Gamification is an online buzzword that’s impossible to escape. Countless online disciplines – from finance to gambling – have embraced gamification as a means of gaining customer engagement.

If you’re unsure of what gamification entails, then here’s a handy definition. Gamification is a means of engaging with customers that treats the entire end-to-end process as a game – albeit a semi-serious one. Rewards can be gained and achievements unlocked by completing certain tasks or a series of tasks, just as a customer would if they were playing a game on their smartphone. There are also elements of social media and personalisation, designed to make each customer engagement challenging and unique.

Plenty of enterprises have declared a rise in customer engagement by using this trend, and an increasing number of financial instrument brokers – including forex brokers – are beginning to take advantage of the possibilities that gamification offers.

“The beauty of gamification,” said Adam Grunwerg, founder of binary robot comparison site BinaryOptionsRobots.co, “is that it takes advantage of a potential traders natural desire for competition, achievement, self-expression and socialising. We’ve seen a phenomenal rise in gaming over the past decade or so, and a change in attitude towards adults playing video games and killing time on the smartphones by playing popular titles such as Angry Birds and Candy Crush. It seems perfectly natural to add gamification to all levels of customer engagement, and that includes forex and binary options trading platforms. One only has to look at the products such as binary option robots and the way they are marketed to see the influence of gamifcation.”

Gamification is a pretty broad definition – this article explains it well in a trading context. When it comes to trading, traders become players, trading in virtual currency. They can be awarded achievements for making their first trade, making their first successful trade and for a run of success while following their specific trading strategy. Traders can also ‘follow’ other traders for advice and to see the kind of strategies that other traders employ.

There is also the competition factor. Traders can rise up the ‘trading leaderboard’ and also compete with the friends they have made at the site in match-ups to see who has the best trading talents. The more trades a trader wins, the higher ‘levels’ of trading kudos they achieve, earning badges and unlocking bonuses and other benefits.
You may be scratching your head and wondering where the money is in all of this – after all, brokers do not increase their revenues by having thousands of traders trading in virtual currency. What you need to understand is that gamification is mainly about customer engagement. Anything that encourages a potential trader to then go forth and trade using their own currency is a useful, crucial tool.

Gamification has the potential to make other contributions too – the collecting of important data, ideas born out of crowdsourcing and teaching traders how to trade in a pressure-free environment are just three. Companies who use gamification such as eTororeport a 100-200% increase in important metrics, such as views, time on site and active engagement. It’s not brokers who are focusing on gamification – super affiliate Tradimo have used it to drive their education platform and 1920’s stock market game Little Traders, as CEO Sebastian Kuhnert explains.

Web trends come and go, and rise and fall, but gamification in trading could just be the most important web trend to come along for some time.