Hi, and welcome to the Affiliate Insider Podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers. Listen up as I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the insider scoop on what's occurring in affiliate marketing. Join us as we explore affiliate strategies, host expert interviews with leading affiliates and tech entrepreneurs, and discuss the latest affiliates and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started.
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SPEAKER_04Welcome back to Affiliate Insiders Affiliate Marketing Podcast with me, your host, Leanne Johnston. And today we are talking about gamification. Now for some of you, you might not really know what that is, but don't worry because we're going to be explaining it all with an industry expert who I had the fortunate pleasure to meet in Malta a couple of months ago. And who is now joining me today, Melinda Jacobs, CEO and co-founder of Pokeyo and gamification agency Subatomic.
SPEAKER_00Hi, Melinda. How are you? Hi, doing good. Thanks. Thanks for having me here today. I'm excited to join the conversation.
SPEAKER_04Super excited to have you on the podcast with me today. And we're going to be talking about gamification, which is something that I hear popping up all the time. But before we get started, I want you to just tell us a little bit about your businesses and how you work with clients, and then we'll get into the topic at hand.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I've been working with gamification for over 10 years now. I started off actually in academia, but decided I wanted to move into a little bit more hands-on practice. And so founded my agency, Subadomic, I think back in, geez, is it 2012 or so now? So quite uh yeah, just uh 10 years for that now. And what we do at the agency is we work with different customers to help them with the user experience side of building digital products or experiences, as well as specifically with gamification. And uh, as I'll get into a little bit after this intro, about how we see gamification and what this really means or how you can implement it. We just try to help people look at their specific situation and look at it from a behavior change perspective and not just a gimmicky, okay, hey, how do we get people bribe them just with rewards only, but really bring that purpose and meaning into play as well. Which is also why then I co-founded Perkyo recently is we're focused on trying to build some of these similar behavior change mechanics into opening a dialogue between company and employee on how can you have a conversation about well-being and how can you try to use that conversation to make the workplace better for everybody.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so quite a lot of stuff in there that we're gonna unpack in this section today. But let's start with what is gamification? If you can give us a quick rundown of the term, how it gets used, and how marketers are currently implementing gamification in their strategies.
SPEAKER_01So, gamification, it's a tricky term to define because at least for myself, I don't see it so much as a practice within itself. A lot of people will be saying a gamification is taking game mechanics and placement them into business context. However, I think it's a bit more complex than that. It's it's more about the strategy or our approach to the design philosophy. What we're really saying is games are really good at engaging people. And how can we use this design approach in other situations to get similar levels of engagement?
SPEAKER_04The situation that I kind of want to focus on today is kind of loyalty and retention, because often that's where I see gamification really plugging in and having an impact. But in this instance on this podcast, obviously we're talking to managers who manage affiliates. And I think gamification is something that affiliate managers can really utilize to engage their inactive affiliate database. So talk to us a little bit about some of the cool things that you're seeing in gamification that are working client side in terms of customer engagement that could actually be repurposed into the affiliate space.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. I I think one of the things gamification or games are great at is storytelling. And anytime you're trying to engage somebody or convince somebody to either do something or buy something or act as a champion for something, to refer something to another customer in this case, you need to be able to explain to people why this matters and also how do you actually go about doing the process of referring or of making a purchase or of engaging further with the product. And gamification is really good in both ways because it focuses on creative ways of which you tell the story to make it more interesting than just okay, click fill in this form and you're done. And you also help them understand how the system works that, hey, if you refer more people, you can also have a chance at this benefit. And what gamification often does, and what it's used for a lot in marketing, but also in many other industries, is then helping people drive certain behavior by adding artificial rules that maybe wouldn't be there otherwise, or rewards that wouldn't be there otherwise. And in both of these ways, we can definitely use these approaches to help guide people into understanding sort of what is going to be rewarded, what is the quote unquote good behavior here, or how can we try to motivate maybe just that little bit more somebody to do something that we'd like them to help us with.
SPEAKER_04And I think that's really cool because often we get a little bit stuck. We get stuck in our like the old ways of doing things, which is, oh, we'll just offer more commission. But actually, sometimes it's not about the commission, sometimes it's about the experience as well. And I think we forget about building experiences for our referral partners and publishers. And this is where I think gamification can really be interesting in terms of helping you to amplify your program performance. So talk to us a little bit about some of the gamification tactics that drive better performance so that people listening to this podcast can understand the application of gamification. Do they need big development teams to create fancy games? What are some of the simple gamification tactics that marketers can use to engage their partners a little bit better?
