Businesses have been urged to bring “gamification” to their email marketing campaigns.

Gamification is a relatively new term which basically means bringing the concepts and techniques of gaming to a completely different environment in which they would not normally exist.

As businesses see the effect gamification has on marketing, many are looking at ways in which they could bring it to their marketing campaigns, with the most recent being their email marketing, emailschools.info reports.

By utilising such tools as interactivity, online games and playful, fun interactions, businesses are finding they are more likely to encourage users to return more than once and spend longer on the site each time they come back. This has been effectively demonstrated with numerous online competitions which give the user more chances to win each time they return to a site.

Now, it seems, the practice is coming to email marketing, with messages containing games and fun activities that offer users the chance to reach an end goal. Every time they then click through these emails to return to the site, they are building up a bigger and stronger relationship with the brand.

Writing for memeburn.com, marketing expert Wikus Engelbrecht explained: “Designing a gamified brand experience requires that you identify the behaviours or actions you want from participants, alongside their relevant value, and then identify engagement-based strategies to engineer a path toward your goal.

“Simply put, you identify the behaviours you want to elicit (awareness, click-throughs, recommendations, purchases) and then you determine motivators that can provoke each of these behaviours and notify your readers.”