be more independent thanks to self-assessment or other remote care solutions. They also help healthcare professionals treat patients more efficiently. We’ll explore how gamification for health can make the patient experience even better!

With the mission of changing healthcare forever, the industry is experiencing rapid growth. In 2020 the mHealth market in Europe was valued at 6.44 billion dollars and is expected to reach 28.61 billion dollars by 2025. Globally, the market is expected to be valued at 206 billion dollars by 2026.

Mobile health apps will have to become more user-centric to boost stickiness. Overall, they should increase the fun factor and make logging in data feel less like a chore. Additionally, better integration with mHealth will allow professionals to tap into a rich ecosystem of data. This can open new doors in health research, and help to create a better patient experience.

Here’s what we’ll discuss:

• What do mHealth apps look like?
• Low user retention & other challenges for mHealth
• Gamification for health apps
• How gamification for apps works
• Gamification for health apps as the recipe for success

What do mHealth apps look like?

mHealth apps are used in a variety of ways. Since smartphones are at the center of individuals' lives, it makes sense to leverage these devices for health purposes.

1 in 4 deaths is caused due to heart problems. Fitness trackers such as MyFitnessPal can help prevent obesity and cardiovascular diseases by tracking eating and fitness habits and giving real-time advice. For instance, your app could tell you to take a walk or to stay hydrated.

You also have robo-nurses. These apps use technology to help patients with reminders or much-needed answers about their condition. The bots don’t just give canned responses but have real conversations with the patient. VirtualNurse is one of these apps that integrates easily with Google Assistant, Alexa, or even Skype. The combination with voice technology creates a fully personalized experience, to help patients improve their health.

There are also cancer detection and monitoring apps. Today we see apps like Cancer.net and CareZone where patients can log their treatment plan and get advice on how to cope with its side-effects. In the future, these apps could use big data to pre-diagnose skin cancer just by taking a picture and uploading it.

Finally, there are patient apps that allow doctors to monitor patients via their smartphones. These are a natural extension of electronic health records and give a consistent insight into the users' medical history, even if they change doctors.

This image highlights a significant hurdle for mHealth adoption: the lack of trust from both patients and professionals regarding the security of personal data.

However, there is one major drawback for mHealth. The lack of trust with patient data, both from patients and professionals is slowing mHealth adoption.

This is of course a significant problem as almost every health app requires its users to enter personally identifiable data. Surveys, activity trackers, biometric scanners, electronic medical records, and face-to-face consults usually require the individual’s data. Without it, the app functionality goes down immediately.

Low user retention & other challenges for mHealth

According to a report by strategy consultant Accenture, the adoption of health apps had stalled before spiking again during the global pandemic. In fact, usage of these tools dropped from 48% to 35% between 2018 and 2019. Wearable technology such as fitness trackers also decreased from 33% to just 18% in 2020.

Additionally, user engagement on these apps is very low. Data suggests that only 2% of patients are actively engaging with their mHealth apps. About 10% of those retain after the first 90 days. Compared to popular apps like Instagram or Twitter that leaves a lot of room to improve.

The data clearly shows that very few patients actively engage with mHealth apps long-term, highlighting a significant retention problem for the industry.

It is possible however to do this by applying a few simple design principles. App engagement is about 30% higher for fitness apps that have mastered great user experiences. With apps like Strava and Fitbit adding social elements and gamification to their experience to promote fitness around the world.

So, how do you pimp your app so that your users won’t want to leave?

Gamification for health apps

Gamification is the use of game psychology and elements in a non-game context. You can use it to drive desired user behaviors such as motivating a patient to log their daily activity.

For instance, you can reward patients with 100 points for checking in their daily activity. After checking in 7 days in a row they get bonus points. When they reach 1000 points they go to the next level and earn a badge to showcase on their profile!

Do you see what’s happening here? Gamification for apps can help make the patient experience more fun and engaging. Patients will automatically be more motivated to check in daily, so they can collect points and keep improving their level. If you create a digital experience that users want to return to, collecting patient data will come effortlessly.