SPEAKER_01Simple as it sounds, having a good, visibly nice, clean UI user interface helps a lot for any website. And this is often, whenever I take on projects, often people come to me and they're like, all right, we need to build this big, crazy gamification system, points, badges, rewards, et cetera. But a lot of times what they just need is they need to make their story clearer by having a cleaner interface, by having a better, like you said, experience. Where even small little things like having a little animation appear when you've clicked a button and you get that feedback of, hey, awesome, that's another referral that you've done, or that's another action you've taken that helps you progress in our system. Those little moments are not so expensive or costly to develop and they're cosmetic in that manner, but they help people feel more interested in what's happening. I mean, how many times have we all gone to a website and thought, oh, the UX is horrible. I'm not going to keep going here. And we go to another one that maybe doesn't even have all the features we'd like, but is just much cleaner, simpler, and more aesthetic to use. And gamification is not just about putting badges in or making a leaderboard, but it's asking, okay, when we put badges in, what we're really saying is we want to highlight an experience. We want to highlight that moment. We want to recognize you for something and try to build a language and a more entertaining dialogue than just flat out saying, okay, yeah, you did five of these actions. So here you go. So my advice would be is just start with small cosmetic changes that just make the basic experience nice. And then again, identify what is it really that you want to change in terms of people's behavior, you know, and then what do they need to do in order to be successful in your environments? And I would never recommend going too crazy and trying to build a whole game world or it's so costly and it doesn't convert all that much more. But having things like challenges is also a great way to frame different approaches of picking something people can work towards and having a clear story or narrative about why they're working towards that goal and what's going to happen then when they get to it.
SPEAKER_04And I think those are incredibly good points because the biggest kind of faults that we see in programs that aren't working is that initial affiliate sign-up to affiliate activation page. So you spend a lot of your time as an affiliate manager going out there to find partners to join your program. Once they're in your program, you kind of leave them to their own devices to go pick up their creatives or, you know, write their content or get their text links, however, they're going to be promoting your program. And actually, gamification can play a really important part between that initial sign-up phase where they're actually onboarded into your affiliate program and welcomed into your team to that point when they actually make their first sale. And actually having those little challenges, those badges, those rewards, those little touch points that talk to those affiliates during that inactive period where they're just getting to know you a little bit sets the scene for how they build a relationship for you later on. So I can see like so many opportunities for affiliate managers listening to this podcast to actually use gamification and encouragement and rewards to get their affiliates active quickly in their program. But talk to me about some of the things that you need to consider before implementing gamification in your marketing strategy. Like, where does it fit best? Does it fit best in that piece that I've just spoken about now, which I think makes sense? But does it also work for like inactive partners that have maybe dropped off your radar and haven't sent you a new customer or a new player for a little while? Like, can you implement gamification in all of those channels, like all of those sections? Or is it really best for getting new, like acquisition? You know, how how do you see it being implemented across multiple different clients that you work with?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, it can it can be implemented anywhere. It's good for education, it's good for re-engagement, it's good for developing dialogue. Like you said, a lot of times where I think it is most impactful is in helping people understand what you're trying to say, like why what they're going to do for you matters. Why should they go out there and promote your product? Why should they write that post? Why should they do X, Y, or Z to try to do this? And I can see it being applicable to explaining what type of actions you can take. General education on how you can be an effective affiliate marketer. And also on top of that, if you look at re-engagement of people who have stopped, you know, it can be very useful to also just start by saying, okay, why do we think this person may have stopped? What might they not have understood? Is it just one of these cases where it's not a match, where it's just not relevant, or it turned out it wasn't what they thought? Or are they just really not understanding what all we can do and what all we can offer? And I think that's a really good point to start if you do see a lot of disengagement or you don't see the retention rates you would like, is then don't worry so much about acquisitioning because clearly that that's working. They're getting the story through that gamification or not. But then you can focus internally and say, okay, these people aren't engaging once they get in. So what is getting through in this pre-message and what's not getting through when they're actually engaging with us? And sometimes the best way to do that is just to talk to users and ask them, like, hey, what happened here? But also to see, okay, what type of things would we like them to do? If they weren't inactive, what would be the activities we'd expect? And that's always the best foundation for a gamification project because it will always be about explaining a system, explaining a process and helping people buy into that process and feel like they're rewarded when they're