SaaS Strategists,

I grew up on games such as World of Warcraft, CS:GO, Dota, and God of War.

Those games always bring me back to the fun times I had playing them on my PC & PSP.

When I entered the world of SaaS, I saw too many boring strategies.

I remembered the dopamine spikes I had from playing those games and thought there must be a way of integrating similar strategies in the SaaS-es we build.

There is.

Today I will guide you through the 8 gamification strategies you can use inside your SaaS in order to increase your user retention.

Let’s dive into them 👇️ 

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🎮 8 SaaS Gamification Strategies For Maximizing User Retention On Your SaaS Platform

SaaS gamification can be a tricky topic to talk about.

Not many SaaS-es can pull it off.

My take is that being too formal with your business is not a good idea.

You close the door to many marketing & feature opportunities, you could have explored otherwise.

But there’s good news!

Even if you’re running a SaaS that’s serving very formal businesses & customers, you can still incorporate these strategies into your product.

1) Milestones & Progress bars

The average human’s attention span in 2023 is 8.25 seconds.

This means that you can’t bore your users with 40 field-long forms.

They will just quit the process entirely.

What you should do is think in milestones & progress bars.

What do I mean by this?

Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Take a look at the above onboarding form.

It’s a simple multi-step form and its ultimate end goal is to get data from the user’s inputs.

Let’s say every step of the form has 4 files.

In this case, without disassembling this form into 5 steps we would have prompted the user with 20 fields right off the bat.

No one likes to see that amount of fields all at once.

Onboarding forms are similar to running a marathon.

You can’t run a full 20km marathon all at once.

You have to dissect the process into milestones.

“I’ll drink water after the first 5 km”

“I’ll eat a candy bar after the next 5”

Etc.

Get the point?

You don’t eat an elephant all at once.

You dissect your process into multiple smaller milestones.

Same with SaaS.

Let’s take a look at a few more examples that can give you the big idea behind this:

This strategy brings you a lot of value, simply because you MOTIVATE your users to spend more time on your platform by showing them:

a) The big goal
b) Steps to get there

The same can be applied to payment forms, signup forms, creation forms, you name it…

But overall, you’ll see this strategy mainly in sign-up & onboarding forms for software that requires a lot of info right off the bat.

2) Onboarding buddy / mascot

Onboarding processes can be boring.