Marketing is a very broad field where lots of concepts come into play. Gamification is one of those “fashionable” terms that are often misunderstood, misdescribed, or associated with unqualified examples. It is worth reviewing this elusive concept because it is one of the key pieces of the future in the field of e-business, as well as an inexhaustible source of exciting business cases. Gamification is a engagement technique (i. e., a way to increase audience involvement and retention), which consists of applying game mechanics to non-leisure environments.

Play mechanics “means proposing a challenge whose success is associated with a fun or stimulating experience and which has some kind of reward for marketing online. The use of this technique is spreading in multiple areas: loyalty programs, social networks, communication, productivity plans in the company, training, and even market research.

Do not assume that your customer arrives at the product by browsing your website and therefore with previous information, as many times it will be done directly from a search engine, or from an advertising link. It has been shown that small changes, such as changing the position, color and size of the “buy” button, can have appreciable effects on the conversion rate of a product page.

Imagine you have a customer in a department store lining up to pay. Would you take him off his tail and take the product out of his hands to show him something else? If in the physical world this would be a mistake, in the virtual environment it is even more so.