successful in it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and it can be, and as you said, it can be small steps. It can be, you know, did you forget to get your link? Here's a quick demo of how you get your link. And remember, when you get your link, you're gonna get this badge, which gets you closer to X, Y, Z, whatever it is. So I think thinking about it incrementally, like as you say, build a big fancy vehicle that has all the bells and whistles, it could be as simple as just you haven't got your first badge with us yet, and we want you to be successful. Come in and do this step in order to move yourself on to the next part of this journey with us. I think that's beautiful. But for people that have limited time, limited budget, what are the key things that they need to get if they are considering using gamification to amplify their program performance? Is there a roadmap that you can verbally talk us through to just get people thinking about the simple things that they can do with gamification?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I I I know I would sound like a broken record in this podcast, but make sure you know what you want to do first and foremost. So one key goal, one key goal or action per gamification project, basically. A hundred percent. Because if you try to do too much at once, you will one not know what actually did work if you do see a positive result, and two, you're very likely to stretch your development too thin because you're creating a lot of new little features, or the the feature may not matter. I think if you're starting and you have a small budget, start with very minimal versions of a gamification mechanic that you might build out into the future to see do people like that language? Because it can, I think that is one of the beauties of gamification, is even in its most simplest form. Like, let me give an example from back in the day when I was in the US as a kid. We had this Pizza Hut. It was a chain. And they had this reading program of which every time that you read a book or you read a certain amount of books, you get a stamp if you read a book. And when you collected enough stamps, you would get a free little personal pan pizza. So this is a good example of very basic gamification. It wouldn't work in all situations, but it worked in this one because it was very clear the reward was very valued by me as a kid or by many kids out there. Pizza, yeah, exactly. You can't get you can't get much better than that. And it was a very simple process. Read a book, get a sticker, earn your way to a pizza. And now you don't want to do that in all situations because sometimes a monetary reward is not the best way to really change behavior. But if that process is so straightforward, like, okay, if you manage to get 10 people signed up, or you manage to sell the product or service 10 times, or you manage to complete 10 actions, and there will then be this response that comes from it, that's a very simple mechanic to build. And it helps you also think about the goals that you want for people.
SPEAKER_04And it could be, and I want people to think about this while they're listening to this podcast, because it could be things like work your way up. I mean, what I often find in really big programs is that you have really good smaller affiliates that are coming into the program, but they're just not getting human account management because we can't resource every single affiliate in a thousand strong program. But what you can do is build a really nice little gamification metric, like that says when you send us your first 10 players, we're going to give you a branded t-shirt to say welcome to the family, and we'll give you 10% off at the next affiliate event that we're going to be going to. We'll pay you for your ticket to go to that next affiliate event and come and meet us in person. I mean, I think that's a really great mechanic to get new partners into your program, make them feel welcomed, have that touch point with them step by step as they're starting to promote you. Because let's face it, a no affiliate signs up to a program and starts sending a thousand customers or players or sales in the first month. They just don't do that. So, how are you building that communication process with them? And I think gamification is a really good idea to sort of think about and implement.
SPEAKER_01I want to highlight one thing that you mentioned is you mentioned that word family, you know, like come join the family. And that's such an important part of gamification, too, is it's the story you tell. It's that meaning you create by that dialogue. Because exactly, it's like, all right, you know what? Maybe you make a gamification platform where it's, you know, in order to become a full member, you know, you have to do 10 of this, 10 of that, and one of this. And then we will, you know, really invite you into the family. And that means that you get these benefits. But you see, already by having that narrative of being a part of the team, we take something that's just okay, do a couple of things, get a reward, into no, no, it's this is just what it takes to be a part of the family. And by doing it this way, you will be treated like family. And all those mechanics have narrative on top. And I think that's always, you know, the most overlooked, but the most important aspect of gamification is tying it together in that story. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And I think we forget about storytelling in affiliate marketing because we're so numbers driven, we're so commercially driven to get performance, to get sales on performance. So I think this ties in really nicely. But we've discussed the simplification. So keep it simple. We've discussed making sure that you know what to measure. So, what is the mechanic that you're measuring, whether that's sending 10, 10 first new sales or customers, or whether it's grabbing your affiliate link and making it live and sending impressions and clicks. It could be simple little metrics like that, but just tiny steps. What are some of the common pitfalls that you see when clients engage with gamification to give this experience and this journey?
