Loyalty is a consumer’s affinity for a particular brand and willingness to purchase that brand rather than another. Loyalty and engagement are interrelated in gamification programs. That is, the more engaged a consumer is with your brand, the more likely that person is to be loyal to it (and vice versa).
As a result, you can reasonably assume that many of the gameplay behaviors that foster engagement will also inspire loyalty.
That being said, inspiring loyalty is different from fostering engagement. One way to inspire loyalty is to use rewards to instill a sense of progress in the user — for example, buy two doohickeys, get the third doohickey for free. Or buy five doohickeys and receive free shipping for life. The behavior you’re focusing on is, obviously, purchasing.
You can also recognize users for simply patronizing the site. If you do a great job of making a user feel welcome, but your competition treats the user like a nobody, then that user will naturally begin to feel more loyal to your site. And of course, you should make a special effort to recognize users who advocate for your brand; such recognition can serve to deepen their loyalty.
Everybody likes to feel like they’re somebody.
The key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with purchasing and patronizing might include the following:
Number of purchases
Number of logins
Using metadata can help foster loyalty because it allows you to get more granular and contextual in the gameplay behaviors that matter to your users. For example, if you know that someone visiting an electronics website writes a lot of reviews about mobile phones, you can probably assume she will enjoy receiving a Mobile Master badge and appearing on a mobile-specific leaderboard.