Learn about the ins and outs of gamification on our “What is Gamification” page!

How gamification for apps works

Gamification for apps can help you achieve a wide variety of business goals. Once you know what your user journey looks like, you can gamify any data point to supercharge engagement.

Here are 5 steps you can take to start gamifying your user journey:

1) Set clear goals to keep users moving forward

Setting milestones and personalized challenges helps users to keep moving forward. Making the user journey easy to understand limits confusion and drives app adoption.

2) Visualize progress to reinforce user motivation

As your user progresses, it’s important to give them instant feedback. The best way to do this is by visualization. For instance, you can use a progress bar to indicate how far a user is from reaching their goals or the next level.

3) Reward positive user behavior to keep users coming back

You can reward users with points for engaging with your app. For instance, when they check-in daily. They can then use these points to claim rewards or join a lottery. You can also reward users for their achievements. With badge reward systems, you can link certain milestones in the app with fun-designed badges!

Doing so creates positive reinforcement when the user carries out specific behaviors, and improves active user retention.

4) Create a sense of connectedness and competition to drive interaction between users

Allowing users to follow and connect with each other creates a community feeling. To encourage social engagement you can introduce a social feed that displays your users’ latest achievements or actions. Other game elements such as leaderboards introduce competition into your app. Users are often motivated to compete or collaborate with their peers.

5) Target users with in-app messages based on their context

Trigger personalized notifications to keep your users engaged, or to remind them to take certain actions. You can target users based on their behavior, so they will only get messages that are relevant and valuable to them.

How to gamify your own user journey without months of development? Check out our plug-in gamification tool!

Gamification for health apps as the recipe for success

MySugr JR is a diabetes app for children with over 1 million users. The app allows parents to check up with their kids so they can worry a little less. The kids can add entries such as their meals and glucose levels in a fun way. They are then rewarded with points for every entry. It even tells them when to take insulin.

The gamified MySugr JR app interface shown here makes diabetes management a fun and rewarding game for children, encouraging consistent data logging.

Another great example is Bayer’s Didget blood glucose meter. It connects to a Nintendo DS and rewards kids for consistent testing. As they gain more points they can also unlock new levels and rank higher on leaderboards.

Gamification for health apps is also used for medication and chronic condition management. Mango Health created an app that notifies its patients when to take their medication. Users earn points for taking it in time, which they can save towards gift cards or charity donations in weekly raffles.

This example from Mango Health demonstrates how earning points for timely medication intake can motivate users toward consistent health habits.

Finally, health apps like MyFitnessPal promote fitness with the help of gamification for apps. They help you set weight loss and activity goals and visualize the progress you’re making towards them. The app also rewards daily streaks for consecutive days users have logged in.

MyFitnessPal effectively uses daily streaks, as seen here, to encourage users to log in consecutively and stay engaged with their fitness goals.

Recap

With the mHealth industry growing as we speak, competition is getting fiercer. However, only 7% of health apps have more than 50,000 monthly active users. The industry is also facing some data security problems, as both patients and healthcare providers have concerns about privacy and safety.

Low user retention & lack of data as the major challenges

mHealth apps are suffering from low engagement rates. This causes a gap in the data healthcare providers need to give sufficient care. To be truly effective most health apps need personal healthcare information. mHealth apps will have to make their experience more fun and engaging to improve retention and trust.

Why mHealth needs gamification for apps

For patients to be truly engaged with their health apps, they need motivation. Gamification helps you apply game design principles and behavioral psychology to do exactly that. By making the app more fun you turn tasks like daily log-ins from a chore into a game. Doing this will create a better patient experience, and make it more rewarding to engage with your app.

How to succeed with gamification for health apps

Several health apps have been successful in gamifying their app. They use game elements like points, badge reward systems, leaderboards, and progress bars to boost patient motivation. By setting clear goals and rewarding desired user behavior you can not only boost app engagement but user retention as well!

Want to get started with gamification? Get a free consultation to find out how you could benefit from gamification!