SPEAKER_01What are some of the things that go wrong? Number one, like I said before, is taking on too much at the same time. That's always going to sink a project. I think as another pitfall, it's putting something in without any thought. So badges for a while, especially back, I don't know, around 2014, 2015, there is all these plugins, add badges to your platform. It's going to make people more engaged. And it's a little true. We do tend to all enjoy that experience aspect of being recognized for reaching a milestone. But a lot of times just adding badges with no purpose or no narrative, it will tank very quickly. It's like there's a beer app called Untapped. And it had badges. And at the beginning, it's fun, you get a new badges. But at some point, when you're a level 15 badge for the same thing that you've been trying, it just doesn't mean anything much anymore. So it may not harm it entirely, but it also doesn't motivate the behavior in the same way because it just inflates the value too much. It's just it's uh another one of these, it doesn't matter. In those situations, if you just made the experience of acknowledgement a bit better, but maybe didn't give a badge. So you just said, like had again, like a little confetti animation saying, oh, hey, cool, it was this, and then you move on, that can be more beneficial. So I would say is don't get too lost in the stereotypes of gamification, but find out what really works for you and don't be afraid to rely more on good UX UI tricks that helped bring that experience to life rather than again just placing it in a leaderboard for no reason whatsoever, because some mechanics can harm the outcome of what it is you want to do. Like I'll give one last example here because it's just funny. I got brought in to work on a car sharing app at one point, some years ago. And they had built already some gamification mechanics, and they said, okay, we really want to encourage everyone to carpool. So we're going to give points that can be used for rewards to people who drive and manage to have passengers. Okay, like on the surface, it's like, all right, a leaderboard, they get points, they get a reward. What actually ended up happening is there was less car sharing. Why? If we think about it, the driver got rewarded. It was assumed that the driver would be the person to motivate to take more passengers. So what it actually did is it created more interest in becoming a driver and a very tiny pool of wanting to be a passenger. It started to feature the object or the purpose in the first place. Exactly, you know, because they were rewarding, they thought they found the way to get people to do it, but they didn't think it through 100%. And so they didn't remember that what do you need to carpool? You need passengers. Yes, you need a driver too, but here you already have too many drivers. So instead of trying to solve it by getting those drivers to take people, try to find a way they can that's more collaborative, of which maybe people are rewarded by how many are in the car or other things that actually get you to the behavior you want and not solo drivers trying to fight over passengers.
SPEAKER_04So it really what strikes me now, I'm just hearing you speak about all of this is that it really is a specialist skill. Gamification is a specialist skill. And obviously, with the experience that you've had over all of these years doing different gamification projects across multiple different industries, you've learned a very exclusive set of skills. So I guess if companies want to explore this, what are the costs? Like, is it does it have to be expensive? Do you have to have new tools and plug in things that you need to pay for or motivate for? Because most affiliate managers have limited budgets, but Would they have to go and ask their CMO to give them a 20 grand project to implement something like this? Or can it be run very simply through your you know email marketing tool like Mailchimp or HubSpot or whatever you're using? Can it be that simple? Can it just be the mechanic and the thought process that they get a little bit of you know strategic advice with maybe coming to you and then they can back it out? Or are there other things that they need to think about? UX, you know, design, web development, all of that kind of thing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I can be a lot of very small changes can be done with very little budget that make huge improvements. And what kind of huge improvements can you see?
SPEAKER_04Like, is it a difference of like 10 to 20 percent on average? I don't know, I'm asking you how long is a piece of string, right? But in your experience, working across all of these clients and doing these projects, like how can gamification actually make an improvement? What's the percentage that we're looking at, the investment?
SPEAKER_01For example, on a project I worked on once I I can't list a specific name, but we we saw a bounce rate that was really high. I think about 80%, 85% of people were bouncing. And by not even doing huge gamification add-ons, we just made a narrator and actually we just changed the way the question was asked. All of a sudden we lowered that to bounce rate of just about 10 to 20%.
SPEAKER_04That's phenomenal. To do a small little project just focusing on one little thing, to see that kind of difference is actually quite encouraging to me. Like if you think about you're signing up a hundred affiliates a month and actually only 10 go live, if you can make that 20 or 30 that go live just by walking them through this initial welcome process, that could have a massive impact on businesses.
SPEAKER_01Oh, absolutely. This is why like I think a lot of times everyone thinks gamification has to be a game. And really it's just taking again that philosophy of like, all right, if you have someone sign up for something, make sure that they get a good email that explains what's expected from them, that uses sort of that narrative terminology. There's so many platforms out there that can help you implement something like coins or something, finding easy ways to add a little bit of engagement or have a progress bar throw up. I mean, these are not very complicated technical projects necessarily. What's more difficult is thinking through how to make matter to people. And that's where, even if you're not an expert in gamification, you know, UX also does a lot of this. You know, you just have to look at, okay, you're dealing with people at the end of the day. People have to understand what it is you're trying to communicate with them. So, how do you try to do that? And this is just a challenge game designers happen to face all the time because you create a whole new world. It's like, you know, you have a planet that doesn't even exist in real life. You create your physics, you create the environment, you create the species, the history, everything in a game you create from scratch. So it's an obligation to think this all through. We just shortcut this in real life often because we don't have to think all of it through. But if we take a step back and look at a digital platform or a program, an affiliate program, as though we have nothing in front of us and we're creating it from scratch, that has nothing to do with technical development. That's everything just to do with thinking through purpose and meaning and what it is we're actually asking for from people and what we're willing to give them back.
SPEAKER_04And I actually something came across my desk this week, actually. Um I think it was from Unbalanced. We've signed up to a couple of SAS products because everybody knows I love a SAS tool. And uh I started thinking, I need to connect this SAS tools to all of these affiliate marketers that I'm talking to as well. And they sent a fantastic email, and it was just a simple email. It's and I think we, you know, we signed up maybe two weeks ago or something. We haven't done anything yet, but they sent us a really cool email going, hey, you're in our program, you haven't started sending, you know, sending anything yet, but here's a really nice piece of content that you can repurpose and use, which outlines why our product is so fantastic. And I just thought that simple thing, A, reminded me of the fact that I'd signed up to the program a couple of weeks ago and was personable and helpful to me. And I think I actually sent it on to the team and said, hey, go and you know, get this live on the website because they clearly signed up for it and forgot about it. So I think you're right. I think it doesn't have to be complex, it just has to be well thought out and simple and actionable that makes the person feel like they belong and makes them feel like they actually are in the right place in the right program and working with the right partners. And that can be automated with, you know, whatever marketing tools you already have. So I think that's quite promising. The fact that yes, gamification is fantastic. No, it doesn't have to cost a lot of money and it also doesn't have to be complex or time consuming. We talked about some results that you've seen with brands, and and I mean those numbers are pretty like fantastic. My last question to you would be to look ahead at the state of digital marketing and give us your best view on how things will be changing in the year ahead and how you think gamification is gonna filter more into the way that we engage with our audiences and get them to converge.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, it's always tricky because a lot of things have already been somewhat touched upon in the past. And it's just a matter of what will we highlight now. But I do think everyone's realized that storytelling is super important and that people want to do things that align with their values. And so I think finding ways to help your audience understand what your values are as a brand, what your story is, what the mission is, what they can do with you is something that will get more and more attention. And of course, there's many tools that are more popular, like the short little TikTok like video clips now. That's clearly going to continue in that way. But you know, market segmentation of really getting to know who's out there and using things like AI to be able to give them a more custom experience. When, like you mentioned before, you can't always have a human account manager for everyone, but you can customize their experience if you have even just a basic system that can make adjustments based on, you know, what type of behavior people are doing or what their preferences are. But I think gamification, in sort of its uh as its umbrella term as it is, will really play a role in how do you take a digital experience, especially. That's also uh what my focus is on, and how do you take that digital experience and make it so that you can connect with people better by telling your story, by having your values, by knowing what it is you want to achieve and making it easy for people to achieve it? Like to touch on it, the example you just gave of that email, that's a perfect example of you could also call it gamification. It's so easy for you to do that. And that's why you did it is because they made it effortless for you to take that action. And that's what the philosophy of this better UX, better gamification, understanding human behavior is is how do you make it easier for people to do what you want them to do?
SPEAKER_04I love that. And also, I mean, we're all talking about the metaverse and what's going to be happening in the future. I mean, some of the psychologies that you've obviously picked up from doing a lot of this gamification projects across the world and across multiple different industries, I think it's incredibly valuable for us to be looking a little bit deeper into because I think you hit the nail on the head there. We are dealing with humans, and often as affiliate managers, as marketers, we forget because we're so embroiled in the numbers, we're so deep in our data and looking at, you know, what decisions do we need to make? How do we need to move the needle? You know, where do we get more ROI that we forget about the fact that the end person is still a human and actually wants to be treated that way? Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast today and for explaining gamification in such simplistic terms because sometimes, you know, we get lost in the jargon as well a little bit. And I think we need to just kind of simplify and make that really easy and simple to understand. And just look at those little one incremental metrics that you mentioned, because those little tiny metrics, you know, 10% here, 20% there, that's what actually makes your program grow. So it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for your time and for your insights. And we look forward to seeing you at some of our future events too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me today. It was fun to talk. And uh yeah, see you in the future.
SPEAKER_03And that's a wrap for this week's Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down in this series, head on over to Apple iTunes and give us a five-star rating and subscribe to our podcast channel so you never miss another insightful episode. Tune in next week for more digital marketing insights and traffic driving tips, tricks, and strategies to keep your digital marketing fresh and your affiliate program driving consistent sales.
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